It is a pity to see how the Church and its head are being attacked due to the paedophile scandals perpetrated by some Catholic priests in Ireland and the United States. It is not the uneducated who are to blame but the cultured, the intellectual and serious media. It makes you wonder whether it is part of a campaign, as happened before, to slander, malign and tarnish the Catholic Church and the Holy Father.

We can criticise some bishops for not acting quickly and taking the correct action. What we cannot and should not do is use these unfortunate events to sow hatred toward the Pope and the Church. That is both unfair and denotes bad intent.

Of course, acts done in bad faith cannot be ignored, not only because silence is consent but also because the honour of the Holy Father and the Church as a whole must be defended.

A militant secularist said: “The entity of the dissemination of the sexual abuse of children by priests undermines the same legitimacy of the Catholic Church as a guarantor of children education.” The term entity implies that a significant amount of priests were involved in such abuses, which, is absolutely false, since they will probably not even amount to 0.1 per cent of all Catholic Church priests in the world.

The problem is that hatred is often diffusive, especially when it affects people with a particular ideology, generally left-wing people, and when it is linked to atheism, particularly when not conformist but militant.

But it also happens that such hatred disguises in good faith to seduce naive people through untruths, statistics and manipulated surveys.

This is the evil hypocrisy that is camouflaged as good to persuade or deceive the consciences of uneducated and detached people.