Some of you might recall that in late February, John Allen ran an column criticizing the coverage of religion, particularly Catholicism, that we find in the British press.

Here’s a contender – one of many – for Exhibit A.

A ridiculous and ignorant piece by the Rome correspondent of the London Times on the Stations of the Cross prayed last night in the Colisseum:

THE Pope risked upsetting many of the world’s Catholic faithful yesterday when he recast a central ritual of the Easter ceremonies.

The pontiff has radically revised the traditional Good Friday Stations of the Cross procession that marks Christ’s progress from prison to the crucifixion. A reference to St Veronica, who wiped Christ’s face with a veil, has been dropped, while Judas and Pontius Pilate have been introduced.

But he stuck with tradition in a Holy Thursday ceremony in which he washed and dried the feet of 12 men at a service commemorating Christ’s gesture of humility to his apostles on the night before he died.

The 79-year-old German Pope Benedict, approaching the second Easter of his pontificate, called on Catholics to pray for the "purification of the heart".

But he courted controversy with the new itinerary for the route, also known as the Via Dolorosa, or Way of Sorrows, which had been drawn up to give more weight to "authentic" gospels, Vatican officials said.

That crazy Pope.

The Telegraph was just as bad:

The Pope shocked many Catholics last night with a dramatically revised version of the Stations of the Cross, one of the central rituals of the Easter ceremony.

News Flash:

The particular structure of the Stations used last night were first used in 1991 by Pope John Paul II and were used 1994, 1995, 1997, in 2002 and 2004 as well.

And I’d say that the existence of JPII’s Biblical stations has not exactly been a state secr over the past 16 years, either. There are several published versions of them, you know.

Not that John Paul II Biblical Stations of the Cross were uncontroversial – not quite as upsetting to some as the Luminous Mysteries of the Rosary, but still, there were (as there are bound to be) naysayers.

So for the major Vatican writer of a major international paper to frame this story in this way, claiming that this is a)new and something b) Benedict did when c)he neither framed the structure of these Stations or even wrote the meditations…is amazingly irresponsible. Amazing, as such things always are, but not surprising.