The official figures for the costs of the pope's visit have now been published. There has been no comment on them from the National Secular Society. Why should that be? After all, it had plenty to say before Benedict XVI arrived here. On its various press releases, the cost of the visit rose from £20m to "Hundreds of millions" of pounds in the course of last year.
Now the Tablet has published the official FCO spreadsheet of the visit's costs. They amount to £13.1m, of which the church paid or will pay, almost half: the FCO share is £6.9m. The total cost to the Catholic churches of England, Wales, and Scotland, was about £10m.
There is a moral here for rationalists who believe in the importance of evidence. Hysteria's fun while it lasts, but it doesn't increase your credibility in the long run.
