Brown on the new no-Popery

Andrew Brown, editor of the Guardian's Comment is Free Belief, is disgusted by the Stalinist hatred shown by the "Nope Pope" brigade, some of whose wilder views are lovingly reproduced here; Monitor realises, reading some of them, how much of the fun it has missed. Concludes Brown:

So far as I can tell, English Catholics are not very enthusiastic about this pope nor his visit, but if anything can get them to stand up and be counted, it is the antics of those who hate them. Equally, this kind of hyperbole and hatred can only discredit atheism, humanism, and secularism. That would be a pity, but the damage will be entirely self-inflicted. Or, as Comrade Stalin might put the matter, it will be history repeating itself as farce.