Pope Benedict XVI has done it again. In September 2006, in the course of an arcane speech about the de-Hellenisation of Christianity, he managed to enrage Muslims by throwing in a quote from a Byzantine emperor on Islam being violent, evil and inhuman. We all missed the point, the Vatican said. His Holiness was talking about the relationship between faith and reason.

Last month, Pope Benedict received back into the Catholic Church four clerics excommunicated in 1988, including an English-born bishop, Richard Williamson, who had just told Swedish television “not a single Jew died in a gas chamber”. Despite widespread outrage, apparently we all missed the point again. The Pope was trying to heal a schism in the Church, the Vatican said, and Benedict was not even aware of the bishop’s views.