RT: I strongly share Roger's point of view over this. We live in a world in which pornography or at least sexual allusion is almost wall-to-wall. You can't open a copy of The Times without seeing a naked woman and that to me is the marker of where we are at. It's as if sex has become shallower and shallower as it has become spread more widely. Sex as a consumer item increasingly dominates over sex as an encounter with the utter mystery of another person, with a profound sense of love and compassion for them. These are marginalised by the ubiquitous culture of pornography.

RS: I agree. One of the social functions of religion is that of withdrawing certain things from the market. We fence them round and say that here is a realm where things are not exchanged, bartered, paid for or taken, but it's still a realm where things can be given in a special way. 

That is the idea of a sacrament: certain ways in which human beings give to each other have a sort of blessing from another realm, and only then can they be fully themselves. It's not just sex that religion withdraws from the market — people too. At least in Christianity, people are not to be used and sold, they are to be understood as objects of intrinsic value. This intuition was rephrased by Kant in terms of his categorical imperative but it's there in Aquinas and all Christian thinking. It is there in the Old Testament too.

But, interestingly, in our culture "we" — as in "they, out there, the proletariat" — still think that you can't buy and sell children. People get into a huge excitement about it. Using and abusing a child becomes the greatest of all sins. You see it in the present hoo-hah over paedophilia in the Catholic Church: it's not that this hasn't happened before, but rather that today paedophilia has been isolated as the one remaining sexual crime. So the whole burden of our guilt at having made each other into consumable objects is laid on those who abuse children.

RT: It also illustrated the difference between ecclesiastical and secular law. There has been a sense for a long time within the Church that ecclesiastical law, and the wellbeing of the Church itself, is above secular law. That's what shocked all of us: the unscrupulous willingness within the Church to pervert the course of justice so that when priests in a situation of total inequality have abused young people, those young people themselves have been abused again by the system that wants to keep the abuse quiet.

RS: And yet it's children who are the victims of the pornographic culture in which vast numbers of people are involved. Children are the ones who are going to be prematurely sexualised and deprived of the maturation that makes the erotic into a form of human relationship. In that sense, all pornography is child abuse.