Our War Zone

The Pope has visited the war-torn Central African Republic and the ubiquity of the ludicrous headline ‘The first Pope to enter an active war zone’ (which I’ve found at the BBC, in the religious press and internationally) must, I suppose, mean it was a clever ‘attention grabbing’ line from a Vatican Press Release which has initially been uncritically bought into by most reporters, although a quick search a few days later shows that most have toned this down with something like ‘in living memory’.  

My second thought was that the truth is that, from the barbarians working their way down Italy repeatedly to sack Rome in the fifth century to the Allied troops working their way up Italy to liberate Europe one and a half thousand years later, it is as often the war zone which has come to a Pope as a Pope who has gone to a war zone.  

But my present obvious thought is that he and we all live in a war zone now, not because terrorism continues to brings the consequences of war to European capital cities, but because everything from drones (many ‘driven’, as it happens, from Lincolnshire air bases) to the present on-line lobbying of MPs ahead of their vote on bombing Syria means war no longer happens elsewhere for anybody.