Pope Benedict's state visit will be a first for the UK.

The Vatican condemned Britain’s proposed equality law yesterday, complaining that legislation to give homosexual equal rights “violates natural law”.

On the day Rome finally confirmed that the Pope would make a state visit to Britain this year, the Vatican launched an unprecedented attack on the human rights policies of Gordon Brown, claiming that they threatened religious freedom and urging Catholic bishops to fight back with “missionary zeal”.

The Archbishop of Westminster, the Most Rev Vincent Nichols, added his voice to the assault, describing the new equality legislation as “unjust”.

In what was interpreted as an attack on Harriet Harman’s Equality Bill, which is going through Parliament, the Pope urged the 35 Catholic bishops from England and Wales in Rome on a five-yearly ad limina visit to make a united stand against it. He claimed that the proposed equal rights laws threatened “longstanding British traditions” of freedom of speech.

The attack is timed in deliberate awareness of the pending general election and gives advance warning of what the Catholic bishops of England and Wales are expected to focus on in their own “manifesto” to be published soon.

The Catholic vote could be crucial in the coming election in determining who will be prime minister when the Pope visits in September.

The Pope’s words indicated the level of Catholic anger, shared at the highest levels of the Church of England, at the Labour Government’s repeated moves to marginalise religion in public life. However, among Britain’s growing secular majority, they are likely to provoke defiance, with online petitions and protest groups to oppose the papal visit being planned for this week.

A spokesman for the Equalities Office said: “The Pope acknowledges our country’s firm commitment to equality for all members of society. We believe everyone should have a fair chance in life and not be discriminated against. The Equality Bill will make Britain a fairer and more equal place.”

In a speech in which he confirmed a four-day visit to Britain in midSeptember the Pope said: “Your country is well known for its firm commitment to equality of opportunity for all members of society.

“Yet, as you have rightly pointed out, the effect of some of the legislation designed to achieve this goal has been to impose unjust limitations on the freedom of religious communities to act in accordance with their beliefs.

“In some respects it actually violates the natural law upon which the equality of all human beings is grounded and by which it is guaranteed.”

Church of England bishops were among those who attacked the proposed law — under which the employment exemptions from equality law enjoyed by religious organisations would have been “clarified” to make clear what were and were not religious jobs — in the House of Lords last week.

Churches feared that they could be prosecuted if they refused to go against their beliefs and employ gays and transsexuals, and Catholics warned that they could be forced to admit women to the priesthood. The Government has always insisted that neither scenario was an intention of the legislation.

The Church of England and Catholic bishops of England and Wales will now join forces to fight any intervention by the European Commission to win back the ground lost by the Government. It is highly unusual for a foreign head of state or church leader to intervene so directly in the legislative process of a Protestant state and the Pope’s comments prompted condemnation from gay rights and secular campaigners.

The stakes will be raised even higher if, as is being suggested in Rome, Archbishop Nichols is elevated to the College of Cardinals by being given the red hat in Rome this year.

Making a cardinal of Archbishop Nichols, whose political views are at one with the conservative Pope, would empower even further the Church in England and Wales on the international stage at a time when it is increasingly at loggerheads with the secular world over issues such as gay rights and equality for women.

After centuries of persecution and suffering the effects of being a minority faith the Pope’s speech signalled the more confident US-style of mission that the Catholic Church is embracing in Britain, as witnessed by the Pope’s recent offer of a special Anglican Ordinariate for disaffected members of the Church of England.

In the next few days the Catholic bishops of England and Wales will issue a further challenge to Mr Brown and the other political parties in a “religious manifesto”, or pre-election document, that will build on more than a century of Catholic social thought to argue for religious freedom, as well as care for the poor and deprived.

After listening to the Pope Archbishop Nichols pledged to “fight on” against the Equality Bill when it returns to the Commons. He told The Times: “The battle is not over.”

While in Rome he has talked with the Pope about the conflict “between us and the Government over the freedom of Catholic adoption agencies to act with integrity”, he said.

“For all sorts of reasons we lost that particular battle, although the Diocese of Leeds is appraising the appropriateness of the rigidity of the Charity Commission not permitting us to change our trustees in order to fit more with the scope that was seen to be there in the legislation. That is still outstanding.”

Peter Smith, Archbishop of Cardiff, also joined the chorus of Catholic attacks on Britain’s equality legislation. “We are getting there but we are not there yet. There have been serious difficulties.

“The Church, of course, upholds absolutely the equal dignity of every person irrespective of their faith, age, ability and so on.

“But there is a misunderstanding: sometimes in government legislation equality seems to mean that we are all absolutely equal, which we are not. We are equal in dignity.”

Keeping the faith

72% of Britons said they were Christian at the 2001 census

15% had no religion; second-largest group

1 million practising Catholics in the UK today

101,000 Predicted number of worshipping Catholics in 40 years

2.6 million Predicted UK Muslim population by 2050 (up from 1.5 million in 2001)

275,000 baptisms a year (all denominations)

2.5 million+ people have attended the Anglican Church’s Alpha Course since 1993

50,000 Church buildings in the UK

18,500 Anglican churches

5,000 Catholic churches

9,000 Anglican ministers in UK. Predicted to fall to 3,700 by 2050

6,000 Catholic priests in the UK. Predicted to fall to 1,500 by 2050

Source: 2001 Census, Christian Research