The BBC has become obsessed with sex

So Pope John Paul II had a mistress. That’s not quite what the BBC’s Panorama asserted, but they chucked around enough hint, innuendo and nudge, nudge to make us believe he had. And there was similar suggestiveness in a Today programme interview on Monday morning between John Humphrys and the liberal Catholic journalist Edward Stourton. Humphrys delighted in the whiff of salaciousness and wondered aloud whether Stourton’s discovery of hundreds of letters between the former Pope and the Polish-American philosopher Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka indicated that the pair were lovers. After much whetting of our licentious appetites, the BBC concluded that they were ‘More than friends but not quite lovers.’ They were certainly collaborators: Anna-Teresa helped John Paul in the 1970s – when he was still Cardinal Karol Wojtyla – with the writing of his book The Acting Person.

Of course the BBC has a reputation for throwing as much mud as possible at the Catholic Church: child abuse, kinky cardinals, sex and drugs in the Vatican and financial jiggery-pokery endemic – but the matter is much broader than that.