I think it has been established already that European democracy and freedom are built on religious freedom – and religious freedom includes the freedom to be indifferent to religion and to make religious cartoons and to be gratuitously offensive about religion whether one is indifferent to it or not, as well as the freedom to espouse any religion you wish.

Your argument is really no different to that of extremist Islam, I trust you understand, which ended up with several people shot dead in a bloodbath in a magazine office in Paris. Learn how to be tolerant of other people’s views of religion and religious figures. After all, we have to tolerate religion’s heavy presence in our society when we are not particularly interested in it.

Pope Francis is an interested party. He leads one of those religions. It is the equivalent of, say, Manuel Mallia saying on television that journalists should not “intrude” in the private lives of politicians.

It’s actually pretty funny.

Roman Catholicism is not the Taliban, and we live in a democracy.