To continue life support treatment for a corpse in order to sustain the unlikely viability of an unborn baby in its womb would be going "from the extraordinary to the grotesque," the High Court was told yesterday.

A UN human rights committee denounced the Vatican for “systematically” adopting policies that allowed priests to rape and molest tens of thousands of children over decades, and urged it to open its files on paedophiles and the bishops who concealed their crimes.

The western world has not seen an empire collapse as spectacularly as the Catholic Church since the Habsburg and British empires began to lose their unquestioned — and unquestionable — power just over a century ago. On this historical scale the relatively brief terror of communism is irrelevant.