The Pope's speech in full on Ruth Gledhill's blog

Roman Catholic leaders in the UK attempted today to minimise the impact of the Pope's remarks, arguing that he had never used the word "homosexual" and that his remarks were not intended to be about gay sex.

But this is disingenuous.

A close reading of the text itself makes it clear that Pope Benedict XVI cannot have been referring to anything else.

This human ecology, the Pope said, is based on respecting the nature of the person, and the two genders of masculine and feminine.

"It is not outmoded metaphysics," he said, "when the Church speaks of the nature of the human being as man and woman, and demands that this order of creation be respected."

He said it has more to do with "faith in the Creator and listening to the language of creation, the contempt of which will lead to the self-destruction of humanity."

The Pope warned against the manipulation that takes place in national and international forums when the term "gender" is altered.

"What is often expressed and understood by the term 'gender' is definitively resolved in the self-emancipation of the human being from creation and the Creator," he warned. "Man wants to create himself, and to decide always and exclusively on his own about what concerns him."

The language mirrors precisely that used in recent Vatican statements on homosexuality in the political arena.

Earlier this month, the Vatican said a proposed United Nations resolution decriminalising homosexuality went too far, and warned that language such as "sexual orientation" and "gender identity" in the resolution would "create serious uncertainty in the law".

In 1986, when he headed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger published a letter, On the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons, which described homosexual orientation as an "intrinsic moral evil".

Since then, the Roman Catholic church has returned to this issue again and again. There has been no shift of position, on this or any other issues of sexual ethics.

Earlier this month the Holy See issued a new "instruction" on bioethics. It too came out of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

This new document said all "artificial" fertility treatments, which would include in-vitro fertilisation for example, should be "excluded". The document also referred to the 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae that ruled out artificial contraception. It said: "The transmission of life is inscribed in nature and its laws stand as an unwritten norm to which all must refer."

Of the world's 1.1 billion Roman Catholics, many many hundreds of thousands practise contraception. Many thousands of infertile couples have also benefited from IVF and other fertility treatments condemned by the Vatican.

Many thousands of Catholics, it can be safely assumed, are also practising homosexuals in stable, loving relationships.

The secular world has never criminalised people who use contraception and no longer criminalises gays.

As the Anglican Church stands on the brink of schism, also over the issue of homosexuality, young people must look at wars, famine and disease all over the world and find themselves increasingly bewildered by the Christian obsession with this issue.

The Archbishop of Canterbury's attempt earlier this week to draw a parallel between the Nazi government of pre-war Germany and the efforts of Gordon Brown's government to manage the credit crunch was equally inept.

It is a shame that, at a time when the world has never been in greater need of strong spiritual leadership, the heads of arguably the two most significant Christian denominations in the world have both been allowed, assuming that they bothered to take advice, to say things that make them appear at worst ridiculous and at best absurdly out of touch with real issues facing the laity of today.

Christmas was never meant to be about this.

The Pope and the Archbishop both need to learn better how a message is likely to be received before it is too late and they find they have run out of people to give that message to.