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When Pope John Paul II arrived in 1982, he famously kissed the ground and declared: “Today, for the first time in history, a Bishop of Rome sets foot on English soil. This fair land, once a distant outpost of the pagan world, has become, through the preaching of the Gospel, a beloved and gifted portion of Christ’s vineyard.”

He went on to preach in Canterbury Cathedral and during the visit became friends with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie. It seemed to set the seal on an end to centuries of anti-Catholicism in Britain, and open the door to a new era in ecumenical endeavour where anything, even reunion, seemed possible.

But that was in a different century, and that Pope and that Archbishop are dead.

This Pope will walk into a storm of protest. Secularists are already planning a series of marches against him wherever he goes. The National Secular Society will launch its Protest the Pope Coalition later this week.

Peter Tatchell, the gay rights campaigner, is among those planning online petitions against the visit.

There will be no visit to Canterbury Cathedral this time, after the Pope announced plans for the Anglican Ordinariate to welcome into the church of Rome disaffected members of the Church of England and other present and former Anglicans.

Even the Queen sent an emissary, Earl Peel, her Lord Chamberlain, to talk to the Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, and find out what was intended by the new conversion plans.

The Pope is certain to use his civic address at Westminster Hall, a place revered by Catholics as the place where martyrs for the faith such as St Thomas More and the Jesuit St Edmund Campion were tried and condemned, to issue challenges to the Government on social and moral issues.

The Pope, 83, has a commendable lack of regard for protocol. Maybe he feels time is running out and he cannot hang around on niceties.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, had merely a few days notice of the Anglican Ordinariate and was visibly discomfited.

But even the Pope’s own Archbishop of Westminster, highly rated in Rome, had almost no notice of the “conversion” plan. Archbishop Nichols was also taken by surprise by the Pope’s confirmation of his visit to Britain in September.

The Queen issued the formal invitation to the Pope only last month after months of negotiations between government departments and the Holy See as to what status the visit should have.

Although the itinerary is still in draft form, the Pope’s visit is scheduled to begin in Scotland.

Pope Benedict XVI will fly straight from Rome to Edinburgh on September 16, where, as a head of state, he will be received by the Queen at Holyrood Palace in the afternoon. He is due to see the monarch there rather than Buckingham Palace because the visit coincides with her annual holiday to Balmoral.

He will also visit Glasgow, before making his way south in what is only the second papal visit to Britain since the Reformation and the first state visit.

The high point will be the beatification of Cardinal Newman, the 19th-century Anglican convert to Catholicism, in Birmingham on September 19.

The Pope has since his youth as a seminarian been an avid student of the writings of Cardinal Newman and in his address to the bishops yesterday he described him as an “outstanding example of faithfulness to revealed truth”.

As well as his address in Westminster Hall there is likely to be an academic address at Oxford University.

Having spoken at the Catholic Chaplaincy at Fisher Hall at Cambridge University in 1988, Pope Benedict XVI has for years nurtured a dream of speaking at Oxford. He raised the possibility of such an occasion with the last Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, in Rome shortly after becoming Pope. Lord Patten of Barnes, Chancellor of Oxford and a leading lay Catholic, has formally invited the Pope to speak there.

The only departure from normal protocol around formal visits by heads of state will be that the Pope, 83, will stay with the Papal Nuncio in Wimbledon rather than in Buckingham Palace.

Perhaps, all things considered, that is for the best.

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