"Since coming to America, I've had any number of people assume that I'm virulently Catholic. To them, that's as Irish as shamrocks and St Patrick's Day drunkenness. In fact, like most Irish people my age -- I'll be 30 in '09 -- I'm not religious at all. And so it would be easy for me to think that the ramblings of old red socks in Rome have no bearing whatsoever on my day-to-day life. He raises his doddery old head above the parapet every so often to say we shouldn't use condoms and that gay people are bad and we all just roll our eyes and vaguely...
