Just sitting there, you were ‘disordered’.

In the London Review of Books, Colm Tóibín has an engaging article on the Catholic Church and gays - the love some of the latter have for the former, and the growing hatred the former has for the latter. The case of Ireland, which Tóibín, an Irishman, knows and describes particularly well, aptly demonstrates that the Church is now reaping the harvest from the seeds of dishonesty and oppression that it sowed, there and elsewhere, for centuries.

The suggestion that the Church's obsessive hostility to gays is rooted in deep-seated sexual repression - a suggestion made in the book by Angelo Quatrocchi, reviewed by Tóibín in the article - is certainly not new. It is one of those banal truisms that never become less banal even as they are shown to be less true than previously thought. Quatrocchi seeks to make great hay from it; parodically protesting too much, he titled his book The Pope Is Not Gay! and speculates therein that the Pope may be gay.

Tóibín, for his part, makes some effort not to take Quatrocchi's suggestion for more than it is worth. Nevertheless, he gives more credence than I would to the notion that the Pope's close personal relationship with his comely personal secretary, along with other indicia, at least suggest that the Holy Father may be, in Quatrocchi's phrase, "the most repressed, imploded gay in the world."

I see no real reason to believe such a thing, much less to be convinced of it. Suggestions like these always seem to have the same aim that Lyndon Johnson had when he floated the notion that a political opponent had sex with pigs: "make him deny it." But believing it is different from suspecting it, and in this sense, Tóibín makes a very lucid connection between the child abuse scandal and the nominally unrelated speculation on the Pope's sexuality. Tóibín notes that, as the Church has systematically destroyed its own credibility by coddling sexual predators, it has inadvertently allowed doubt and suspicion to cast shadows where once they would never have fallen. This is always the consequence of a loss of credibility, and the fight to restore it is always fought on many or indeed all fronts. So now the Pope, that arch-scourge of gays, finds his own sexuality questioned, and however specious that speculation is, it cannot be dismissed summarily. He is reaping what he sowed.