The Roman Catholic Church in Italy wants us to give up texting, Tweeting and other tecchie messaging services for Lent. This is the organisation presided over by a Pope who claims he did not know Bishop Richard Williamson was a Holocaust denier when he lifted the excommunication on him last month.

On January 21, three days before the decree, I wrote a blog warning that the bishop was a Holocaust denier.

This blog contained video footage from Swedish television showing Bishop Richard Williamson claim: “There were no gas chambers.” Williamson also stated that far from the accepted figure of six million, a maximum 300,000 Jews died in the Holocaust.

Two days later, the bishop's views were reported in a news story in The Times.

On January 24, to worldwide incredulity and in spite of these well-sourced reports, the Congregation for Bishops, under the authority of Pope Benedict XVI, went ahead and lifted the excommunication.

In the resulting row, it was claimed that the Pope had not known of Williamson’s past. This was even though Italian blogs had been writing about it, The Catholic Herald in England had covered it and I had blogged and reported it extensively for The Times.

These reports were easily accessible online. They had been the subject of debate on blogs, Facebook and Twitter. But they were not picked up by clerics who, we now know, believe texting is tantamount to sin.

The Roman Catholic Church thinks in centuries, millennia even, not in the hourly, daily, secondary moments of Tweets, status updates and comments which punctuate the lives of the rest of us living in the secular world.

If the Pope and his bishops had been more au fait with the media of the modern era, they would have been messaging each other furiously about Bishop Williamson and would never have made their catastrophic error – proof of papal fallibility if ever it were needed.

A few months ago I visited the offices of Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. We were told that some rooms were off-limits because of the papers scattered over the tables. Cases could take years, decades, to resolve, we were informed. This information was imparted in reverential tones, as proof of the seriousness with which doctrinal error was treated.

To me it seemed another example of the other-worldly inhumanity at work in that place.

Those papers represented people’s souls being dallied with, year after year. Doctrinal theologians were lingering interminably over the alleged errors of clergy and bishops doomed to wait and wait to find out if they were to be deemed heretic or not, and maybe even die before their cases had been resolved.

How much quicker it would be if it were all computerised. Imagine if the Vatican archive were put online. What extraordinary discoveries might be made. Pope Pius XII, the wartime Pope, could be proven once and for all not to have been an anti-Semite.

But no. This is a Church whose concept of self-denial is not to heave itself out of its own resistance to change, but to urge the faithful to stop texting, to stop communicating.

In the name of the gospel of communication, it is not texting they should be giving up, but Luddism. And they should start to employ a few people who know how to use computers. There’s a whole world out there waiting to be discovered. Maybe that's what they’re afraid of.