There must be huge relief for people in knowing that every time they have to deal in business or other daily life with a Roman Catholic organisation, all of its employees are gleaming, perfect saints. Because the Catholic Church is not going to be forced into employing people who offend against its teachings -- ie, sinners. It just warms the cockles of your heart in these turbulent times when supposed pillars of society are being caught with their hands in various cookie jars right, left, and centre.

That's the obvious conclusion after a broadside at Britain launched by Pope Benedict. We all expected that, didn't we? We noble Catholic Irish, renowned for our good living, have always shuddered at the pernicious standards of morality across the water. . . I mean, they don't even fire MPs for fiddling their expenses. (Oh, sorry; they do. It's here they get re-elected after having used parliamentary privilege and influence for their own benefit.)

There is equality legislation going through the House of Commons which will make it illegal to refuse to employ people because they are homosexual (or on the basis of their religion, or lack of it.) In fact, it is already illegal in Britain to discriminate in such a way, and the Equality Minister Harriet Harman has said that the clause to which the Pope objected will merely clarify existing legislation.

But the Pope, speaking to the English and Welsh bish-ops in Rome, urged them to oppose the Equality Bill on the grounds that it could block the Church from refusing to employ lay gay staff (or atheists).

I imagine the Pope's fiery sword won't bother atheists, since such people, if they are genuine in their rational humanism, find the intricacies, prejudices, and superstitions of Roman Catholic belief and practice distasteful at best. But it is a huge insult to homosexual men and women, many of whom strive to maintain their Catholic belief and membership of the Church, pointing out that their sexuality is as much the will of god as is heterosexuality.

Admittedly, the Church has moved in recent years from its position that homosexuality was a deliberately wicked choice of evil perversion, and that all homosexuals were damned. Now, the Church magnanimously acknowledges that people can actually be born gay, but that it is an "affliction" and they must mortify the flesh by remaining celibate. Fall in love and make love, and you're still damned in the afterlife.

Of course, this is the stuff of angels on pinheads. But it gets down, dirty, and personal, when it becomes a matter of civic rights.

The Church is entitled to its daft, illogical, cruel teaching on homosexuality, but, as with all daft religious notions, it is not entitled to have it enshrined in civil law.

When the Pope cautioned the English and Welsh bishops about their duty to put canon law above civil law by opposing equality legislation, he was doing what non-Catholics know the Church always does, (despite statements to the contrary). Mind you, he was being rather more incautious than the Church usually is, in that he was parading Church bigotry quite blatantly.

The Church has no intention of employing a dirty gay in a (lay) position, is what Benedict was saying, and we'll fight to the death any legislation which tries to give dirty gays equal employment rights before the law. (He didn't mention anything about the employment of homosexual priests, bishops, or cardinals, interestingly enough.)

But practising homosexuals are sinners and will not be employed by the Church.

So the Church does not employ sinners. Well, hallelujah! And praise the Lord! No embezzlers; no liars; no tax cheats; no fornicators; no gossips; no gluttons; no drunkards. They're all sins, serious sins. And now we have it on the authority of no less a person than the Pontiff that the Church will not tolerate civil legislation which guarantees equal employment opportunity to such sinners, because it might force the Church to employ such people. Well, he wasn't suggesting, surely, that

homosexuals are the only sinners to be targeted by the Church? Was he?

Archbishop Vincent Nichols is the Head of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales. (He's the successor to Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, but maintains a notably lower profile.) He said that the Pope's words would meet with a welcome from many "who feel uneasy about the effects of equality legislation to date". Presumably he was talking about the Catholic faithful, and charmers like the deeply fascist, racist British National Party. Because, for the majority of Britons, the answer to that one is, thank goodness, "in his dreams".

Already people are queueing up to protest against the Pope's forthcoming State visit to Britain. Until now, the majority of the population was as indifferent as they would be to a state visit from any other head of a small foreign state. But they are noisily outraged at Benedict's having stuck his Holy Roman nose into civil affairs in their country. The National Secular Society launched an online petition, and the system crashed through overload. There are plans to bring major celebrities on board to protest against the visit, and the British Humanist Association, usually noted for its level-headed restraint, accused the Pope of being uninformed and homophobic, and said he wanted to be "unfettered by the laws that everyone else in society must abide by and respect".

We could have told the association that, yes, the Pope -- and many of the rest of his clergy down to the "most humble" -- do indeed want to be "unfettered" by the laws that the rest of us abide by and respect. They want to be unfettered in protecting priests who abuse the sacred bodily integrity of children, and they want to be, and have been, unfettered (despite the law) in their access to the children whom they have destroyed. It's called the sanctity of Canon Law, something the majority of people in Britain have never even heard of.

Irish people, on the other hand, may be vague about Canon Law's terrifying implications for civil liberties when it is allowed to dominate legislative thinking, but, thanks to Catholic control of the education system, they have been trained to accept that the Church knows best, and civil law should never be inimical to Catholic doctrine.

The British Humanist Association would be horrified to learn that the Church is unfettered here in its control of the ethos of State-run hospitals, and in its control of the primary school system where it can train the new generation not to think for itself.

Our laws on civil liberties lag far behind those in Britain, but we have advanced far enough into modern times for a few of them to be unacceptable to the Vatican.

But let's not forget that we have adopted our Constitution, "In the Name of the Most Holy Trinity, from Whom is all authority and to Whom, as our final end, all actions both of men and States must be referred". (Preamble to the Irish Constitution.)

It doesn't sound as though Pope Benedict need worry about a lukewarm welcome here. The welcoming party might well include a fair clutch of prominent lechers, adulterers, embezzlers, fornicators, tax cheats, and drunkards (name your own names). But not, of course, homosex-uals. We don't want to insult the Pontiff.

Originally published in