So, we have an Education Secretary who is a member of Opus Dei. That’s us and Spain, I suppose.

I could use this space to make my own ‘definitive’ (hah!) evaluation of Opus Dei’s role in the world; it would be fun to do, as well as interesting to read your reponses. But I am more interested in the perspective of political analysts in the British media. The question about whether or not Ruth Kelly is into self-mortification seems to be of far more importance to them than the potential implications of Josemaría Escriva’s question, ‘Is this task only for priests and religious?‘ The priestly role we accept in baptism, and its implications for education, have informed Catholic policy since (as Gomez Addams so beautifully put it) Godknowswhen. To put it bluntly, there is a tension between Catholic education theory, which is centred upon the spiritual, moral and intellectual formation of the person being educated, and the current political environment in which (thanks to the thrall of management theorists) the procedures of acquisition of an unspecified thing called “an education” are everything, and the only thing that we are allowed to concentrate on are those procedures. If we treat the political rhetoric in the manner it deserves and judge the education system by its actions, then we have to accept that everything that schools do is for political benefit rather than society’s benefit – and the benefit to the child doesn’t even enter the equation.

The question we should be asking is whether Opus Dei’s approach to education is significantly different to the rest of the Catholic Church’s (and which the British body politic has, so far, had no problem with,) and whether Ms Kelly is sufficiently intellectually aware of the difference between the sizzle and the steak to get rid of the mountains of crap that have poisoned our education system over the last couple of decades.

But all the newspapers want to know is whether “Cute Ruth” wears a “barbed wire garter” (presumably this is just a salacious reference to a cilice.) Except for the Guardian, of course, which has joined some of the more rabid individuals on Christian message boards in mistaking the Da Vinci Code for the real world and opposing Catholic influence in anything on the grounds that it is, well, whatever they are paranoid about at the moment.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, our esteemed politician (who is simultaneously a ‘highly principled and spiritual intellectual‘ and a ‘mindless slave to an austere cult‘) continues to spout the mindless platitudes of the Department for Education’s management culture – which is so intellectually impoverished that it cannot tell the difference between means and ends.