THE week’s most startling revelation, which stood unnoticed in a dark corner of another tale, was made by an anonymous Catholic priest. The Edinburgh padre told The Times: “Catholics have never been good with money and that includes us priests.”

I’ve been a Catholic all of my life and this was the first time I’d been told that my lot suffer from profound financial fecklessness. Nothing in the way of evidence, not even a wry anecdote, was proffered to illustrate this unsettling observation.

Is this fiscal profligacy hereditary, affecting all of those baptised in the church?

Or is it merely confined to those who still attend the sacraments regularly, a somewhat reduced quantum?

If it’s the former then wider Scottish society surely needs to do something about it.

Catholics make up around 16% of the population and you simply can’t have such a large cohort jouking around Scotland wasting their money on fripperies and bagatelles. The country is in the midst of an economic crisis, the effects of which could be significantly eased if Catholics were to deploy a little more rectitude in their fiscal choices.

Perhaps the Scottish Government could launch a softly-softly, financial health initiative in partnership with church leaders so that it wouldn’t look as though they were targeting us simply for being Catholic.

Are we spending too much money on the horses? Is it really necessary to go on those expensive trips abroad to see “the Sellick”? Perhaps invest in one of those metal corks so that you can stretch out your bottles of wine over a couple of days.

The practice of uttering a few Hail Marys before venturing to take advantage of glitzy-looking investment opportunities should perhaps be avoided.

Avail yourself of a recommended financial adviser instead.

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Catholics who have succeeded in overcoming their congenital imprudence and gone on to enjoy affluent lifestyles could be asked to host seminars for fellow parishioners about how they maintained their bank accounts above water.

The revelation that Catholics are congenitally wasteful with their hard-earned poppy appeared in a larger story about the financial Armageddon currently said to be threatening many Scottish churches.

A spokesperson for the church suggested this may be down to churchgoers choosing to waste money on Netflix subscriptions and football season tickets rather than donate to the upkeep of their parishes.

I’d suggest that the church looks closer to home on this one. In particular, I’d be asking them to consider if lower church attendance might have something to do with the soporific and stupefying effects of what often passes for a sermon.

Better still: take a leaf out of the Free Church of Scotland’s preaching manual. I’ve been to a few Free Church services and their ministers don’t half put their hearts and soul into it.

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I’d also be inclined to review the church’s sprawling property portfolio of grand parish houses and bishops’ residences. Many of these could be sold off and the money reinvested in parishes that serve poorer neighbourhoods.

Meanwhile, students at Aberdeen University have been troubled by more secular signs and wonders. It seems that Peter Pan is proving to be “emotionally challenging” for some students.

Perhaps younger students could be asked to complete a questionnaire about their emotional wellbeing prior to embarking on their studies. If it seemed likely that they might experience distress in their under-graduate exertions they could be advised to attend a pre-entry feeder course.

This could ease them into the dark themes they’ll be required to negotiate in their degree courses by showing them excerpts from Bambi, Jungle Book and the Lion King – all of them shown under supervision and with counsellors on hand to conduct recovery sessions afterwards.

Alternatively, they could ditch all that and simply pursue the lifestyle choices of Peter Pan himself, who was called the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up.

I’m told that tyre-fitting garages are experiencing something of a bonanza this winter. My friend who works in a busy Glasgow car repair centre reports that “every third vehicle that comes in is reporting damage because of the potholes”.

As I’ve always been a glass-half-full kind of chiel, I think all the local authorities in the west shouldn’t be too harsh on themselves and keep their chins up.

Drivers are noticeably moving at much slower speeds as they negotiate roads that look like the surface of the moon. This leads to lower fuel emissions and means that some busy roads are safer for pedestrians. People are being forced to use public transport while they wait for their battered cars to be ready.

Rather than spend money on expensive speed humps, simply allow the roads to deteriorate naturally and organically. Perhaps introduce wildlife into these places and win some kind of global sustainable and sustainably global Green City award.