Wrong impression

ABOUT a week after meeting the Irish bishops, Pope Benedict finally made a pronouncement: “In every action, it is above all essential to protect and value the human person in their integrity”.

At last, I thought, the beginnings of some sort of acknowledgement, and this said in public at a so-called audience in the Vatican.

Alas, it was not to be. The Pope was not referring to the decades of ubiquitous institutional child abuse by thousands of his staff worldwide. His uttering’s were, however, in keeping with the Catholic Church’s pertinacious obsession with sex and anything that could be remotely construed as sexual activity – he was objecting to body scanners at airports. Alas, my thoughts of receiving him and his bishops into the real world were premature.