A Catholic priest in Southampton, England, has banned a yoga class from using a church building because he says it's a Hindu spiritual exercise and thus is incompatible with the Catholic faith.

Yoga teacher Cori Withell says she created the class and booked the hall in an attempt to combat obesity. The church accepted her booking and a payment of about $300, but then informed her that the class would be canceled 10 days before it was due to take place because yoga is from another religion.

Withell said, As a nation we have an obesity epidemic. I was trying to bring some exercise to the community.... I offered to go down and show them the moves and, literally, the shutters came down.

Father John Chandler claims that the class was advertised as Pilates, but then he found out it was for spiritual yoga. Yoga is a Hindu spiritual exercise, he told The Daily Telegraph. Being a Catholic church, we have to promote the Gospel, and that's what we use our premises for.... It's the fact that it's a different religious practice going on in a Catholic church. It's not compatible.

An editorial in the Catholic Herald praises Father Chandler for his decision, but Ravindra Parmar, president of the Vedic Society Hindu Temple of Southampton, said he felt let down because of the work the Southampton Council of Faiths does to get all the faiths talking to each other.

Q: Was the priest right to ban the yoga class?

In my opinion, the priest was wrong to ban the yoga class. Exercise is good for the body and the soul, regardless of whether that exercise comes from the Hindu or the Christian tradition. And we New Testament types know that the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit.

I am reminded of a place in one of the gospels in which the disciples tell Jesus that they saw a man casting out evil spirits and they told him to stop doing that because he was not doing it in the name of Jesus. Jesus told the disciples they were wrong to rebuke the man because whoever is not against us is for us.

Many believers are hung up on whether the right denomination or religion gets the credit for something good being done, but the story of the Good Samaritan, as told by Jesus in the Gospel according to Luke, would seem to argue that who gets the credit is not important. In the story, the person who is compassionate is not a member of the Jesus crowd or the Jerusalem crowd, but a hated Samaritan. In fact, to Jesus' listeners, the title Good Samaritan would have been an oxymoron. But the point of the story seems to be to respond to human need, whether that person is a Jew, a Samaritan, a Republican or a Democrat.

What that priest has done, I'm afraid, is to make the Roman Catholic faith more exclusive than it really is.

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In Theory: Should church have banned yoga class?