The Government has found itself with a scrap on its hands it clearly never bargained for, as the Catholic Church flexes its political muscles to thwart a plan rightly seen as an attack on the very principle of Catholic schools. The Archbishop of Birmingham, Vincent Nichols, has written to every head teacher pointing out the importance of contacting local MPs to show how widespread is the consternation in the Catholic community at proposals to alter the admissions criteria for pupils in their schools. Once they get the point, most parents will agree that the Government's clumsy attempts to deal with a quite different problem - the claim from some Muslims for a few faith schools of their own - has the potential to undermine the basis of Catholic education altogether.

The Muslim claim to their own schools has already been conceded in principle, but the Government faces strong criticism that, instead of advancing the multicultural integration it wants, it risks setting up state-funded pockets of Muslim separation and isolation, even fundamentalism. That is a reasonable anxiety. The Government's first response was to insist that 25 per cent of places in all new faith schools should go to children from outside the faith community concerned. This half-baked notion - there is manifestly no demand from non-Muslim parents for places in these hypothetical Muslim state schools - is so unworkable that it raises the suspicion that the real intention was to make such schools so unattractive to the Muslim community that they would lose interest in the idea.

But its one gigantic flaw was that it was incompatible with the basis on which more than 2,000 existing Catholic schools had long been operating. They fill their places first with Catholic pupils, then with non-Catholics - although even this sensible provision was suspended in recent memory to prevent Catholic schools "poaching" pupils from the non-denominational schools next door. In fact, on average, the non-Catholic ...

The Catholic community in Britain is entering a difficult period in its relations with wider society. The background cultural climate is becoming less friendly - Matthew Arnold's "long withdrawing roar" of the sea of faith seems to have been replaced by a surging incoming tide of antagonistic secularism, at least among some decision makers and commentators. For them "faith" signifies either ...

Hostility and rejection based on religion are part of the history of the Catholic community in Great Britain. It was in living memory, for instance, that nuns in the streets of Britain could expect to be insulted, jostled or even stoned. There is therefore a strong strand of sympathy among Catholics for Muslims experiencing something similar today, particularly in relation to the current controversy over Muslim women ...

The BBC Panorama programme has accused Pope Benedict XVI of enforcing a policy of secrecy over priests facing allegations of child sex abuse when he was a high Vatican official (see News from Britain and Ireland, page 36). The declared intention was to prevent victims and the church authorities reporting such cases to the police. In this case, consistent with Panorama's previous approach to investigative journalism, ...

Unlike his recent Regensburg speech with its controversial quotations about Islam, Pope Benedict's first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, published earlier this year, met with universal acclaim. Its far-reaching analysis examined not only the more spiritual aspects of our lives, but also our responsibilities in the public sphere, emphasising that social justice should be a central concern of politics ...