You would need a heart of stone not to laugh. After months of furious controversy about homosexuality, Victorian graveyard law and Birmingham Council planning, the man at the heart of the row has softly and silently vanished away like the Snark. Last week it was discovered, to the chagrin of exhumers, that Cardinal Newman is not in his grave at all.

So John Henry Newman, that humble, thoughtful, loving and humane convert, that hot tip for canonization by the Roman Catholic Church, cannot after all be hoicked out and reburied. Not for him the marble tomb in the Oratory, still less the risk of being laid out with a nasty waxen mask from the Tussauds team over his dead face so that the faithful may file past and gawp as they do at Pope John XXIII and Padre Pio. Dust to dust: nobody can get their reverential paws on him now. Newman's last wish, furiously quoted by Peter Tatchell, was to be buried alongside his close friend and companion of 30 years. He wrote: “I wish, with all my heart, to be buried in Father Ambrose St John's grave - and I give this as my last, my imperative will.”

Though even Tatchell admits that the relationship was very likely non-carnal, we know how openly and innocently he loved this friend: “He was my earthly light... as far as this world was concerned, I was his first and last.” His writings suggest also that he saw human love as utterly necessary to the religious spirit: “The love of our private friends is the only preparatory exercise for the love of all men.” When Ambrose died, Newman said that no grief of a husband or wife could be greater.

But with talk of his being made a saint, the first English one since the 40 martyrs, the Church wanted to move Newman to a grander tomb. All year there has been legal wrangling over a law forbidding bodies to be moved from public graves into churches, and the Ministry of Justice had to intervene. Then there was Peter Tatchell's protest that separating his remains from Father Ambrose's was homophobia. And as a sideshow, a planning row about a hideous steel barrier round the grave. But the Church won; and a fine empty victory it is.

For on Saturday they sulkily confirmed that since the great man never had a lead-lined coffin, he is all gone. “Brass, wooden and cloth artefacts” were recovered, but “there were no remains of the body... in the view of medical professionals in attendance, burial in a wooden coffin in a very damp site makes this kind of total decomposition unsurprising.” Indeed; though they do say that saints Cuthbert, Guthlac and Alphege, Edward the Confessor, Hugh of Lincoln, Teresa of Avila and St Bernadette all remained miraculously incorrupt, and in some cases smelling literally of roses. St Francis Xavier is said to have survived quicklime; Blessed Margaret of Metola allegedly still has eyelashes. Not every holy corpse is pleasant to the eye: when (against his relatives' wishes) the Vatican dug up Padre Pio this year they had to commission mask-makers to do him a more seemly face for the faithful to file past.

Oh, enough! Even as a genuinely devout Catholic schoolchild I hated this stuff, and I hate it more now. The Church's weird horror of fleshly things (unmarried or contracepted sex, gay love) is nastily counterpointed by its affection for cadavers. I know the theology, I accept that there is a distinction between voodoo paganism and the more complex ideas formulated by St Jerome and Thomas Aquinas. They say that relics are not worshipped in themselves but are an “aid to veneration” of people whose bodies “were the temples and instruments of the Holy Spirit”.

Fine. Save a well-thumbed prayerbook if you will, or a lock of hair. But these creepy exhumations feed the superstitious magical instincts of religion, not the spiritual and humane ones. I made a programme about relics once - sparked off by discovering that Generalissimo Franco had Teresa of Avila's severed hand on his bedside table - and talked to many aficionados. The Anglican Bishop Graham Leonard (who later converted) carried a bit of St Philip Neri's kneebone in his pocket. Bishop Worlock of Liverpool, a palpably holy man, spoke eloquently of the awe he felt in the presence of ancient relics. At the Methodist headquarters they primly rejected the whole idea, and then got annoyed when I asked why they kept John Wesley's boots under glass. Which was flippant; I do grasp both the theology and the emotion that drives reverence for physical relics. All the bereaved know the importance of locks of hair; all hero-worshippers see the pleasure of owning a Jimi Hendrix guitar-string or a hat worn by Churchill. I keep a crumb of the Berlin Wall on my desk, as assurance that things can change for the better.

But enough is enough. Historic bones and fragments may as well stay in their jewelled reliquaries, in a kindly antiquarian spirit which accepts that in past centuries the border between faith and superstition was heavily blurred. But Newman belonged to a newer, more rigorously intelligent school of thought. New exhumations - whether of himself, Padre Pio or Pope John XXIII - are as disgraceful as the Vatican's infantile demands for miracles to prove sanctity. One thing I do remember very well from a Catholic upbringing - however far from it I am driven now - is that it was a serious offence to “cause scandal”: this being defined as provoking the spiritual ruin of another. Does that not include gratuitously causing onlookers to go “Yuk! Weirdos!” and turn their backs on the good bits of your church? The modern catechism defines as scandalous all institutions that do things leading to “the corruption of religious practice”. Is it not a corruption of religious practice to dig up a man's body from the grave in which he humbly asked to be buried, near the friend whose love confirmed him in his faith in man and God?

What would Newman have thought of all this? He was no narrow Vatican bigot: he was the man who bravely said that in all religions there is “something true and divinely revealed”, and in his pre-Catholic days he openly worried that the Church of Rome was “degrading and idolatrous”. Was he right? I would not want to think so. There are plenty of appalled Catholics who wish the Vatican would just stop embarrassing them with its compulsive ghoulery. They will rejoice as I do that God and Nature gave John Henry and his friend a blessed dissolution, and the last laugh.

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