She advises that she and her colleagues are bracing themselves, anxiously, for the day when new prime minister Scott Morrison speaks in parliament in "tongues".

Morrison is a credulous Pentecostalist. His rapture-propelled sect is known for the ways members of its congregation break into tongues when the spirit moves them. If you’re not familiar with tongues (called glossolalia by scholarly linguists), here’s helpful Wikipedia.

"One definition of glossolalia used by linguists is the fluid vocalizing of speech-like syllables that lack any readily comprehended meaning… as part of religious practice in which is believed to be a divine language unknown to the speaker. Glossolalia is practiced in Pentecostal Christianity…"

"Of course," my Hansard confidant confides, "here at Hansard were used to turning the worst, raving, unintelligible gibberish of politicians into respectable-looking English. It’s what we do."

"But when the PM spontaneously breaks into tongues – and it’s bound to happen in Question Time because that’s when things are at their most irrationally passionate – it’s going to be a unique challenge for us."

"With glossolalia not even those who yodel it know what they’re yodelling. So it’s not as if we’ll be able to catch up with ScoMo afterwards to ask him what he was saying while the Holy Spirit was using him as its trumpet, its set of bagpipes."

Still with wild-eyed, credulous Christians, your columnist rejoices that the Roman Catholic church has at last, this month, decided that after all that that the death penalty is always wicked and "inadmissible".

The church is almost 2000 years old and so has had plenty of time to make up its mind about this. But it has come, just this month, to a conclusion that Ian Warden, 72 now, came to in 1954 when he was nine.

An atheist now that he is grown up, Ian is reminded by Catholicism’s everlasting death-penalty sluggishness of what a struggle so many professing Christians seem to find it to think and act in Christian ways. People who call themselves Christians but who never do anything in imitation of Christ set the needle of my Hypocrisyometer crazily flickering.

Our earnestly Christian PM, Scott Morrison, is case in point. He was an especially heartless and unJesus-like minister for immigration. He is not a bit like the New Testament’s Jesus but more like its bitter and twisted Pharisees, the parliamentary Liberal Party of their time and place. Jesus, in his decency, saw right through the Pharisees.

"Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! Ye outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity," Jesus seethes at them in Matthew 23.

It was in about 1954 that flaxen-haired, urchin Ian, his blossom-pink cheeks bedecked with freckles, made up his mind about the death penalty. In doing so then he had some of the same reasons that Pope Francis, 81, has just given for his own long-delayed but still welcome announcement.

Francis, altering his church’s universal catechism, has announced that the death penalty is always, whatever the crime being punished, "an attack on the inviolability and the dignity of the person". Last year, foreshadowing this, Francis offered the bleeding obvious thought that the death penalty is "contrary to the [teachings in] the Gospel".

Boyish Ian felt the "inviolability" matter in his bones and knew in his soul, as an admirer of the gentle Jesus of the Gospel, that it was wicked to hang people. In the 1950s as I formed this opinion and in the UK (where I was growing up) there was an orgy of hangings. There were 15 in 1954 alone. Some reporting of this unChristian vileness must have reached and touched me, staying with me ever sence.

Why any professing Christians need to be told that the death penalty is wrong is bewildering for all thinking, sensitive folk. Ye 'Christian' hypocrites! From where in Jesus' example do you unkind folk find, from this most merciful and forgiving of men, permission for the state to kill people?

Let us pray that the New York Times is right when it says "The pope’s decree is likely to hit hardest in the United States, where a majority of Catholics support the death penalty …"

"The pope’s move could put Catholic politicians in a new and difficult position, especially Catholic governors like Greg Abbott of Texas and Pete Ricketts of Nebraska, who have presided over executions.

"'If you're a Catholic governor who thinks the state has the right to end human life, you need to be comfortable saying you’re disregarding orthodox church teaching,' said John Gehring, the Catholic program director at Faith in Public Life, a liberal-leaning advocacy group in Washington.

"'There isn’t any loophole for you to wriggle through now.'"

Hmmm. Let's never underestimate the loophole-wriggling-through flair of slippery, political Christians. This wriggling may be one of the hallmarks of the Morrison prime ministership as we see and hear him doing and saying hard-hearted and ruthless things that would never have crossed Our Redeemer's merciful mind.

In these difficult coming months let us pray for a probing, alert, agnostic parliamentary press gallery that faithfully reports any iniquities and hypocrisies of our elected Pharisees.