THE most astonishing Vatican document of the past half-century appeared on Monday - and, of the British dailies, only the Telegraph noticed it.

"Catholic bishops took an unprecedented step on Monday to 'welcome' homosexuals and noting they had 'gifts and qualities' to offer the church," the story from Rome started.

Of course, the changing attitude towards gay people affects the Roman Catholic priesthood far more than the laity. In the grand scheme of things, it is much less important than the shufflings around divorce and marriage after divorce, which seem to have escaped the notice of Telegraph readers as completely as they escaped all the other papers.

Yet there are, by reasonable estimates, 400,000 divorced Roman Catholics in this country to whom the news is of immediate and pressing interest. That's more than the entire circulations of the "quality papers" that ignored the story.

Possibly related to this is the fact that the Guardian site yields 90,000 Google hits for "Steve Jobs" and fewer than 11,000 for "Ayatollah". A Martian Guardian reader (and why stop at merely global domination?) would suppose that it was Apple that was threatening to develop nuclear weapons, and Apple's chosen executives who now controlled the rump Iraqi state, while "Ayatollah" was just a title given to the chief executives of computer companies.

They do these things better in the United States. The New York Times led: "In a marked shift in tone likely to be discussed in parishes around the world, an assembly of Roman Catholic bishops convened by Pope Francis at the Vatican released a preliminary document on Monday calling for the Church to welcome and accept gay people, unmarried couples and those who have divorced, as well as the children of these less traditional families.

"The bishops' report, issued midway through a landmark two-week meeting, does not change church doctrine or teaching, and will now be subjected to fierce debate and revision at the assembly."

The bit about "liable to be discussed in parishes" is bathetic to an English eye, but it reflects the judgement of the NYT that many of its readers are part of parishes, and that this is a normal and natural thing to do. That is not the judgement of any English news desk right now.
 

A REMARKABLE piece in The Financial Times had Archbishop Welby courteously calling bankers to repentance.

"The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, wants to help change the culture of the financial services industry by offering places in a new quasi-monastic community to be created in a corner of his Lambeth Palace residence. There, budding bankers and other future leaders aged 20 to 35 will spend 12 months 'in God's time' under a prior studying ethics and philosophy, praying and serving the poor. The Archbishop will be abbot of the community, which will take the name of one of his predecessors at the see of Canterbury, St Anselm."

It is interesting that he should combine this with a pitch that they will have to clean up their act for fear of regulation: "To those who see little chance of the banking industry mending its ways, Mr Welby points to the experience of the 1930s, when he says the great crash triggered a change in banking culture which endured until the 1980s.

"If banks today fail to mend their ways, he sees a double threat: more instability as bankers chase higher risk opportunities in a low-interest-rate environment, and rising popular anger leading to a fresh wave of heavy regulation."
 

THE other notable interview was of a rather different nature, with the Revd Richard Coles, described by The Independent as the most famous vicar in Britain. He was interviewed by Patrick Strudwick, the man who got a psychiatrist struck off for offering to cure him of gay cooties.

"'I was very much healed by the experience of anonymous sex with strangers in lay-bys,' he says. 'This might stretch my credibility to the point of knicker-elastic twanging, but I really was. There were moments of profound intimacy with people who were dying to be intimate. Dying for it - just being close and being able to be vulnerable and express longing.'

"Plus, I offer, there must be the wholly welcome breeze. Coles laughs. 'It's like a picnic!" he says, reaching for the lemon drizzle cake."

Despite Strudwick's palpable hostility to Christianity, this comes across as a story of something rather more interesting than redemption.
 

AND so to the Daily Star, which has decided that Britain is threatened by child migrants from the afterlife: three times in the past week it splashed on the "black-eyed ghost child", culminating in: "A plague of black-eyed child ghosts have sparked fears of a terrifying spook invasion. Paranormal experts are reporting a dramatic surge in the number of sightings." It's news you will find nowhere else.