The metropolitan cathedral church of St Andrew in Glasgow will never be regarded as the most ornate piece of episcopal architecture the world has ever seen. Built in 1816 on the north bank of the River Clyde at a time when the Catholic faith in Scotland was in the process of re-establishing itself after more than two centuries of persecution, it is not magnificent, but handsome.
In keeping with the status of the church at that time it is also modest, taciturn and unprepossessing. There are no gargoyles with lolling tongues, nor bearded saints, and no serpents being crushed under the dainty heel of the virgin queen of heaven. There is, dare I say it, Presbyterian rectitude in its masonry. For it is what it is: a Catholic church in a Protestant country.
Last year saw the completion of a £5m facelift for the cathedral, and though the work was long overdue, I cannot have been alone in wondering if the archdiocese of Glasgow had slightly lost the plot when we all got to view the finished product. The renovation included an expensive gold leaf restoration and the installation of specially commissioned bronze doors.
A new painting by the acclaimed Glasgow artist Peter Howson was also commissioned to hang over the altar. This depicted the martyrdom of St John Ogilvie in 1615 at nearby Glasgow Cross and, well… perhaps after many visits you may acquire a taste for it all. I was expecting something a little less gaudy than all these trinkets, but perhaps I am being churlish and unduly rebarbative.
To complement all this Mediterranean rouge, something called an Italian memorial garden was landscaped on a plot beside the cathedral. This was dedicated to the hundred or so Scots-Italians who died when their ship, the Arandora Star, was sunk by a German U-boat near Ireland in 1940. An Italian choir was flown over to help inaugurate the garden and there was an opera singer to add a bit more drama to the pantomime.
Not half a mile east of our new painted cathedral lie some of the most deprived and troubled streets in Europe. This neighbourhood is home to tens of thousands of Catholics of Irish descent whose antecedents flooded into Glasgow in the decades that followed the construction of the cathedral.
Most had fled disease and starvation from Ireland's great famine to find refuge in Glasgow. And it was their labours and ill-afforded financial contributions that set the archdiocese of Glasgow on a sound footing.
A memorial commemorating an Gorta Mór and its place in Glasgow's history would have been a much more fitting monument than this Italian vanity project. The only gold leaf they ever saw was the name on the side of their grandfathers' favourite tobacco for their rolled cigarettes.
The entire cathedral restoration project, though, is simply the physical manifestation of something that has been evident for a few years now; that the Catholic church in Scotland is losing touch with reality.
Further credence was given to this view when the church announced that it was ceasing all official dialogue with the Scottish government over the issue of same-sex marriage. Having lost the battle to prevent such unions becoming law, the Catholic hierarchy, like a drunk man trying to get past wine bar bouncers on a Friday night, keeps coming back for more.
As such, it is blind to the potential consequences of its absurd obsession with homosexual unions. These will be far more damaging than the prospect of a few hundred gay people upgrading their civil partnership to a marriage.
The church's opposition to gay marriage is entirely valid and rooted in the central role that the sacrament of matrimony plays in Christian life. It has every right to express its opposition and not to be branded homophobic by Scotland's liberal fundamentalists. What started, though, as reasonable opposition to proposed legislation with which it fundamentally disagreed has become a bitter and spittle-flecked campaign.
Thus we had the unedifying sight of the church's director of communications appearing to espouse the absurd view that homosexuals, by dint of their wretched lifestyle, have a shorter life expectancy than other people. This followed the revelation that the new archbishop of Glasgow had suggested that the untimely death, at 44, of David Cairns, the Scots Labour MP and former priest, had somehow been linked to a gay lifestyle.
We were then treated to a grotesque Monty Python vignette involving one of Glasgow's most senior priests, a skinful of the old altar wine and some clumsy (and unwanted) advances toward his male dining companion. It seems the poor chap had merely forgotten himself in the bevvy and succumbed to his inner Quentin Crisp.
There are districts of Glasgow where nine out of 10 adults are on benefits and which top all those international league tables which measure the indicators of multi-deprivation. The obscenity of poverty strikes at the very heart of the Christian message that all men are created equal.
This inequality cries out to God for vengeance much more than a few hundred gay people who want to have their union endorsed by a marriage certificate.
The Catholic church in Scotland enjoys many rights earned by hard-working men and women at a time when their faith was under attack. Among them are the right to educate its children, on the state's account, in separate Catholic schools and the right to veto the appointment of teachers in these schools if their beliefs are deemed contrary to the Catholic ethos.
Others might suggest that, in a pluralist and secular state, there should be no room for privileges such as these.
Yet there is a small cabal of ultras in my church, who, distressingly, enjoy far too much influence in its affairs. Their actions, words and attitude are in danger of provoking a backlash which would seek to withdraw its privileges.
There is something rotten at the heart of the Catholic church in Scotland right now and I fear that it is about to engulf it.