WAKE UP, RICHARD, AND SMELL THE INCENSE

You know, if God didn't exist, I suspect Richard Dawkins would have to invent him so that he could stridently shout down that existence.

I have a great deal of time for the Professor although I haven't met him since tutorials in the Zoology Department at Oxford in South Parks Road in the 1970s but I do think that today's contribution to the debate about the Pope's UK 'State Visit' is publicity opportunism - and a bad example of same. And let's remember that the Pope isn't God (not even the Catholics claim this).

"Go home to your Mussolini-concocted principality, and don't come back," says RD in today's (16/9/10) The Times. 'Mussolini-concocted' !?! Oh surely he can rant better than this.

'Concocted' is more cocktail-mixing than religious orthodoxy. I mean the Vatican may be spicing up the communion wine but there are few spirits here (sorry about that).

This surely cannot be the real Dawkins speaking, not the greatest neo-Darwinist of the age, not the writer of The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker.

Perhaps I am guilty of transferring hope to belief here (although there's a lot of this about on the other side of Cardinal Kasper's aggressively atheist divide), but I believe that Prof Dawkins has about him more aggressively atheist advisers than he is and he has tumbled into their way of thinking without fully believing their dialectic. And I have met one such adviser - a meeting that strenghthened, not diminished, this opinion.

You know, I am beginning to wonder whether this is all about Oxford. Pullman whose books are banned to Catholics is Oxford through-and-through and so is Dawkins. Let's remember that Cardinal Newman preached regularly at St Aloysius at the top end of St Giles in Oxford after his 'conversion' and that the Pope has taken up Newman's "Heart shall speak unto Heart" mantra as a theme of his visit.

I don't know what Sebastian's teddy-bear would say!