Tales of the City: The Catholic Church still has a lot to learn

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor has come out fighting. As the seemingly endless procession of revelations about Catholic priests abusing children rolls on its sorry way, the Church of Rome's boss in England and Wales has decided to get tough. Interviewed on Monday, he gave it to his inquisitors straight. Were there any more embarrassing stories still to come out? No there damn well weren't. Had he presided over a cover-up? That was totally untrue. Had the Church been undermined by the scandal? "The Catholic Church has been on a learning curve in the way it deals with child abuse," he said. "I think that the Church will, before very long, be a model for child-protection procedures."

You'll probably need to sit down after reading that last bit. I feel a bit shaky myself. In the annals of bottomless cheek, I've rarely read anything more blood-boilingly complacent than the cardinal's assurance that the charnel-house of corruption, the stew of heartless exploitation over which he has presided, both as bishop and cardinal, for years is in reality as pristine as a Barratt's show-home.

Perhaps he's right. Perhaps the Catholic Church will be seen in future as a model for child-protection procedures; but will that "model" ever eclipse the rather more gigantic "model" that Catholicism has become over the past couple of decades – a model playground for sexually voracious, interfering, sneaking, perverted kiddy-fiddlers?

And while we're grateful that the cardinal's dim and dawning awareness of the scale of a scandal that has effectively destroyed the dignity of the Church in the eyes of its former faithful can be written off as "a learning curve" (as if it were the equivalent of a training film), I rather wish that fewer young men had had to suffer the indignity of being shown that their bodies weren't strictly their own property, but could be used by the kindly neighbourhood priest to do with them whatever he fancied.

When asked about discipline, the cardinal tends to offer the same reply – he will abide by the findings of the Nolan committee report, published in April 2001, which made 50 recommendations for protecting children against abuse by priests and social workers. Well, that's a positive, if rather grudging, note to strike. So much better than the Church's attitude in 1994, when it published its first child-protection guidelines, which explained how the church should act when a priest is next accused of violating a 10-year-old, rather than how it might protect children. But what the Nolan report didn't do was indicate what exactly counted as "abuse" and what could be thought to be merely standard priestly behaviour.

I spent 11 years in a single-sex Catholic school. My own experience of priestly misbehaviour wasn't terribly traumatic or life-changingly obscene, but it illustrates the conceitedness of papist clerics, and their conviction that they cannot be wrong. There were two odd priests. One simply loved having boys in his private office, several at a time, where he would feed them figs, of all things, and discreetly fondle their arms and hips. He had an obsession with visible crotches. "Uncross your legs!" he would yell at mystified boys in class who'd swung one knee over the other. But he was harmless, and we tended to laugh at him.

The other was the deputy headmaster, known as Bats, a small, cruel man with a sharky mouth. His speciality was to twine his arm around your neck or waist and grip you in a rapidly tightening embrace until you squirmed. While he did so, he kept on talking quadratic equations or symmetry. Sometimes, he would take my face between both his hands and tilt my chin towards him. It was hellishly disconcerting, having an elderly priest holding you in this unlovely clinch as if about to snog you. I can see his gold filling and the hairs in his nostrils to this day. And what I can't forgive, slight though it may seem, is that look in his face that said: "You are mine, if I want. I can do anything I like to you. You have no will. You are my property."

Oh, the snob value of Southern exactitude over Northern exposure

I was idly listening to Radio 4's Saturday-night arts review programme, fronted by The Independent's heroically fluent TV critic, Thomas Sutcliffe (who could not admire a man who described Eminem's face as "the flesh equivalent of the phrase 'It's not fair'"?) when this odd thing happened. Sutcliffe and his guests were banging on happily about the merits or otherwise of Aunty and Me, the new play in the West End starring Alan Davies. Most of them hated it, especially George Walden. Then Sutcliffe's voice came in to wrap it up. "And Anty and Me continues at the Wyndham's Theatre", he began, using the short "A" dictated by his Northern background. Upon which, one of the guests, the toff-like children's thriller writer Anthony Horovitz, cut across him and said, "It's Ahhhnty and Me actually". There was an embarrassed silence. "I couldn't tell if it was a joke or an involuntary spasm," says Sutcliffe about the encounter. Not since before the last war has anybody in the world of radio presumed to tell someone with a regional accent to speak proper. Maybe it's time we did. What bliss it would be to hear John Prescott on the Today programme saying: "We agree with the soobstance of the proposal," only to have Sarah Montague say: "It's pronounced 'substance', ecktually."

Sailing happily into controversy

The publisher Macmillan is courting controversy by bringing out a picture-book for tinies entitled Hello, Sailor. It concerns a lighthouse keeper and his pal, Sailor, with whom he hopes to sail around the world. It's probably the first introduction to gay relationships that the nation's under-five readers will have received, although Macmillan has drawn the line at explaining what goes on in the lighthouse bedroom. Instead, it claims that many young readers will see it as simply a book about friendship – despite the book's title, the name Sailor (very Jean Genét), the wifely figure of Matt the stay-at-home keeper, and the fact that, on being reunited, the two men spend the night together inside a gigantic 100ft penis, all of which would alert the averagely cynical modern kid that something was up.

I have no problem with my offspring reading about homosexual sailors, as long as the story is good or interesting or amusing enough. But, trying to have it both ways, so to speak, the publishers also hope the book will "provoke debate on the validity of gay relationships". Not a chance, chaps. Children do not go in for debate. The average junior reader, I find, has a refreshingly clear-eyed attitude to characters in books, and can rarely be found worrying about their interpersonal "validity". My young daughter had a favourite picture book called Cap'n Betty Ahoy! in which a grizzled old seadog in a red wooden boat strikes up a friendship with a dykeish old party called Betty in a blue wooden boat, as they sit together on the shelf of a toy shop. They are tearfully parted when a small girl buys the lady (and boat) for her bathroom.

As luck would have it, the girl returns and buys the grizzled captain as well – but puts him in her bedroom, miles from his beloved. One evening a great rainstorm floods the house and the captain sees his sturdily built lady-friend sailing towards him, vowing they will stay together for always. My daughter accepted this farrago of nonsense as perfectly plausible behaviour for grown-ups in the marine fraternity. I asked the child if she thought the two captains would now get married. "No, Daddy," she said with four-year-old firmness. "She only wants him for his boat."

Not all children are suckers for romance, gay or otherwise.