To many secular, non-Christians the current controversy over Pope Benedict’s “poaching” of conservative Anglicans may have succeeded in putting the mysticism back in to Christianity… in so much as it’s all pretty mystifying.

The sight of poor Rowan Williams torn spiritually asunder at the hurried press conference in response to the move was sad to see. He must have wondered if all the ecumenism of recent decades was just a bluff and the Catholic Church had simply been biding it’s time – 500 years to be precise – before putting the boot in.

Most Christian churches talk unity, but as the Times points out, it is usually on their own terms.

Yet I believe the problem is not really about Christianity so much as church: how the structures of Man struggle to accommodate the spiritual dimension.

Both Archbishop Rowan and Pope Benedict are doubtless true believers, but Rowan appears closer to heaven, while the Pope, officially, and literally, seems more down to Earth.

Rowan struggles to reconcile the cosmic message of Christ with the all-too-human limitations of his flock. Benedict begins with those limitations and works his way upwards, a version the old “top-down versus bottom-up” approach, if you like.

Ironically, for all his tarmac-kissing, Benedict’s predecessor John Paul was more like Rowan – he believed in the unity of faiths against the “faithless” and reached out to them accordingly. But Benedict sees things differently: according to Christopher Caldwell, a chief concern of the Pope’s is the threat of other faiths, and in particular Christianity’s chief competitor, as he sees it, Islam.

As part of Benedict’s, ahem, crusade to shore up Christendom, he has even reached out to atheists and secularists, staking claim to freedom of speech, democracy and human rights as uniquely Christian attributes, and has won their support.

So it is little surprise that Benedict should make a “land grab” for disgruntled Anglicans when one of his allies, Vittorio Messori, told the Times the Anglican Communion was already losing followers because of female and gay priests.

“More Muslims go to the mosques in London than Anglicans go to church” he said. “The exit of half a million Anglicans to Rome will only confirm a trend.”

Placed in this context, Rowan’s recent acceptance of Sharia in the UK also probably didn’t go down too well over breakfast at St Peters.

Ironically Unitarians like me, who I like to think of as being at the spiritual end of the spectrum, have experienced our most recent woes at the hands of Rowan’s church – it was the General Assembly’s expulsion from Chester Cathedral that alerted me to the movement in the first place.

So at first glance it might appear that Rowan is stuck between a rock and a hard place, yet I know many Christians who are not half as rigid as the doctrine of their church.

There are around 25 million people baptized in the Church of England, and 70 per cent called themselves “Christian” at the most recent census, but few go to Service on a Sunday, many, I fear, put off by its insistence on the literal truth of rigid dogma, along with the backward attitude to women and gays.

It makes God – who surely, if it indeed exists, must be considerably bigger than all that – seem meaningless, faintly ridiculous even.

The aisles of my local Unitarian church meanwhile are beginning to fill again, with people attracted by acceptance, not insistence; by the understanding that precisely because we are all-too-human, conversely we each have our unique experience of the spiritual.

Heavens, maybe the Church of England could even learn a thing or too from us.

And a good start would be by an invitation back to Chester.