JESUITS tend not to like the adjective Jesuitical, since, in popular usage, it conveys the sense of dissembling, equivocating, or deploying over-subtle casuistry. How ironic, then, to see it being employed by the Vatican to spin the language of the world’s most prominent Jesuit, Pope Francis.

“All religions are a path to God,” the Jesuit Pope told a gathering of young people at an interreligious meeting in Singapore. “There is only one God, and we, our religions, are languages, paths to God. Some Sikh, some Muslim, some Hindu, some Christian, but they are different paths.”

But, when his words appeared on the Vatican website, the official English translation read: “All religions are seen as paths trying to reach God”. Dynamic rather than literal translation, perhaps? No. The next day, the translation had been finessed again to: “all religions are paths to God” — almost the original translation.

Any of these might sound like common sense to the secular reader. But conservative Catholics were outraged that the Pope appeared to have disregarded the words of Jesus in St John’s Gospel: “No one comes to the Father except by me.” The Pope was variously accused of relativism, indifferentism, and “heresy, pure and simple”.

The context is important. His remarks came at the end of his long overseas tour — through South-East Asia and Oceania — where his theme was religious tolerance and the need for constructive interfaith dialogue, without an insistence by each group on the righteousness of its own beliefs. The need for inclusivity was nowhere more emphasised than in Singapore, where Christians make up just 19 per cent of the population amid Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs.

The shift in Rome’s attitudes to other faiths is longstanding. Vatican II’s Nostra Aetate, in 1965, introduced a new attitude of dialogue and respect towards Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. The current Catholic Church acknowledges the “goodness and truth found in these religions”, albeit as a “preparation for the Gospel”. The Vatican has finally decided that the Pope’s remarks are perfectly compatible with church doctrine.

The problem is that the Pope set aside his prepared text and spoke off the cuff. Francis’s tendency to shoot from the lip routinely horrifies conservatives because of its linguistic imprecision and philosophical untidiness. Yet this is what communicates so vividly to plain people in the pew: “There is no Catholic God”; “Atheists can go to heaven”; “God is not afraid of new things”; “Catholics do not need to breed like rabbits”; “I would happily baptise a Martian.” These are just a few of his previous demotic utterances.

Yet this Pope is subtler than his opponents suggest. Asked by a reporter whether US Catholics should vote for Donald Trump or Kamala Harris, Pope Francis responded with apparent even-handedness: “Both of them are against life . . . the one who throws out migrants and the one who kills children.” Yet all Catholics should vote and “choose the lesser evil”.

This amounts to a correction of the US bishops’ declaration that abortion should be the “pre-eminent priority” for Catholic voters. Pope Francis is rejecting single-issue voting and insisting that “equally sacred are the lives of the poor, those already born, the destitute, the abandoned, and the underprivileged.” No wonder the conservatives are upset.