It's the question on all Catholips: is the Pope an atheist?

The Pope has had a pop at the mounting claims of lunatics and wanna-be cult leaders to have seen visions of the Virgin Mary or Christ. Now such claims will be intimately probed by a team of Bishops and psychiatrists in what critics are hysterically calling a new Inquisition. Would a psychiatrist consider anyone sane who says they have seen such things?

It's about time there was some regulation; after all, some people have worked out how to get Holy likenesses burnt into slices of toast, which can make them a fortune on ebay. It's a sticky situation for the Pope, and not just because of the marmalade, since if all such apparitions, stigmata and personal conversations with bearded men on clouds are now under suspicion it will be impossible to find any genuine examples. The only ones that can be approved will be those the Church gives a nod and a wink to - preferably after a substantial financial donation or agreement to drop allegations involving young boys.

Has the Pope lost faith in visions of Holy characters following his surprising apologetic acceptance of the works of the heretics Charles Darwin, Galileo, David Icke and Oprah? It's enough to get rosary beads in a universal tangle. Could he be a secret atheist who wears a condom, and dances the Hokey Cokey? One day he may have been struck by the blazing light reflecting from Occam's Razor, and become possessed by the conviction that one should not add God to the equation at all, if he's not necessary to explain the world. If recent pronouncements on biological determinism (misinterpreted as gay bashing) are anything to go by, he is rapidly becoming a devotee of Richard "The God Delusion" Dawkins.