This Strange Little Chapter

"Guests of Her Majesty", Norman Stanley Fletcher used to call himself and his fellow-inmates. Has it occurred to Richard Dawkins that Her Majesty's guest will be rather well-protected by Her Majesty's Constabulary? And we don't mean your friendly village bobbies. There would be an arrest, all right. The Pope to be arrested by Richard Dawkins? I ask you! With Robbie Coltrane no doubt reprising his role in The Pope Must Die, who will be the rest of the cast of the worst British film comedy since Carry On Columbus? In particular, who will play Richard Dawkins, and why?

By this time next year, most people will either deny that they ever entertained such notions, or will sincerely have forgotten all about this strange little chapter, when the merely eighteenth, nineteenth or twentieth-century media mouthpieces of global capital, war against Iran, martial law for the Catholics of the West Bank, bombardment of the Catholics of Lebanon, and the jackal, vulture or hyena school of litigation, all thought that they could take out the only institution in the world to go back to Classical Antiquity and to have its foundation recorded in the Bible. We trust that they have learned their lesson. They certainly appear to have done so. Only the Dom Joly antics of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Peter Tatchell remain, and even they could not in practice carry out their threats. Not that they would ever have dared try, anyway.

Elsewhere, I have been rather hysterically told that there will be an American attempt to file a class action against the Pope, leading to "public pressure" for a prosecution. Leave aside that in every part of the globe, the Police have dismissed this whole business as being of not the slightest interest. Leave aside that the most powerful media on earth (Murdoch, the New York Times, the BBC) have already been swatted away like flies by the world's oldest continuously existing institution. What could possess anyone to imagine that such a class action might be successful in the first place? Unless it went the Church's way at an earlier stage, then it would certainly end up before the Supreme Court, where six of the nine Justices are Catholics, at least five are weekly Mass-goers, and at least four have by common consent some degree of affiliation to Opus Dei. Yet that, take note, is this campaign's best hope in the world.

Beyond satire. Quite, quite, quite beyond satire.