Pope Benedict XVI says that saving humanity from homosexual or transsexual behaviour is just as important as saving the rainforest from destruction. His controversial comments were all over the international media last week. They shouldn’t have been, according to the Iona Institute, a faith-based organisation. Because he didn’t say that at all.

So what he actually said was: “We need something like human ecology, meant in the right way. The Church speaks of human nature as ‘man’ or ‘woman’ and asks that this order is respected. This is not out-of-date metaphysics. It comes from the faith in the Creator and from listening to the language of creation, despising which would mean self-destruction for humans and therefore a destruction of the work itself of God.”

Clear on that, now? Me neither.

Thanks to the Iona Institute’s well-intended presentation of what the Pope meant to say, we now know Benedict comes from the same school of crystal-clear communication that gave us our beloved taoiseach. Given that media outlets, including the BBC, understood that the Pope was saying homosexuality is as dangerous to humanity as the destruction of the rainforest, Benedict clearly needs help with his communication.

My friend Kieran Lyons would have been offended by reports of the Pope’s statement. Although, no, Kieran didn’t do offended. He did outraged.

Not that he had much time for outrage the year his mother was diagnosed with secondary cancer and told she’d be dead in six months. He gave up his job and went back to the family home in Bagenalstown, Co Carlow, to nurse her.

His mother was a strong country widow who had come through a tough marriage relying on silence and prayer. Kieran could talk for Ireland but he also had insight, so each morning he’d leave the breakfast tray and go away to give her peace.

One morning after he set the tray on her lap, she caught his wrist. “I hardly know you,” she told him. He stepped back, the two of them silenced by the truth of what she had said. Kieran was in his mid-thirties and his mother hardly knew him.

“Would you write to me?”

“Write to you?”

“Write what you can’t talk to me about. A letter now and then.”

So he did. Every day for the seven-and-a-half months she survived, she got a handwritten letter from him in an envelope on the breakfast tray. Sometimes several pages long, sometimes one paragraph. Sometimes serious, often riotously funny. Towards the end, when neither breakfast nor reading were possible for her, he would read the letter aloud.

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