But Christians are too far down the food chain to be granted even the most superficial courtesy. And especially Catholics, as the Act of Settlement, still unamended after 13 years of "equality" legislation from a fanatically anti-discriminatory government, testifies. The knee-jerk anti-Catholicism of the British is the legacy of Sir Francis Walsingham and the other Elizabethan spin-doctors who fabricated the Black Legend of Popery. On that was based the collective paranoia known officially as the "Glorious Revolution".

As mosques, sometimes hosts to militant jihadists, rear their minarets in British cities, the native population is still fearfully scanning the skies for Jesuit parachutists dressed as nuns with snow on their boots. "Sink me the ship, master gunner... Fall into the hands of God/Not into the hands of Spain." Zzzzz... The infantilism of the anti-Catholic myth, once an Anglican prejudice, persists today in the agenda of secularists. That was the real point behind the Foreign Office document - not the immediate offence, but the mindset it betrayed.

The FCO has long been a basket-case department: only the iconic incompetence of the Home Office has shielded it from greater exposure. For decades, the Foreign Office has been the overseas edition of The Guardian. It was the deluded, liberal Wykehamists in King Charles Street who sent the misleading, anti-colonialist, wishful-thinking signals to the Argentine junta that encouraged the invasion of the Falklands, leading to the deaths of 255 British and 649 Argentine soldiers, sailors and airmen, as well as three islanders.

The chinless Carlton-Brownes of the FO have been supplanted by a new breed of barrow-boy "diplomat" - they are advertising for recruits on Twitter - but the consistent factor remains incompetence. Only a department of state that had gone feral could have produced the sneering document suggesting the Pope open an abortion clinic and preside over a homosexual "marriage". Only a gravely dysfunctional Foreign Office could have reduced Britain to the pathetic status it currently occupies in international esteem.

Now the attempted damage limitation is becoming more damaging than the original damage. Catholics are being asked to show "a sense of humour"? How much sense of humour would be on display if Islam had been insulted? Or ethnic minorities? Or homosexuals? Are we seriously expected to believe that similarly offensive documents are routinely drawn up, circulated and tolerated on the eve of a state visit by the Saudi king? Catholics are fair game - the objects of the sole permissible prejudice.

The FCO document betrays just how seriously the establishment really regards clerical sex abuse: in King Charles Street it is no more than a dirty joke. In a climate where the most moderate, even accidental, offence to minorities is punished with dismissal, the civil servant who perpetrated this gross insult to the Pope must be sacked from all Government service, not simply "transferred to other duties". The media will identify the offender, one may be confident. Since his continuing tenure is a defiant gesture of contempt for Christianity, his dismissal must now become an election issue.

----Gerald Warner is an author, broadcaster, columnist and polemical commentator who writes about politics, religion, history, culture and society in general