His Holiness the Pope smiled his slightly lopsided and foxy smile and waved from the window of the Popemobile as it made its stately way up Whitehall, delighted but still rather amazed at the size of the jubilant, cheering multitude.
When he had first announced his state visit to Great Britain, just seven short months ago in February 2010, such a reception had seemed more than just unlikely: not only did he expect to be confronted by the kind of indifference common to those unhappy lands where soulless secularism appeared to have triumphed, but the hostility of the zealots of equality legislation had promised much worse. Now that had all changed and, as he continued to smile and wave, he thought back to the extraordinary events that had presaged Britain’s re-conversion to Rome and re-entry into the communion of the universal church.
Of course, the comforts of orthodoxy and discipline always thrive in troubled times, although the domino-like collapse of the economies of Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Croatia, France, Poland and Austria – all predominantly Roman Catholic countries – could, in other circumstances, have resulted in different outcomes had anyone had time to make a connection between faith and fiscal laxity. Likewise, the city riots at Easter could, maybe, have led to a collapse in the faith in all kinds of authority. As it was, when most of the mightiest banks announced bonuses for their staff in excess of all the money in existence, the fury at the rest of the population was as much at this further proof of the bankers’ innumeracy as it was in response to their avarice. This was even though the subsequent razing to the ground of the Square Mile of the City of London – for the historically minded, its still smoking embers remained a potent evocation of the Great Fire of 1666, while those last three digits also contained an ominous hint at coming apocalypse – had resulted almost immediately in the total collapse of the British economy as well.
But his Holiness knew that these circumstances alone would not have led to the miracle he now witnessed. For that, he could thank the actions of just one man.
It had been shortly after giving evidence to the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war that a familiar figure had furtively entered a suburban Catholic church by a side door, interrupted the local priest conducting a coffee morning for young mothers and begged on his knees that the priest immediately hear his confession. The priest had smiled apologetically at the mothers, promised not to be too long and led the figure away to a confessional box further down the nave. It was what happened next that spilt into the realm of the miraculous.
Twenty-nine hours later, the priest finally ran screaming from the confessional and, with a valedictory cry of “Jesus Christ – he hasn’t even got to the 1997 election yet”, fell dead to the floor. The priest in question was now undergoing beatification as a prelude to canonisation, while the spring of sparkling water that erupted where he’d fallen was now proven to be a most efficacious cure for acne. The needs of the supplicant were paramount, however, and soon relays of hundreds of priests were hearing his ongoing confession round the clock. Moreover, it was rapidly calculated that, in order to achieve absolution, the supplicant would require an almost infinite supply of rosary beads on which to say the Hail Marys, and thus it was that the church’s wealth was diverted into kick-starting the moribund British economy with a massive programme of investment in the manufacture of religious artefacts.
Further, given his Holiness’s own dogmatic reaffirmation of the role of purgatory in personal salvation, the unprecedented step was taken to allow chantries to be established to pray for the soul of the supplicant prior to his death, so monumental was the challenge. These were endowed not just by the church, but also by the supplicant himself, whose various highly remunerative jobs thankfully required no actual input from him, even being the new goodwill ambassador for Ambre Solaire and the latest incarnation of Ronald McDonald.
Soon, the half of the working population who weren’t busy stringing beads were now monks and nuns, praying non-stop to intercede on behalf of the supplicant’s soul. Before leaving Rome, his Holiness had learned that seven months of ceaseless work and prayer was, according to the wisest theologians, beginning to pay off, and they had calculated that so far all this spiritual labour had remitted his sins sufficiently to knock as much as 37 seconds off his time in purgatory.
Given its new economic dependency on Holy Mother Church, it was only a matter of time before Britain admitted its 600 years of error, and so it was that His Holiness was now on his way to the ceremonial burning of the Act of Supremacy in Parliament Square. The rain continued to fall in torrents, although since the anathematisation of climate science, none knew why. Through the murk, his Holiness could just make out the figures of Rowan Williams, Harriet Harman and Richard Dawkins tied to stakes for the auto da fe, although he also noted with growing dismay the difficulty Ann Widdecombe and others appeared to be having with the soggy matches…
