Joe has put up a stoic defence as usual. But I would urge him to read "Religion and the Rise of Capitalism" by Richard Tawney. Its argument that the world's religions have in significant degree been shaped to address vested interests is so persuasive as to be almost irrefutable.

Joe's particular religion owes its survival and wide propagation largely to the fact that it was adopted as the state religion of the Roman empire, Constantine seeing its unique intolerance of other religions as a useful device for building cohesion across the empire. (The state's role in developing its new religion, to mutual benefit, is first documented in chapters 15 and 16 of Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.")

Later, the church was to amass fabulous wealth by putting a price on salvation and selling indulgences - a monstrous example of religion being shaped purely to feed vested interests. No wonder some were diffident when papal infallibility was voted in, in 1870 (it applied retrospectively of course, Joe - not just to subsequent ex cathedra papal pronouncements.)

I am frankly amazed that Joe can write: "I strongly support the Catholic Church's ...uneasiness with warfare and with capitalism." This of a church that makes Rupert Murdoch a papal knight!

Never mind the barbarity of the crusades, or the iniquities inflicted on South America under the Spanish conquest, or Rome's deep unease at the spread of demmocratic governance 100 years ago. Or its hostility to tolerance and freedom of expression, as in Pius IX's "syllabus of errors" published around 1865.

It's enough to remember how the Vatican sided with United States interests against its own clerics on the ground in El Salvador. Or Rome's pathological hostility to communism (the only possible excuse for Pacelli throwing in his lot with Hitler - in defiance of brave archbishops in Germany and Austria - long before going on to become the famously spineless Pious XII).

The Vatican's capitalist sympathies have been stalwartly upheld by the present Pope, whose meddling in eastern Europe has been thrown back in his face. (In open and fair elections in Poland a few weeks ago, the former communists got 45 per cent of the vote and are back in government, while the western/Vatican construct Solidarity didn't win a single seat.) To say nothing of the corruption and scandals involving Bank Ambrosiano, Roberto Calvi, etc, that preceded his accession. Unease with capitalism???

Some church. Its shortcomings are not merely "newsworthy" Joe, they are shameful in an institution that puts itself next to god; presumes to hear the confessions of lesser mortals; and to absolve us of our sins, blah, blah, blah.

Briefly on a wider note, it is now well documented (from their own correspendence, among other sources) that many if not most of the 19th Century missionaries in Africa and India, including probably the best-known, Livingstone, saw their work as opening up new markets for British trade. Persuading "savages" to wear shoes (cue Bata) meant breaking down their cultural values, and pushing Christianity up their noses was as good a way as any to do it.