I’VE a sneaking admiration for Cardinal Kasper who’s pulled out of the Pope’s tour ‘for medical reasons’, though headlines dramatised his claim that arriving at Heathrow was like ‘you’ve landed in a Third World Country’.

He described our ‘aggressive new atheism’ and a ‘crisis of faith’ in our ‘secular and pluralist’ land in such detail that good Pope Benedict’s Vatican hastily distanced itself from his views.

You might recall our column did the new atheists last month.

I do welcome the Pope’s visit. We may not see eye-to-eye on all issues, but his sane and reasoned defence of God and Christianity with its civilisation-building values and rights and wrongs makes a wee bit more sense than godless, anything-goes atheism or apathy.

I also hail this week’s massive government u-turn on faith.

The Lord bless Tory chairlady Baroness Warsi who declared the new coalition ‘does God’ as opposed to Labour which didn’t, and treated faith as quaintly irrelevant.