Okay, it can’t be avoided.

Sir Roger wrote this in a fit a few weeks ago and he was in a variety of minds as to whether he ought to publish it. Was it intemperate? Of course. It was Sir Roger. Anything else? Was it wrong? Sir Roger, on reviewing it, has determined that he does not resile from its sentiments and so directs its publication. Here then is his response to the

Foreign Office Pope Flap …

Someone at the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office made what appears to be a joke memo about what the Pope could do when he visits Britain and before he gets arrested.

The FCO is wishing it had a hole to jump into. The Government doesn’t know where to look. The poor author of the memo has been “assigned to other duties”. And the “Vatican” is effecting to be deeply mortified by the “insult”.

Really?

The true obscenity is that while many of the suggestions are, in an enlightened world, actually rational and reasonable, they are characterised by the FCO as “far-fetched”. Commentators are calling them “astonishing”, “foolish”, “clearly ill-judged, naive and disrespectful”. A Catholic Bishop says, “This is appalling”, “outlandish” and “outrageous”.

So what were the abominations that the poor little 20-something Oxbridge Foreign Office boy proposed?

[ Be careful. You may go to hell just for reading this list.]

It includes:

• Launch ‘Benedict’ condoms

• Review vatican attitude to condom use

• Bless a civil partnership

• Reverse policy on women bishops

• Ordain a woman

• Open an abortion ward

• Training course for all bishops on child abuse allegations

• Announce sacking of dodgy bishops

• Vatican sponsorship of AIDS clinics

• Launch helpline for abused children

So all of these things are done by other religions and/or secular groups in advanced 21st Century society around the world. Done by grown-ups, by rational, thoughtful people, by mature, socially-concerned human beings dealing with actual problems in the real world.

Nevertheless, the “Vatican” (whatever that is a metaphor for) is not part of 21st Century society. nor is it any of those other things. It is anchored in 6000 year-old anxieties of desert tribal culture, was hijacked into a militaristic system by a mad emperor in the 4th Century who appropriated it to his imperial service and decided its beliefs, and for millennia has been so wrapped in archaic, cannibalistic, irrelevant ritual that it has lost even the vaguest connection to the “true” orgins of the cult.

If Christ were to return today it is the Catholic Church which would most vehemently be clamouring for his murder – because he would threaten to collapse their cosy, now entirely temporal, globally-tentacled, fear-mongering, parasitic apparatus, emasculate their power structure and reduce the fraudulent façade of their unctuous piety to rubble.

What the “Vatican” is doing now, must do and always does do is to desperately try to prop up the flimsy cardboard and canvas of the awful illusion they call their “authority”; patch it, stitch it, retouch it. And scream obscenities at – and, as they have so frequently done, kill – those who too clearly see their fakery and their flagrant lies and refuse to pretend it is real.

The more the church screams injustice and victimhood the more you know they are lying and afraid and protecting their livelihood whatever the cost to the real people in the world.

Because that is the problem; the catholic church through its pope is literally – and I mean literally – responsible for the deaths of millions in Africa, millions who are dying right now.

The catholic church is harming lives around the world. It is causing endless misery on a daily and hourly basis with its so-called “beliefs”. The pope’s “beliefs” are not merely irrational, illogical, deeply stupid and pathologically detached from reality; they are caustic, toxic, savage and inhumane. They are putrid, repugnant and rotten. They are fundamentally anti-life.

The catholic church for at least 1700 years has been, in its deepest nature, dishonest and utterly debauched. The establishment — which supposedly honours a simple, plain man who blessed the poor and the downtrodden — smells like a brothel and is painted up like a cheap, toothless harlot. (Metaphorically.) It remains debauched, like a syphilis-ridden hag, because those who have attached themselves like crabs into its stinking knickers don’t understand that they cannot continue to get away with what their predecessors have done for so very, very long.

Here endeth the lesson.