Pope Benedict XVI announces visit to United Kingdom

September 23, 2009

Pope Benedict XVI has announced that he will be coming to the United Kingdom in January 2010.

The information was announced that the Pope had accepted an invitation to visit the United Kingdom from Prime Minister Gordon Brown. The latter had visited the Vatican City three times and had invited the Pope to come to Great Britain in February 2009. Downing Street is expected to confirm the arrangements later today. This visit would make the first Papal visit to the UK since Pope John Paul II's visit in 1982. However, John Paul's visit was on a pastoral basis, so this is set to be the first state visit to the UK by a pope in that it is the first to follow an official invitation.

John Paul's six-day tour through England, Scotland and Wales was hugely popular, attracting hundreds of thousands of people from the Catholic religion. It became the first ever UK visit from the Pope, which will make Pope Benedict's visit the second papal one. John Paul's visit was likely to be cancelled due to the Falklands War and assasination attempts.