999 times out of 1000 I want to scream when I read Polly Toynbee. But whatever I might think of her politics, she is a class act as a columnist. Today it's that 1 in 1000 column when I want to cheer. Her piece today on the reaction to the death of the Pope is Ms Toynbee at her best:

With the clash of two state funerals and a wedding, unreason is in full flood this week. Yet again, rationalists who thought they understood this secular, sceptical age have been shocked at the coverage from Rome.

The BBC airwaves have disgraced themselves. The Mail went mad with its front-page headlines, "Safe in Heaven" and the next day "Amen". Even this august organ, which sprang from the loins of nonconformist dissent, astounded many readers with its broad acres of Pope reverencing.

...The Vatican is not a charming Monaco for tourists collecting Ruritanian stamps or gazing at past glories in the Sistine Chapel. It is a modern, potent force for cruelty and hypocrisy.

...The Vatican's deeper power is in its personal authority over 1.3 billion worshippers, which is strongest over the poorest, most helpless devotees. With its ban on condoms the church has caused the death of millions of Catholics and others in areas dominated by Catholic missionaries, in Africa and right across the world. In countries where 50% are infected, millions of very young Aids orphans are today's immediate victims of the curia. Refusing support to all who offer condoms, spreading the lie that the Aids virus passes easily through microscopic holes in condoms - this irresponsibility is beyond all comprehension.

This is said often, even in this unctuous week - and yet still it does not permeate. He was a good, caring man nevertheless, they say, as if it were a minor aberration. But genuflecting before this corpse is scarcely different to parading past Lenin: they both put extreme ideology before human life and happiness, at unimaginable human cost. How dare our prime minister go there in our name to give the Vatican our approval for this? Will he think of Africa when on his knees today? I trust history will some day express astonishment at moral outrage wasted on sexual trivia while papal celebrity and charisma cloaked this great Vatican crime.

The editor of the Catholic Herald was somewhat Jesuitical when I argued with him in a BBC studio yesterday. He asked how the Pope could be blamed when all the church calls for is sex within marriage and abstinence. But abstinence and celibacy are not the human condition. If the Vatican learned anything about humanity, it would humbly meditate on 4,450 Catholic clergy in the US alone accused of molesting children since 1950, and no doubt as many in Catholic churches elsewhere still in denial.

The scale of it is breathtaking yet not at all surprising: most humans are sexual beings. A Vatican edict in the 1960s threatened to excommunicate anyone breaking secrecy on child sex allegations, and guaranteed that ever more children continued to suffer. And within its walls the Vatican shields an American priest from allegations.

Still the Vatican turns a blind eye to this most repugnant and damaging of all sexual practices, the suffering little children whose priests come unto them. Yet at the same time it thunders disapproval of sex in every other more innocent circumstance, blighting the lives of millions with its teaching on gays, divorce, abortion and unrealistic self-denial. There is no reckoning how many of the world's poorest women have died giving birth to more children than they can survive; contraception is women's true saviour.

The non-stop, fawning coverage on every channel, and in every newspaper, has made me despair. It was, of course, appropriate to mark the passing of a man who was clearly one of the most important figures of the past century. But OTT doesn't even come close to describing the coverage. Some of us, let it be pointed out, consider the Pope's edicts to have been those of a deeply misguided, dangerous man. Ms Toynbee is spot on.

And as for Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor; if I have to listen any more to his tones of supposed sweet reasonableness then I think I might throw something at my TV. This is the man, remember, who considered it appropriate to protect and then re-employ a pederast priest. Lord alone knows what else lies buried in his church's paedophile past. So far is he from being a man fit to act as a spiritual guide, he ought to pilloried at every opportunity for his behaviour.

And now we will no doubt have more coverage of the Cardinals' election of a new Pope. Stop the world, please; I want to get off. Will someone wake me up when it's over.