How to Lose a Pontifical Visit in 10 Days

When Parliament is dissolved to allow for a new election, MPs who were ministers at the end of the session, along with their counterparts in the opposition, retain their positions in a caretaker government.

Maybe they should have been canned too, especially with the Foreign Office generating and later retracting a list of possible items to include on Pope Benedict XVI's visit to the UK in September.

Now, His Holiness might be cancelling that trip as a result of that list, according to sources in the Vatican. The list, which was marked "should not be shared externally", included such blatantly anti-Catholic suggestions like having the Holy Father bless a same-sex union, commission his own brand of condoms, and ordain women bishops, plus rather nefarious and otherwise outlandish ideas like singing a duet with Her Majesty for charity.

Already Britain's envoys to the Holy See and Italy have communicated grave regret over the list's release and have issued copious apologies, but the mere dissemination of it in official materials indicates a glaring lack of decorum within Whitehall concerning this visit. Especially as the Vatican and the Church of England continue to tussle over the issue of Anglican and Episcopal churches that seek to convert to Catholicism over the push of Anglican dioceses to ordain and appoint women and openly gay clergy.

This has yet to play out in the current election, but given how precarious Labour's standing is, any gaffe involving the Catholic Church (especially with roughly one-tenth of the Great Britain's population professing membership and being in league with the nationalist party in Northern Ireland that actually fills their seats in Northern Ireland) will only damage Gordon Brown's chances of remaining in 10 Downing.

Then again, with avowed atheists Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens declaring their intent to have the Pope arrested in the same manner as Pinochet should the visit go through, maybe the Foreign Office's crude sense of humour has given the Pope the exit needed to avoid their harsh solution to the mess in the church concerning priests accused of pædophilia.