WHERE THE RUBBER HITS THE ROAD KILL:

Two, four, six, eight: time to transubstantiate (Kevin Myers, 10/04/2005, Daily Telegraph)

[P]olly Toynbee's hate-flecked diatribe in The Guardian against the Pope and the Catholic Church probably spoke for a sizeable community of intolerant feminist liberals.

Even by her usual intellectual incoherence, the following sentence sets positively Olympian standards of doctrinaire witlessness: "With its ban on condoms, the Church has caused the death of millions of Catholics and others in areas dominated by Catholic missionaries in Africa and right across the globe."

So there you have it: not merely is the Catholic Church in political power in all those states in sub-Saharan Africa, but also, its ban on condoms actually causes the deaths of millions. And bizarre though it is, such toxic mumbo-jumbo is probably well-received in certain corners of Hampstead, where bigoted, sectarian secularism disdains the affections of the masses and curses simple, celibate virtue such as the Pope's.

But it is not his goodness alone that has commended itself to the people of Britain: the Catholic Church seems to have established a moral primacy within the British Christian community. Cardinal Basil Hume and now Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor have achieved an authority far greater than their equivalents in Canterbury, even though the Catholic Church has been rocked with both the evils of child-abuse and by falling vocations.

People apparently crave what it stands for - unbending moral authority in personal and public life - even if they do not comply with every instruction it issues.

Hypocrisy is perfectly healthy.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 24, 2005 7:09 PM