pope on a rope

Much excellent hilarity to be had in the reactions to the complete non-story about some Friday afternoon e-mail prankery among junior civil servants in the Foreign Office.

And what was the source of the outrage? A just-for-fun list of things the Pope should consider doing on his impending trip to the UK. Now if you or I had been tasked with doing that (particularly on a Friday afternoon) we'd have come up with the usual nonsense about wrestling the Queen, nude, in a vat of baked beans, or chainsawing a live cow in half or something like that. But no, this was actually a list of quite sensible stuff like blessing a civil partnership, launching a helpline for abused children, etc.

What's interesting is that while a large majority of professed Catholics would probably not object in principle to a lot of the stuff listed, they would nonetheless agree with Malcolm McMahon, the Bishop of Nottingham, when he says:

This is appalling. You don’t invite someone to your country and then disrespect them in this way. It’s outlandish and outrageous to assume that any of the ideas are in any way suitable for the Pope.

It would be fascinating to get any of those people to articulate why it's "outrageous" to suggest these activities for the Pope despite their believing they are generally a good thing. As always, though, there's probably some internal mental safety valve that prevents that sort of self-questioning, lest their minds should react like one of these.

The best bit of the BBC TV report on the story was when one of the talking heads they'd wheeled in offered the opinion that there was a very real danger here that members of the Catholic Church might be made to feel that their beliefs "weren't being taken seriously". To which the only rational response is HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA NO SHIT YOU CRETINS. Or something like that.

Laughter is perhaps not the appropriate response to Damian Thompson's jaw-droppingly inane blog post on the subject in the Daily Telegraph (apparently it's all Political Correctness Gone Mad or something), at least once you realise that the commenters are not taking the piss. As always Poe's Law makes it hard to be sure, but hey, it's the Telegraph. Thompson has a fair bit of previous in this department as well.

The Guardian article takes a more balanced view, as you might expect, with an undertone of amused bafflement both at the absurdy defensive overreaction from the Catholics, and from various senior Government officials (including David Milliband) who've been falling over themselves to fawningly apologise for the whole thing.

The Guardian article does also give a scoop on a major showbiz story you may have missed:

Among its other suggestions were that the now-Catholic Tony Blair and the singer Susan Boyle might be suitable candidates to be introduced to the Pope, while the atheist Richard Dawkins and Wayne Rooney – who married in a Catholic ceremony – might be less suitable.

Wait a minute - Richard Dawkins and Wayne Rooney got married in a Catholic ceremony? Maybe the fusty old Catholic Church is getting a bit more groovy after all.

The amusing (in a way) footnote to the story is that the FO employee on question has now apparently been "demoted" - if that's the case then it's richly ironic that his punishment for indirectly pointing out that some members of the Catholic clergy rape small children exceeds in severity that meted out to the priests who actually did the kiddy-raping, most of whom were simply transferred to different dioceses.

I wonder if it's too optimistic of me to imagine the whiff of a paradigm shift in the air - all it takes is a few people to stop and examine the basis on which they give a free pass to certain groups to peddle bigotry and intolerance (not to mention actual criminal behaviour) and fleece their followers for enormous sums of money, and for other people to look round and go "well.....actually I was only doing it because you were", and suddenly the whole house of cards falls away and it becomes clear that there was just a small slimy tentacly green blob inside the Dalek costume all along. Or maybe it'll be a bit like this. By Vectron's knees!

Anyway, if you fancy treading on the Pope's velvet slippers a bit have a look at the various resources here.