When wits die, they go to the Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris. When great wits die, they eventually end up in Rome. In a paradox that he would have enjoyed, the Vatican is including epigrams of Oscar Wilde in a collection of 443 sacred apothegms to encourage the faithful. For example: “I can resist everything except temptation.”

Not all of Oscar’s bons mots are equally inspiring. “It is better to be beautiful than to be good: but it is better to be good than to be ugly.” Wilde horses on bended knees would not have made pious Victorians smile at that. “A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.” The Pope would need to take the bull between his teeth to swallow that as a sacred gobbet.

But Oscar’s inclusion in the Vatican’s anthology of useful wit is recognition (a century late) that the Devil does not make the best jokes. Nor does he have the best tunes. The proposed opera of Dante’s Divine Comedy wittily makes rock the music of Hell. (Quite right too, say lovers of Mozart and jazz.) Oscar summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram. But although his tongue was in his cheek, his heart was not necessarily with it. That is a definition of wit.

Oscar’s paradox is that his contemporaries vilified him for degeneracy because of his homosexuality. His plays are light-hearted. But their subtexts attack a society whose code was intolerant, but whose intolerance was hypocritical. There is plenty of evidence that he was a brave man who made an emphatic protest against the vulgarity of his age. And yet, artistically, he was himself subject to vulgarity of an opposite kind. On the roundabout of history, Oscar and the Pope are no longer strange bedfellows.