AMONG the lessons that this week may have taught Pete Broadbent is that God has a purpose for the papacy. Had it not been for the surge of interest in Pope Benedict XVI’s remarks on con­doms, Bishop Broadbent would have been promoted to the currently vacant see of The Bishop Who Doesn’t Believe A Word of It.

This has been not been properly occupied since the retirement of Jack Spong, and even he had the drawback of being American. But a bishop who doesn’t believe in fairytale wed­dings certainly qualifies as a heretic so far as the Daily Mail is concerned. Melanie Phillips must have felt that Christmas came early this year.

“For those who despair that the Church of England has progressed beyond satire, along comes a joke bishop to ram the point home. The Bishop of Willesden, Pete Broadbent, has pre­dicted on his Facebook page that the marriage of Prince William and Kate Middleton will last for only seven years.

“This was because the young couple were, he declared, ‘shallow celebrities’ and the Royal Family full of ‘philanderers’ with a record of marriage break-ups — notably the divorce of ‘Big Ears and the Porcelain Doll’, otherwise known as Prince Charles and Diana, Princess of Wales.

“Such remarks were unbelievably crass, spite­ful and stupid. How on earth can this absurd churchman purport to know how long William and Kate’s marriage will last?”

It’s worth noting that Phillips is a friend, or at least an adviser, to the groom’s father. But it’s hard to disagree with her main point, which is that Bishop Broadbent knows nothing about the couple beyond what he reads in the papers. I don’t think any professional Chris­tian, let alone a bishop in the Established Church, should sound off about anyone’s character on that basis.

He is also ignorant, obviously, of the first law of internet publishing, which is that no one will care about, or even read, anything you write on­line except the people who will be most upset and angry about it.

Jonathan Petre deserves full marks for snaff­ling the story. I know that some sensible people think it is wrong to seize on Facebook remarks, supposedly made among “friends”. You may be certain that nothing that appears there will stay private if it is sufficiently damaging, especially when you know that some of the “friends” are journalists.

AND SO to the Pope. It is one of the glories of this job that it sent us to the dictionaries to discover whether Italian distinguishes, as German does, between the sexes in its word for “prostitute” — because it seemed for a while on Sunday to matter a great deal whether the German translation of the story, in which the Pope defended the use of condoms by a male prostitute, was more authoritative than the Osservatore Romano’s version, in which the pros­titute was apparently female.

Almost all the first reports had this as a U-turn, or a reversal of previous teaching, simply because it was. Obviously the Pope was not say­ing that the use of condoms, or artificial birth control, had suddenly become acceptable. But he did say unequivocally that they might be justified for the prevention of infection in some cases.

This may well have been consistent with official doctrine, but so was the opposite po­sition, and this was more loudly and more openly stated. Let us not forget Cardinal Lopez Trujillo, who claimed that condoms were not only illicit, but ineffective. No one from the Vatican slapped him down for that.

But, by Monday, the papers were already hearing from Roman Cath­olics eager to explain that Oceania had always been at war with East Asia. Austen Ivereigh, in The Independent, was a pretty good example: “It will clear up, once and for all, the misper­ception that the Church’s message to an HIV-positive prostitute is that he, or her client, shouldn’t use a condom under any circumstances. The Church has never believed that, but the silence from Rome has allowed some con­servative Catholics and Church critics to claim otherwise — giving the im­pression that it would rather a person be infected with Aids than prevent a pregnancy.”

Compare and contrast The Guardian’s report from South Africa, where the paper actually sent David Smith out to discover what Roman Catholics there thought about it all. “Frank Lessaka, a student from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where about half the population is Catholic, said the Pope had a duty to put doctrine first: ‘The medical side is right, but he is contradicting the religious side.

“‘Legally he must emphasise the religious side. The danger is that people will mis­understand what the Pope is saying. He is trying to explain the use of condoms to stop HIV, but in a religious way he’s wrong.’”