The proposed "compromise" by the Government over the fate of Catholic adoption agencies is in truth a defeat for the Catholic Church and a victory for those who have been opposing any exemption to the new regulations against homosexual discrimination. But the Government's position has to be confirmed by Parliament, and MPs have yet to test the strength of Catholic feeling in their constituencies. Not just Catholic either: Anglican and Muslim leaders have sided with the Catholic case, without subscribing to every detail of Catholic doctrine. The Government will be particularly embarrassed about the situation in Scotland, where, with elections pending, the nationalists are ready to exploit the fact that Westminster wants to overrule undertakings by the Scottish Executive to safeguard the position of Catholic agencies. It is a perfect demonstration, they say, of why Scotland needs to be master in its own house.

There are other principles at stake. One is that the leadership of the Catholic Church must start to engage with the many Catholics who find the Church's traditional treatment of homosexuality repugnant and indeed homophobic. The language of "gross depravity" - as in the Catechism - has to be repudiated. The Catholic case also needs to be more sharply defined as to what is really at stake. As Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor expressed it in an article in the Daily Telegraph this week, the argument is not that homosexual couples could never qualify as good parents for an adopted child - some have and more will - but that the new law demands recognition of a fundamental equivalence between homosexual and heterosexual couples and their lifestyles. The proposed law, in short, leaves no room for the many, who could well be in the majority, who believe that the best family setting for raising children is one parent of each sex. Any adoption agency, Catholic or not, that agrees with that principle is about to be driven out of business. That is an alarming ...

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 ...

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 ...