I feast on Holy Smoke like a vulture on carrion.

It’s a Daily Telegraph religious affairs blog and for a peek through the bars of the asylum it’s a must-read.

The most recent bulletin from behind the bars is about a simmering row in the English Roman Catholic Church over saying mass in Latin.

About 30 years ago, a rebellious youth, I led a delegation to tell our parish priest we didn’t understand most of the mass*, as he and a handful of aged warbling ladies sang it in Latin. We were, I said, bored and put off.

Tough, he said, the old people like it. Well those old people have now found out whether or not it was all true (they’re dead) and all the young uns in that congregation have without exception shaken the incense-scented dust of the Church off their shoes. That church - one of two Catholic mausoleums in the town - has closed and the remaining one has a shrinking, aging congregation.

So it is with a certain amount of glee that I read of the traditionalists going for the throats of the aging liberals, of the English Bishops ignoring the Pope’s teachings on the Latin mass (again, shnore), that Church still prays for the conversion of Jews but in a watered-down way (how, on one knee?) and (the author is a Catholic) when the Anglican Archbishop Canterbury suggested that some elements of Sharia Law might be used in civil disputes in the British Muslim community, Holy Smoke administered a well-shod shoeing and another one and another one and another one and good grief another one to the protestant Archbishop.

It’s terrific stuff. Long may Holy Smoke smoulder on.

* I asked how the mass could be valid if you can’t understand what the fuck’s going on. He said it just is. Even in Klingon? It’s like the teaching that sacraments administered by preists who rape kids are still valid. EH? They just are. Their administration by a criminal pervert who should be tied up in a tank of hagfish rather than moved to another parish is neither here nor there. And no, it never happened to me.