In troubled times, it is natural for humans to return to old ways of thinking. In Britain the optimism that preceded the global financial crisis was largely founded on economic prosperity. With that gone, Britons feel they have nothing to hold on to, and therefore the lead up to the papal visit has witnessed an uncovering of the unseemly tribalism of the past that was largely defined by a division between the Protestant majority and Catholic minority.
As the Pope was arriving in the UK on Thursday, social commentator Frank Furedi wrote in Spiked Online that the visit has provided the opinion leaders of Britain's cultural elite with 'a figure that it is okay to hate'. He described displays of animosity towards the Pope as 'the kind of conformism that is usually seen amongst children who, under peer pressure, compete to see who can come up with the meanest phrase to castigate the playground scapegoat'.
Catholic officials themselves appeared callous, with the Pope associating atheism with the Nazis, after Cardinal Walter Kasper had declared upon his arrival in London that 'an aggressive new atheism has spread through Britain'.
The Catholic paper The Tablet dismissed Cardinal Kasper's assertion in its editorial on Friday. It suggested that the problem is common to all faiths, and also to religious believers and atheists. It alluded to the slogan 'Broken Britain' that was used by the Conservatives before the May election, arguing that the phrase should not be equated with the loss of religious faith, but instead a depletion of social capital.
We might regard the present angst in Britain as a manifestation of the growing pains that are to be expected in a world of emerging pluralism. Earlier this month, Eureka Street published Peter Kirkwood's obituary for inter-religious dialogue pioneer Raimon Panikkar. Panikkar influenced US theologian Ewert Cousins, who used the term 'mutation' to describe the period of profound religious change we're currently in the midst of.
According to Cousins, the globalisation that followed World War II precipitated a mutation into a 'global matrix of cultures' that involves 'mutational men' from the future drawing others from the past 'across the abyss of the present and into the mutational world of the future'.
The grafting together of different faiths and cultures also has implications for Australia. We can think of ourselves as part of the 'new world' and therefore somewhat immune to tribal animosities that go back for much of