The Queen was away on a tour at the time, but Princess Margaret was there together with the Queen Mother and the Duchess of Kent. They made their rounds to meet their guests accompanied by six Yeomen of the Guard from the Tower of London, each carrying an enormous halberd. It was a most impressive sight. The royal party was just passing the group where we were standing when one of the Canadian bishops’ wives, who was on the plump side, sat down firmly on one of the canvas lawn chairs. There was a loud tearing sound as the seat gave way and she sank through the frame to lodge there. The members of the royal family had been schooled not to look back, mercifully, but since the military band was silent at that moment, everyone else within earshot heard the ripping noise and stared at her as one man. Several bishops rushed instantly to her aid, their red cassocks matching the colour of her face. They tried to raise her to a standing position, but unfortunately the frame was wedged around her hips and the entire chair came up with her. It took some delicate manoeuvring to get it off, and as she finally struggled free she caught sight of me. With a hiss she threatened that if I ever wrote a word about this she’d come after me herself.
Two highly controversial stories came out of that garden party, one of which I filed for publication in the Star; the other I deliberately kept to myself. Idi Amin, the ruthless dictator of Uganda, figured in both of them. During the sixties and until 1971 there were a number of young Ugandan clergy who came to study at Wycliffe under a special “Ugandan program” that was conceived and directed by the principal, Rev. Dr. Leslie Hunt. Several of these men later became bishops soon after their return to Africa. One of them came over to me during the affair at Buckingham Palace and we had an enjoyable few minutes together catching up on what we had been doing over the intervening years. As we talked, I noticed a couple of black men with press credentials hanging about and obviously attempting to listen in. The bishop glanced over at them and, gently tugging at my shirt sleeve, motioned his intention of moving away. He whispered, “We must get away from them.” He led me quite a distance towards a small bandshell where a band of the Grenadier Guards was now playing. Out of earshot of the two (as it turned out) ersatz reporters, he grinned broadly and said, “You know why we’re here?” I said that obviously he was there to attend the conference. He shook his head while, still maintaining his smile, he swore me to secrecy and said, “Well, that’s not all. We are here to get guns to fight Amin!” I was somewhat startled, but agreed to keep it off the record.
As it turned out, the bishop, who still referred to me as Professor Harpur, had another revelation to make. He told me that the two men whom I had observed eavesdropping on our earlier conversation were not journalists at all. “They are spies for Idi Amin,” he said. When I pointed out that they seemed to be wearing proper press identification tags, and in the case of one, to be carrying a large Nikon camera, he explained that the men were intelligence agents of the Amin regime whose presence was being countenanced by Canterbury as part of a negotiated “deal” with Amin. The dictator had flatly refused permission for the Ugandan prelates—there were three or four attending—to leave their country unless his two fake reporters were accredited to come as well. I felt this was a scandal of some proportion and told the bishop I intended to report on it in my daily file that night. I assured him I would not reveal my source.
As luck would have it (bad luck), back at the University of Canterbury later that evening, I was dictating my story over a phone that was well away from the main concourse when the wrong person happened to intrude. Quite unexpectedly, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s press secretary, who was responsible for organizing all media coverage, came down a nearby staircase and heard some of my report. He made some angry gestures at me and grew very red in the face as he indicated he wanted me to hang up at once. I waved him off, finished the last couple of sentences and turned to face his wrath. He was very upset with me indeed, charging that I had gone totally against some “contract” he had made with the press not to make any mention of a “Ugandan deal.” He alleged that all the journalists covering the event had solemnly agreed to keep this matter out of their reporting for the sake of the safety of the Ugandan contingent and the required conditions of their being there at all. I replied that I had never been part of any such “contract” of silence and that I felt the safety of the bishops would be better protected by full disclosure of the intrigue. He refused to accept that and left in high dudgeon with a threat to report me to the Canadian Anglican primate, the Most Reverend “Ted” Scott.
I met Archbishop Scott during a coffee break the following morning. He confided he was “on a bit of a high” since he had just been offered, and had accepted, the prestigious post of Moderator of the World Council of Churches. He then told me he had been complained to by the press secretary but that, off the record, he thought I had done the right thing. Ted Scott remained a personal friend for many years, until his tragic death in a car accident on June 21, 2004. The Right Reverend Desmond Tutu, the former Archbishop of South Africa, preached the sermon at his funeral in St. James’ Cathedral.
The year 1978 was to become known as the Year of Three Popes because of a series of major events that began to unfold rapidly in Rome in the late summer and autumn of that year. I had been home barely a week after the Lambeth Conference in Canterbury and London when the Star switchboard managed to trace me to a poolside dinner party. It was a hot, lazy afternoon and to be honest the last thing on my mind was going anywhere on a story for the newspaper. However, the operator said that wire services were reporting that Pope Paul VI, who had been in poor health for several weeks, had died at his summer retreat of Castel Gandolfo, not far from Rome. According to the managing editor, the Star’s London bureau chief would head to Rome and cover the story until my arrival, but a hotel room near the Piazza di San Pietro in the heart of Rome had been booked for me, and airline tickets and money were waiting at the airport for a flight that night.
Rome was enduring one of the hottest summers in recent memory when I arrived there the following morning. The news of the day was that a crowd was expected to line the streets as the cortège carrying the dead Pope delivered him to the Vatican for some final rites and preparation of the body for his lying in state before the altar of St. Peter’s Basilica. Paul, who was baptized Giovanni Bat-tista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini, had been in office for fifteen years. He never smiled much and was perceived as a rather Hamlet-like figure by the media and also by many of his followers. He is no doubt best known for his 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae (“Of Human Life”), which, in contravention of the proposals of the commission he himself had established to study the issue of the birth control pill, firmly banned its use by the faithful. It was to become a principal source of discontent and of the erosion of the moral authority of the papacy in our time. Rome’s stand on abortion made some sense to the majority; the simultaneous stand against birth control and contraception did not. Paul VI was eighty when he died in the late afternoon of August 6.
One of the wonderful things about covering a story like this one was that once a daily report had been written up and then wired home from the Reuters office in the Via Propaganda Dei Fidei, close to the Spanish Steps, I then had the rest of the day to spend as I wished. It was one of the greatest pleasures of my life to be in such a romantic and historic city—my favourite over any other city on the planet—and to be able to wander at will through the narrow, twisting streets in search of the distant past. I was able to make several visits to the catacombs beneath the ancient sites, especially that of St. Sebastian along the old Appian Way, outside the crumbling walls of the earlier medieval town. Also there was the opportunity to do some research on the Mystery Religion that was so much older than Christianity and that was such a rival in the first two centuries of the Christian era, Mithraism.
The cult of the Persian-originated man-god Mithras had arrived in Rome in approximately 100 BCE and had so many similarities to Christianity that the early Fathers and apologists