KEY POINTS:
As parents often tell children, the best defence against mockery is not to give the mockers the pleasure of knowing their jibes have hit home.
Mockery is part of the columnist's armoury. I wouldn't say we mock for a living but you'd have to be a saint and/or
a stuffed shirt to fill 50-odd columns a year without the odd burst. So it was gratifying that the Herald's coverage of the Vatican's recent pronouncement on sin and my column on the subject should have drawn an indignant squawk from the Roman Catholic Church.
Like Batman and Robin galvanised by the appearance of the Bat signal above Gotham City, the Catholic Bishop of Auckland and the managing editor of New Zealand Catholicism's official organ, the imaginatively named NZ Catholic, sprang to the defence of their embattled institution.
It was doubly gratifying that their defence - in the form of a broad-brush denunciation of the mainstream media and a Muldoonist swipe at this newspaper and a few wretched folk who contribute to it - was riddled with the non sequiturs and paranoia which have characterised the church's engagement in polemics since the first heretic was flayed alive and burnt at the stake.
They began by asserting that this "hatchet job" was part of a co-ordinated media attack on Christianity that occurs every Easter "like clockwork". My coded instructions from Media Central must have got lost in the mail or perhaps been intercepted by a Vatican agent but that didn't matter. I'm a pro; I know the drill: Easter's coming up so let's get stuck into the God botherers.
Secondly, we misreported "the musings" of a solitary bishop in an interview with the Vatican newspaper, a misrepresentation comparable to presenting a backbencher's comments to their local rag as official Labour Party policy.
The implied comparison between The Clutha District Recorder and L'Osservatore Romano, which is owned by the Holy See, based in Vatican City, publishes official Vatican documents and is universally recognised as the Vatican's semi-official newspaper, is disingenuous to say the least.
As is comparing a backbencher to the bishop who heads the Vatican body which oversees confessions and plenary indulgences. If a Cabinet minister "mused" on a matter of far-reaching significance in such specific terms - "priests must take account of new sins which have appeared as a corollary of the unstoppable process of globalisation" - it would be deemed newsworthy and reported across the media.
My particular offence was to trot out the "oft-used argument that the church aided and abetted Hitler". The charge came with a veiled suggestion that I'd dredged this slur out of some obscure and disreputable book.
That the Roman Catholic Church supported fascism (my words) in the form of Franco's Phalange, Mussolini's National Fascist Party, the Vichy regime, the Ustashe Party in Croatia and the Nazi Party among others is a matter of record, not opinion.
Rather than address this inconvenient truth, the critics sought to deflect it by pointing out that the church saved thousands of Jews during World War II, the implication being that the two things are so contradictory only one of them can possibly be true.
Not so: a prime motive for the church's alliance with fascism was fear of Bolshevism. Particularly in Germany, it was more a case of the enemy of my enemy is my friend than a blanket endorsement of Nazism's philosophy and policies, not all of which were explicated.
It could be argued that, having made this deal with the devil and then watched the horrific consequences of fascism unfold, offering sanctuary was the very least the Catholic Church could have done.
Certainly, given what the church stands for, it's difficult to understand why anyone would argue that it deserves a credit for not doing otherwise.
I was also chastised for being mischievous about the notion of papal infallibility. I'll happily accede to that: if the proposition that a human being can in some way be infallible doesn't bring out your mischievous streak, it's safe to assume God was temporarily out of stock when he designed your DNA.
A reader sought to have the last word with this pronouncement: "For those with faith, no evidence is necessary; for those without faith, no amount of evidence will suffice."
I wouldn't dispute the first part, although I'm not sure it's anything to be proud of. As for the second, where exactly is this mound of hard evidence - fake stigmata don't count - that sceptics and unbelievers wilfully ignore?
But that's a discussion for another Easter. This Easter we should give thanks that, in a world convulsed by religious zealotry, our proponents of belief are benign, if a little touchy.
