Arrayed in Purple and Scarlet

Accusations that the Church of Rome is intolerant of sexual diversity must surely be silenced once and for all by what is euphemistically termed the restoration of a three-hundred-year-old church in north-eastern Spain. The Hermitage of Our Lady of Mirón has been luridly camped up, with beams and pillars painted pink and the cherubim looking like the more inexpensive genre of drag act. Mere experts are up in arms, while a spokesbeing for the diocese managed to employ Old Testament legalism and trendy-vicar permissiveness in a single sentence: "all I can tell you is that the works on the church were carried out with the required permissions and that some people like the end result and some don't." A more cogent and pious defence would surely be that, since the entire cult of the Virgin derives ultimately from the translation of an everyday Hebrew parturition into a gaudy Greek miracle, it is only fitting that the Lady's real estate should be transformed in similarly slatternly fashion.