The extraordinary affair of the priests studying for higher degrees at the University of Leuven (Louvain) in Belgium who were denied access to this country by the British Embassy in Belgium finally gained such prominence that even Mr John Prescott as Deputy PM had to intervene - rather belatedly since the influential magazine The Spectator had revealed all three weeks previously.

The immigration authorities were unable to understand that these priests who would be saying Mass in England - and covering for a Parish Priest to give him a holiday - would not be staying on in England as "illegal worker immigrants". Suppose I decided I had had enougth and invited Father X from Upper Volta to come and say Mass in this parish. There would just be the little matter of Bishop Crispian and the Bishop of Ouagadougou! Clergy are under authority.

Of course this does not have an exact parallel in the lay state, hence the Embassy's confusion. It would not one feels have taken much initiative to have made a few phone calls and be briefed on how Catholic priests operate, but still. One problem is that officials can be very slow to admit they have been wrong (like priests!)

The point of this is not just to bash our diplomats. The real point is how easily we all jump to conclusions about how other people live and operate - be they priests or not - on the basis of hearsay or assumed fact. A priest's life has its own particular and unique, patterns. So does a bus driver's, or anybody else you care to mention. We are often guilty of making assumptions about other people,s lives based on the shape of our own.

Of course, one call go too far to the opposite extreme, especially in the case of the priesthood, making it into a state so far removed from and so exalted above other states that it is barely earthly at all. Here we must carefully distinguish between the priest's liturgical role at the altar and his status as a human being. As Paul says in Acts "We are only humans, after all". The Church has done itself no favours by putting the priesthood into some unapproachable niche (look at the misery now being caused by the belated revelations of cases of child abuse). I do not like being treated with excessive deference and find it very uncomfortable; that is quite different from being treated with the dignity due to any human being, whatever their role in life.

Jesus treated everybody as uniquely dignified, and he knew each one. Our love cannot match that, but we can try. DS