For those privileged to have experienced education in a Western-model university, Pope Benedict's speech at Regensburg last week was a template of an academic lecture: intellectually challenging, provocative, clarifying some issues while also raising new questions. But in the ever-shrinking twenty-first century global village, such discourse, particularly by a world leader, can never stand in isolation. Across the globe, life is dominated by insatiable 24-hour rolling media, always looking for the next controversy. The worldwide Islamic family, communicating through email and blogs, appears to take offence easily, its sensibilities heightened by the traumas of Guantanamo Bay, Iraq, Gaza and Lebanon.

That the Pope's speech, with its quotation from an obscure Byzantine emperor, should open up divisions between Catholicism and Islam 41 years after the ground-breaking Second Vatican Council document, Nostra Aetate, forged a new relationship with other religions, is regrettable. But the possibility that such a rift might occur during this pontificate was apparent before the Pope cited Manuel II Paleologus as saying that Muhammad brought evil and violence to religion. As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Benedict had already expressed concerns about Islam's impact on Europe - a continent he sees as fundamentally Christian - and had questioned whether Turkey should join the European Union. Since being elected 17 months ago, he has moved Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald, one of Catholicism's leading experts on Islam, out of Rome. The word from Rome is that Benedict XVI made his address with too little of the kind of advice a twenty-first-century Pope needs. For today he requires not only input from those of the highest intellectual, theological and spiritual calibre but from people quick to spot the pitfalls awaiting those on the world stage.

This is not to suggest that the Pope should not raise difficult issues, nor should he be bullied into silence. But today tone, ...

In response to the Nolan Report in 2001, the Catholic Church in England and Wales tightened its procedures for dealing with allegations of sexual abuse of children against priests. The aim was not only to rescue its reputation, which had been badly damaged by a series of appalling cases, but also to make the Church an example of childprotection best practice. It has undoubtedly come a long way towards ...

Tony Blair must be reflecting ruefully on Enoch Powell's dictum that all political careers end in failure. He has been trying to engineer an end to his own that defied the rule: to go at a moment of his own choosing, basking in the applause of a grateful public, having fought his enemies to a standstill. But there is no warm autumnal glow in prospect: the political weather for the rest of his Prime Ministership ...

Even the United States realises it needs the United Nations. The idea popular among neo-conservatives in Washington that the UN was useful only in so far as it did America's will has given way to a wiser understanding, whispered in President Bush's ear by both his new Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and his best friend Tony Blair, that not all problems in the world can be settled by American might and the ...

Pope Benedict was leaving himself open to challenge when he remarked in an interview that women "are very present in the departments of the Holy See". It was a tacit invitation to delve into the Annuario Pontificio, the Vatican's Year Book, and count them. The result, according to our Rome correspondent Robert Mickens, is that no more than 15 per cent of the named total of officials of the Holy See are ...