The people who run the Protect the Pope website are to be congratulated for their loyalty and diligence and perhaps also for their apparent unwillingness to allow the security of the Pope to be left in the hands of the police, the security services and the agents of the bishops of England and Wales. All the same, there is something rather worrying about them.
What troubles me especially is that they seem to encourage a ghetto mentality among the faithful. They place far too much faith in the rightly derided 2006 Racial and Religious Hatred Act, as well as the other hate crime legislation. On their website they encourage frightened and intimidated Catholics – when was the last time you met a Catholic who was genuinely frightened and intimidated? – to register complaints about hate crimes with their local police force. “Each police force,” they tell us, “will usually have an online form on their websites to record acts of hate crime.” The thought of teary-eyed Catholics filing complaints on a police website is not one that will please all Catholics.
