Since I inhabit the Westminster bubble, my local church is Westminster Cathedral in which is displayed the masked body of St John Southworth. It occasionally makes casual tourists jump a bit as they dawdle round taking selfies. I sometimes wonder what he thought of the fortunes of religion in England during his lifetime, which was cut short just as Oliver Cromwell was revving up the Protectorate. Even being an Anglican was hard enough in the 1650s. John Evelyn confided to his diary in 1656 an account of attending a Church of England service of Holy Communion broken up by soldiers, who interrogated him on how he “durst offend, & particularly be at Common prayers, which they told me was but the Masse in English”.

Just at the moment, when Westminster Cathedral is regularly full at Sunday Mass and sustains half-hour queues for Confession, I get the impression, unscientific as it is, that Catholic practice is not in decline. According to a report by John Bingham in The Daily Telegraph, the same can be said, with a little more scientific basis, of Christians in Britain at large. “New figures from Britain’s longest-running and most important barometer of general public opinion suggest that reports of the imminent death of Christianity may have been greatly exaggerated,” he wrote.