The price of hypocrisy

I know we keep going over this, but it can’t be emphasised enough. We don’t want to have to pay millions of pounds for a monster to visit our shores.

But we’re going to have to. That monster is Joseph Ratzinger, a pope, aged 83, of Vatican City, Rome, who kills people and makes others’ lives a misery via his network of total evil.

The National Secular Society is reiterating – and quite rightly – that the British taxpayer should not have to pay for the red carpets and the posh scoff that will be required for what is to be a state, as opposed to a mere pastoral, visit.

(Incidentally, it looks as if he won’t be attending the banquet at Lancaster House – the London mansion managed by the Foreign Office – that’s being held in his honour. How ungrateful can you get? “Would you like to come for dinner?” “Love to, but I won’t actually be there.” Priceless!)

What gets up most people’s noses, I’m sure, is the sheer hypocrisy of it all. We can, as the then Home Secretary Jacqui Smith did, bar that politician-filmmaker chap Geert Wilders – who, as far as we know, hasn’t denied people lifesaving terminations, or told people that they’ll burn for eternity in the fires of Hell if they’re actively gay, or denied possibly lifesaving condoms to believers in the developing world – but we find it hard to ban this utter fiend.

Because it’s religion, you see; therefore it’s a Good Thing.

Then there’s that other hypocrisy. It could cost about £20 million to bring this vile toad here. Various figures have been bandied about, but it’s going to be in that ballpark. And what will have been the good – the tangible good – of the visit when he’s gone home and all the faithful have returned to their quotidian existence?

If they’re the faithful to begin with, will any difference have been made, other than that they may feel warm inside for a while? If there are conversions, is that going to be a good thing – yet more people to preach the poison, to tout the toxicity?

What joy or hope could £20 million bring to the lives of people in our communities who are in desperate need of funds – funds for medical and/or educational facilities and a hundred and one other schemes that might improve life for those on the edge? Multiply that by the number of countries this oaf is visiting, and you have a lot of potential good that could be done with the money he’s consuming unashamedly.

It just makes caring people want to vomit.