Vatican: "No right to offend"

According to this story, "the Vatican" (I'm never quite sure who that means) has responded to the violent reaction in some quarters of Islam to the Danish anti-Muslim cartoons with this:

The Vatican deplored the violence, but said: "The right to freedom of thought and expression . . . cannot entail the right to offend the religious sentiment of believers."

In response, Eugene Volokh, who has a long post up, called "The Catholic Church and Free Expression," writes:

The Church (I'm not speaking of individual Catholics, just the church hierarchy, or at least its authoritative voices), still seems not to have accepted free expression about religion, or for that matter religious freedom.

He quotes the following from a Reuters story:

The Vatican on Saturday condemned the publication of cartoons lampooning the Prophet Mohammad which have outraged the Muslim world, saying freedom of speech did not mean freedom to offend a person's religion.

"The freedom of thought and expression, confirmed in the Declaration of Human Rights, can not include the right to offend religious feelings of the faithful. That principle obviously applies to any religion," the Vatican said.

"Any form of excessive criticism or derision of others denotes a lack of human sensitivity and can in some cases constitute an unacceptable provocation," it said in a statement issued in response to media demands for the Church's opinion.

Then, Volokh continues:

This is not just an admonition about what's right, decent, productive, or in good taste -- rather, it's a claim that the law ought to have a relatively free hand in restricting speech that "offend[s] religious feelings of the faithful," which apparently includes some unstated amount of "excessive criticism or derision of others" that "denotes a lack of human sensitivity." May we still publish the works of Martin Luther? How about of Christopher Hitchens? The Last Temptation of Christ? . . .

This is not a marginal issue; it is at the core of the rights of free speech and religious freedom.  Under the position the Vatican sets forth, large zones of religious debate, political debate, and art would be outlawed. . . .

I really hope this "Vatican" quote is inaccurate, or taken out of context, or an outlier.  Surely it cannot be the case that the Pope means to instruct Catholics that we should support using law to censor things that "offend" our "religious sentiment" -- or the "religious sentiment[s]" of those who are, or certainly appear to be, very easily offended?  (Obviously, as Volokh points out, to say that offensive speech should not be censored is not to say that it should not be criticized.)

UPDATE:  Jody Bottum, at the First Things blog, has this to say about the reaction of the "Vatican":

Despite the murder of a Catholic priest in Turkey, apparently because of these cartoons, the Vatican issued a statement in which obtuseness seemed caught in a death struggle with inanity—and for much the same reason: It’s not nice to tease our backward brothers, or hold them to the same standards we might hold Danish newspaper editors.