"Who do you think you're kidding, Mr. Ratzinger?"

"Even in our own lifetimes we can recall how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live."

That would be a sophomoric resort to argument by way of deception, historical revisionism and outright falsification coming from any old geezer, but what makes that assertion astonishing is that those words were spoken by no less than Old Red Socks himself, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, otherwise known as His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI, on the occasion of his widely-protested visit to Britain.

From the mouth of no less an authority on Nazi ideology than Adolph Schicklgruber, otherwise known as Adolph Hitler, Führer of the National Socialist German Workers' Party, came this assertion, one of many words and deeds to amply prove that rather than a wish "to eradicate God from society" the Nazis harboured precisely the opposite intent: "We were convinced that the people needs and requires this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out."

We owe this corrective to our comrade Johnny Guitar, an Armagh lad lately of Belfast, whose patience with all the Popemania was broken by Ratzinger's outrageous statement, which he uttered in the course of a creepy attempt at some kind of ecumenical appeal to fellow-feeling with the decidedly non-Catholic, mainly pagan and Protestant British people.

The ex-Catholic Martin has a go at all this and presents the kind of thing he wishes the pope had said, specifically to British Christians, instead: "I have heard some of you talk of persecution and of your faith being banished from the public square. Frankly, I am astonished - 'gobsmacked' is I believe the appropriate word in your language - when I hear such talk. Here I am, in a country where the upper chamber of your parliament includes Christian bishops as of right, where your church schools are partly funded by the taxes of unbelievers, where your services and sermons have guaranteed slots on television and radio, and where your politicians make regular obeisance to 'faith communities' and 'faith leaders'. How Christians in some other lands - Iran, Saudi Arabia, China, North Korea - might wish for such 'persecution'!"

I tend to approach these media eruptions in more or less the same way as Paul Evans ("agnostic in religious terms" but culturally Catholic). Paulie found himself bored and irritated by the papal-visit rumpus, but highly amused by this assessment from a brilliant wag who goes by the handle Flying Rodent: "To me, Catholicism is primarily objectionable horseshit because it's a vehicle for a lot of ultra-conservative closet-cases to expand their influence over a substantial chunk of humanity with mumbo-jumbo and threats."

I especially liked this part: "The idea that Catholicism is going to utterly reconstitute itself into a pseudo-spiritual, virtually God-free feelgood pantomime called Hey Man, So Long As You Don't Hurt Anyoneism is insane. That's what Protestantism is for."

Indeed it is. Looking back on my own reflection on growing up in a Catholic minority among those poor, sweet, suffering, condom-having, Mary-ignoring, earnest Protestant bastards, I think Rodent's got it closer to the mark, and he's funnier besides.

Last word to Anne Applebaum: "And thus did Benedict's visit to Britain turn into an advertisement for religious freedom -- the freedom to abhor religion and the freedom to practice it."