Blair pilgrimage continues
Tony Blair, the former prime minister, received a ritual scourging outside Notre Dame Cathedral yesterday as he continued on his expiatory pilgrimage to Rome.
Dressed in bright orange sackcloth, and wearing the ashes of British parliamentary democracy on his head, the penitent was beaten about the face and body by personal envoys of Pope Jeanne I, costumed as apes and eating Camembert.
Notre Dame, one of the first buildings in Europe to utilise the flying buttress, marks the first quarter of Mr Blair’s barefoot pilgrimage from Westminster to St Peter’s in the Vatican.
Since converting to Catholicism in 2007, Mr Blair has shown increasing signs of being morally disturbed by many aspects of his government, particularly its role in the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Shortly after the election of the new Pope, an apologetic Mr Blair voluntarily renounced his title, Lord Belmarsh of Ecclestone and Basra, on the grounds that the Iraqi people, and not he, had paid for it.
At the Pope’s urging, he made a full public confession of his crimes at Tyburn, then embarked on the nearly 1,000-mile journey to Rome, where he hopes to receive a public absolution before surrendering to the secular arm at The Hague.
As Mr Blair’s odyssey unfolds, however, reporters have found him ever more speechless.
In her first encyclical, De imitatione Christi (Christian Impressions), Pope Jeanne noted that the Church could no longer afford to tolerate the derelictions of powerful men and women if it was to retain its moral authority.
The Pope also issued a formal apology for the “regrettable aspects” of Christianity’s past, and said she hoped a line could now be drawn under the “unfortunate episode” of Church history which had been going on since the time of Constantine the Great.
