It is clear from polling that an older generation, brought up to believe that homosexuality was a crime, has struggled to come to terms with changing mores while younger generations drive society forward in a more liberal direction. In Britain, surveys have found hugely divergent views between pensioners and those under 50.

Like millions of other Roman Catholics, Ruth Hunt attended mass on Christmas Day.

She was joined by about 150 other devotees at her central London church, a multitude of nationalities coming together to celebrate a cherished festival. So it was a shame that the magic of the moment was blown apart by a blast of bigotry from the pulpit. Her priest, like many others in Britain, used his sermon on this sacred day to rant about the looming prospect of gay and lesbian people being allowed the same right as anyone else to marry. Instead of encouraging this ultimate act of love, he fulminated about its deep offensiveness.

The diatribe perplexed most people in the pews. For Ruth, it felt more personal. She is Catholic and gay, a reminder that both are the broadest of churches. She is also director of public affairs at the pressure group Stonewall, so deeply embroiled in the struggle for equal rights. “For me, God is love,” she says. “So why do I have to justify my very right to exist?” She was not alone in having to endure priests using their sermons to spout prejudice. For this was the year an insecure Church, confronted by an increasingly secular country, celebrated Christmas by lashing out in ways that only served to demonstrate its own demons and display its impotence.

One befuddled bishop conjured up the spirit of Hitler by comparing the Coalition’s intention to legalise gay marriage to the ideology of fascism. In so doing, he exposed the most basic rule of debate: when you resort to bringing in the Nazis, you have obviously lost the argument.

Almost as absurdly, the head of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales claimed that the Government’s plans were undemocratic and Orwellian. For an outfit headed by someone who proclaims infallibility to complain about the lack of democracy when an elected government seeks to pass a law on a free vote in parliament takes not just the biscuit, but the entire packet.

George Orwell would have been proud of Archbishop Vincent Nichols. Yet all his church has done is shine a spotlight on its diminishing importance, just as the Church of England did when it told half its congregation they were not fit to play a leading role, in voting down women bishops last month. This is, of course, another outdated organisation whose new leader opposes the right of people of the same sex to marry.

Such opposition does not just go against the central tenets of a creed that purports to be based on love and tolerance; it is also politically inept. The census has just revealed the astonishingly rapid collapse of Christianity in this country, with four million fewer people describing themselves in this way than a decade earlier. Little wonder that a quarter of us now claim no religion.

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