AP Photo

Pope Benedict XVI is the antithesis of a pop star, elderly, shy, set in his ways, even finding it hard to hold a note. Yet in the United Kingdom the week before last, he received massive pop-starlike adulation, with successive crowds of 120,000 lining the streets of Edinburgh merely to watch him pass by, 60,000 for Mass in Glasgow, 80,000 in London's Hyde Park for a prayer vigil (tens of thousands more lined his route), and 60,000 in Birmingham, many holding banners proclaiming their love for him.