There are various perspectives from which we can view the papal visit: and one of them is as a PR exercise. That’s not to say, of course, that that is what the visit was actually about:but a failure in PR terms would have been a definite set-back for the Church. The ultimate PR pro, Max Clifford, has opined that the Pope “got better coverage in the British media than I expected. In the build-up to the visit there was far more criticism than praise and then after he arrived far more praise than criticism. The pluses far outweighed the minuses. From a PR perspective there is a huge amount that needs to be done, but the visit was a success - far more a success than I thought it might have been.”
 
We starry-eyed papalists might at this juncture be a little more enthusiastic than that about the fact that the whole thing was “more of a success than… it might have been”, but Clifford’s is on the whole a positive assessment from a wholly disengaged non-Catholic professional. 
 
The Tablet online assessment was much less positive than Max Clifford’s: if you didn’t know, you might have thought it had been composed by a member of Protest the Pope—an organisation which was basically reduced to complete insignificance by the scale of the Pope’s success everywhere but in the immediate environs of their demonstration last Saturday, but which continued to say what a success their whole campaign had been.