Battle has been joined over the threat to Catholic adoption agencies, contained in a clause in proposed legislation to outlaw discrimination against homosexuals in publicly funded services.

The 12 adoption agencies in England and Wales have a total budget of nearly £100 million a year, and more than half of what they spend on adoption work comes from local authorities. The Catholic agencies have a high reputation and tend to concentrate on children with special needs, a valuable service to the public at large. All prefer married couples, some will consider cohabiting heterosexual couples and single people, but they all discriminate in the case of prospective adopters of the same sex. Then their policy - not always followed, it must be observed - is to "positively refer" applicants to other agencies.

The Government's task, of which it is making heavy weather, is to balance the good of outlawing discrimination against homosexuals against the bad of seeing these excellent Catholic agencies close down. And they really would close: the bishops are bound by teachings and policies that are not theirs to change (and certainly will not be changed by this legislation). But most of what both sides want can be achieved by compromise. Gay couples will find plenty of agencies to welcome them, and the Catholic societies can continue with their good work in accordance with their consciences. So the battle boils down to the argument that to allow one exception, even on grounds of religious conviction, would undermine the new law as a whole. That is stretching the argument too far.

It is unwise for issues involving a genuine conflict of rights to be pushed to the point where there is total victory for one side and defeat for the other. But it would be well for the Catholic Church to recognise why its own position has become difficult to explain and defend. Its submission to Government makes reference to Catholic sexual ethics. Not long ago ...

Catholic priests are not employees of the Catholic Church. Nor are they labour-only subcontractors or management consultants, nor, strictly speaking, are they self-employed. The difficulty of legally categorising them has become an unresolved issue between the Catholic bishops of England and Wales and the Government's Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), which oversees legal issues surrounding employment generally. ...

This time, at least it was not about sex. That is almost the only comforting fact to emerge from the fiasco in the Polish Catholic Church over the appointment of a new Archbishop of Warsaw. The dramatic last-minute withdrawal of Archbishop Stanislaw Wielgus has damaged the reputation of Pope Benedict, who at best acted in good faith on bad advice, at worst ignored all the warning signs he should have seen ...

The strongest argument for the death penalty was the simple invocation of the name of Hitler - or in more recent days, Saddam Hussein. What fate but death could possibly be appropriate for the world's most wicked men? But the appalling images and stories from Saddam Hussein's actual execution chamber in Baghdad have dramatically reversed the argument. Here was irrefutable proof that execution dehumanises not ...

Every human person is a someone, not a something. The essence of Benedict XVI's New Year message for peace is this simple affirmation that shows how close contemporary concerns for human rights are to gospel values. The Pope's particular point this year was that observance of human rights is the only sure route to peace, together with a warning that an inadequate grounding for the doctrine of rights quickly ...