Although officials insisted that the 77 year-old had dropped out of the trip for medical reasons, as he had been ill “for some days”, his comments represent another embarrassing PR blunder for the Roman Catholic church at a critical time.

The are all the more embarrassing because the Cardinal’s position makes him responsible for promoting Christian unity around the world.

The Vatican, the hierarchy in England and Wales and the Government are all desperate for the first-ever state papal visit to Britain to be a success.

The preparations for the Pope’s arrival have suffered a number of setbacks and thousands of tickets remain unsold for the large open-air Masses. Meanwhile secular groups have led protests against the £10million cost of the trip at a time of public sector cuts, and survivors of clergy abuse are angry that the Pope will be greeted by the Queen today at the start of a full state visit when the worldwide church stands accused of covering up the activities of paedophile priests.

Cardinal Kasper’s presence will also be missed during Benedict XVI’s visit to Britain as he is seen as more liberal than his fellow German, as well as an expert on ecumenical dialogue.

The cardinal’s abrupt withdrawal from the trip prompted speculation in Rome that it was linked to an interview he gave this week to a German news magazine, Focus.

In an article headlined “A Third World country” he was quoted as saying: “When you arrive at Heathrow you think at times that you’ve landed in a Third World country.”

His secretary, Mgr Oliver Lahl, said the remark was a reference to the diverse, multi-cultural population of Britain, which the Cardinal has visited three times in recent years.

Cardinal Kasper, who recently retired as the president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity having headed it since 2001, said that Britain was a “secular and pluralist” country in which there was a “distance from God”, noting that there was “a crisis of faith” in much of the West.

He referred to the case of a British Airways employee, Nadia Eweida, who was suspended by the airline in 2006 after she refused to stop wearing a crucifix around her neck, and alluded to the activities of prominent atheists such as Prof Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion.

Cardinal Kasper said Christians in Britain suffered discrimination, “above all by an aggressive new atheism. If you wear a cross on British Airways, you are discriminated against.”

In a break with tradition, the Pope is returning to Rome with Alitalia rather than Britain’s flag carrier.

The Cardinal also said the Catholic Church would “never” allow the ordination of women. Asked if the Church might soften its position on women priests in 100 or 200 years, he said: “I’m not a prophet, but I don’t think so.”

The Anglican Communion has allowed women to be ordained and priests to be married, but the cardinal asked: “Does it seem to you that things have gone better for them?”

He had been due to take part in talks on ecumenicalism with senior Church of England figures this week, and predicted in the interview “a difficult dialogue”.

Cardinal Kasper added, however, that the Pope’s beatification of Cardinal John Henry Newman in Birmingham “would not hinder” the building of closer relations with Anglicans.

He said Benedict was keen to find a “common strategy” with the Queen in defending Christian faith in Europe.

A Vatican source denied that the last minute withdrawal was a blow to the Pope’s trip but said that Cardinal Kasper’s “expertise” on ecumenical dialogue would be “much missed”.

“He is quite a liberal figure who doesn’t always see eye to eye with the Pope, and he has been very friendly towards the Anglicans,” the source said.

Meanwhile one of England’s most senior Catholics, The Most Rev Peter Smith, Archbishop of Southwark, has warned that “crackpots and lunatics” may try to disrupt the papal visit.

The Protest the Pope coalition has promised its rally will be peaceful and that no attempt will be made to arrest Benedict for alleged “crimes against humanity”.

But Archbishop Smith said: “To be fair to them nobody can guarantee that you are not going to get crackpots and lunatics tagging on to these things and acting individually.”

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The Sharia Squad Steynposts Sunday, 30 May 2010 A few years back, a propos Salman Rushdie, I wrote: The Rushdie fatwa established the ground rules: The side that means it gets away with it. Mobs marched through Britain calling for the murder of a British subject – and, as a matter of policy on the grounds of multicultural sensitivity, the British police shrugged and looked the other way. One reader in England recalled one demonstration at which he asked a constable why the “Muslim community leaders” weren’t being arrested for incitement to murder. The officer told him to “f— off, or I’ll arrest you.” A decade and a half after the Rushdie hit contract, Islamic supremacists decided enough with the legalistic fatwa stuff, let’s just kill the guy in the street: To express his disgust at Theo van Gogh’s murder, the artist Chris Ripke put up a mural outside his studio showing an angel and the words “Thou shalt not kill”. But the cops thought this was somehow a dig at the local mosque and so came round, destroyed the mural, arrested the TV news crew filming it, and wiped their tape. A couple of years later, it was the Danish cartoons: There was a photograph from one of the early Muslim demonstrations in London that I cut out and kept: a masked protester promising to behead the enemies of Islam, and standing shoulder to shoulder with him two Metropolitan Police officers, dispatched by the state to protect him and enable him to incite the murder of others. I think this is what old-school coppers would call a pattern of behavior. This weekend, the blogger Blazing Cat Fur went along to an anti-Netanyahu protest at Palestine House, a taxpayer-funded den of Jew-hating genocidal eliminationists. He was assaulted by Ali Mallah, local heavy from the Canadian Union of Public Employees and Vice-President of the Canadian Arab Federation. The Toronto Sun’s Michael Coren takes up the story: Surely this isn’t legal – at least not in countries where Sharia Law doesn’t apply. The bully then told the police that the awful man with the camera was a racist and the cop told the blogger to “keep things peaceful.” Surely this officer should be reminded of the law and that a man who crosses the road to insult and threaten another person is the one not keeping things peaceful. I’m afraid Mr Coren’s view of law enforcement is hopelessly outmoded. The enforcers of the modern “tolerant” “multicultural” society will tolerate the explicitly intolerant and avowedly unicultural, but they won’t tolerate anyone pointing out that intolerance. From Rushdie to van Gogh to the Motoons, law enforcement has guarded the thugs and harrassed those who draw attention to the thuggery. This is PC policing: There are identity groups who merit the solicitude of the constabulary, and there are the rest of you who don’t. Mass Muslim immigration will impose severe strains on the Euro-Canadian welfare states in the years ahead. In increasingly fractious societies, the police will be out in force – upholding not the law but the dopiest fatuities of the multiculti delusion.