The Equality Bill includes a clause set to ensure that religious organisations are not able to discriminate between potential employees on the grounds of a person’s sex or sexual orientation – legislation that Pope Benedict XVI believes “violates natural law”.

It’s not just the pope who’s got himself in a flap about it; Bishops of the Church of England are also expressing concern, although the bill also intends to ban discrimination on religious grounds, so it’s not all bad news for the clergy.

Freedom is a powerful thing, allowing opinions to be voiced without restraints imposed by others. It’s only right that we have religious freedom, freedom of expression and freedom from discrimination on ‘any ground such as race, sex, colour, language, religion, political or other opinion’. The Human Rights Act says so. From that, I assume that no one freedom from discrimination outranks another. If religious freedom impinges on someone’s employment prospects it contravenes their right to freedom from discrimination.

I’m far from being on a high horse about this; I’m more saddling a slightly dishevelled, confused looking pony. My religious knowledge has its holes, so I don’t claim to have all the answers. After all, I’m not the Pope, and nor could I be, as a woman. Besides, I’m not a ‘hat person’ anyway.

The proposed changes to the UK equality legislation take such religious constraints into account. It won’t prevent religious groups from discriminating when appointing people to religious positions.

People who don’t ‘fit in’ with a particular religious ethos won’t be eligible for priesthood within that religion, but they also won’t be refused consideration for non-religious positions such as clerical staff or cleaning posts. I would have thought that this could make a nice compromise, but it still doesn’t quite conform to the tick-box society the Vatican wants to mould us into. If social equality violates natural law then perhaps, for once, I’d actually prefer something synthetic.

It’s no use asking certain religions to ‘move with the times’, and why should we? With Christianity as the lime-lit example, there are plenty of denominations which have taken a step back and re-assessed how to proceed into the twenty-first century.

There are plenty of religious groups that focus on morals rather than rules. There are plenty of groups that uphold their religious beliefs without excluding people. There will, of course, always be groups whose religious beliefs simply can’t coincide with certain practices or ways of life, but is it too much to ask merely to co-exist?

I think it’s rather likely that, by the time the Pope visits the UK in September, he’ll be more in favour of the bill than he’ll let on.

Those in power will have to listen fairly to his potentially controversial statements, protected from religious discrimination by equality legislation.

At a time of all-time lows in Church attendance, peaks in atheism and general media unease of all things papal, it seems that the Pope has bigger fish to fry.