The relief when the latest pope said that he did not want to judge gays was as palpable as it was pitiable. Conventional liberals do not want to overthrow or even reform oppressive institutions. They want to "respect" religion while blocking out the darkness within. I often think religious leaders can treat them as PR men treat gullible consumers. All they need to do is look cuddly and speak in soft voices.

Or, in the case of the pope, mouth contemporary pieties about avoiding "judgmental" prejudices. We once assumed that being judgmental was what popes did. Not this one, apparently.

An embarrassed silence has descended on one and all since that moment of euphoria, because Jorge Bergoglio has spoilt the story by carrying on as if nothing has changed. The Vatican announced that Catholics would receive remission from the punishments of purgatory. The good deed they had to perform was not to defend children from abusers, to pick an example at random, but to follow Pope Francis on Twitter. Bergoglio shows the way to salvation on his @Pontifex account. He has millions following him but, like a true narcissist, follows only himself.

Meanwhile, the behaviour of the church under his leadership has remained as disgraceful as ever. Buried by the praise for the pope's humility was the news that Irish Catholic orders were refusing to compensate "fallen" women, who toiled in their Magdalene laundries. The Sisters of Mercy, the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity, the Sisters of Charity and the Sisters of the Good Shepherd belied their names by benefiting from the proceeds of what I can only call slave labour.

They kept women working for nothing behind locked doors in sweltering laundries . This is not some half-forgotten abuse from before most of us were born. With the complicity of Ireland's quasi-theocratic state, women were condemned to sweat for nothing into the 1990s. Yet the church refuses to pay them the wages it stole, and the Irish government will not even strip the thieving orders of their charitable status by way of retaliation.

The people the religious fool do not depress me. All of us can be tricked. It is the people who want to be fooled I can't abide. If you forget what liberal Catholics and the liberal media think the pope said on the papal plane last month, and take the trouble to read what he actually said, the happy story of a reforming, tolerant pontiff disintegrates before your eyes.

Reporters asked about Monsignor Battista Ricca, superviser of the Vatican bank. A breathless Italian press had reported accusations – strongly denied – that the church had to recall him from South America when he began an affair with a captain in the Swiss Guard. These may not be crimes in the eyes of the law. But breaking the whos, whats, whys, whens and hows of permissible sex are certainly crimes in the eyes of the jealous and nosey god Ricca is meant to serve.

Journalists wanted to know whether a "gay lobby" in the Vatican had covered up Ricca's alleged sins. "If a gay person is in eager search of God, who am I to judge them?" the pope replied. "The Catholic church teaches that gay people should not be discriminated against."

This sounds a start: a small start, a long overdue start, but a start nevertheless. But consider the sequel. "Being gay is not the problem," the pope continued, "lobbying is the problem and this goes for any type of lobby... political lobbies, masonic lobbies, all lobbies." ("Lobby dei politici, lobby dei massoni, tante lobby.")

And with that casual phrase, the pope signalled his fealty to the deep strain of reaction in European history and hardly anyone noticed. Few Anglo-Saxon readers understand that prejudice against freemasons is the founding conspiracy theory of the far right. It saw the machinations of a society that began among harmless Scottish craftsmen in the 15th century as responsible for liberalism, the enlightenment, the rights of man... everything it hated.

In the 1790s, an abbé named Augustin Barruel, an alarming combination of Dan Brown and David Icke, looked at the American and French revolutions and concluded that the masses could have overthrown divinely ordained monarchs and the holy mother church only if they were the dupes of an international conspiracy of freemasons.

The masons were not middle-aged men in fancy dress, but the descendants of the Knights Templar, who went underground in the Middle Ages and swore to avenge themselves on the church and monarchy that had persecuted them.

It sounded mad. Indeed it was mad. But a conspiracy theory that says that human rights are a sham behind which a sinister secret society manipulates the world was too useful to waste. Successive popes issued bulls against it. Pius IX included freemasonry along with socialism, liberalism and freedom of conscience as evils the faithful must fight in his Syllabus of Errors of 1864.

The antisemites and fascists of the early 20th century added that the masons were in league with the Jews. Franco and Mussolini persecuted them. The Nazis made freemasons wear red triangles and murdered them by the thousand.

Do not think these foul ideas are dead. Radical Islam echoes the European far-right's ravings. (The Hamas charter says the freemasons are in an alliance with the Jews and – brace yourselves – the Rotary Club and the Lions as well.) Like Hamas, Luigi Negri, a Catholic bishop, believes that freemasons were responsible for the French revolution and the Russian revolution, too. Last week, the Catholic Herald took its cue from the pope's condemnation of the "masonic lobby" to raise the "truly frightening thought" that masons had infiltrated the Vatican and were subverting the Holy See from within. These devils in aprons are everywhere.

Bergoglio, in short, was digging in over-manured soil. Before the gormless acclaim him as a liberal, they should expect him to meet minimum standards. His church opposes civil gay marriage and maintains that homosexual sex is a sin. If he were serious about stopping discrimination, he would reverse both those dogmas. He might also welcome the use of condoms because they emancipate women and protect against Aids, and co-operate with police investigations into the rape of children by clerics and compensate their victims.

To date, there is no sign of him doing any of the above. For despite all you have read, the pope remains what he has always been: a Catholic.