I hope that the Archbishop of Canterbury did not have any trouble at customs on the way back from meeting the Pope in Rome. The Most Revd Justin Welby had been given a replica of the head (The Times called it the “handle”, which doesn’t sound right) of the crozier of Pope St Gregory the Great, the man who sent Augustine to England to become the first Archbishop of Canterbury. Now the original was made of ivory, and modern anti-poaching laws mean the confiscation of ivory objects at borders and their burning by the public hangman, or some similarly draconian measure.

That would have made a story. The replica was probably made of olive wood from the Holy Land or hand-crafted resin, not ivory. So the meeting between the Pope and the archbishop hardly made the papers at all. Good news seldom does. The Times report was online only, though The Daily Telegraph ran a front-page item with a turn to page eight for more details, with a photo of the pair. The nub of the story was that the two men publicly pledged to press on towards the full reunification of the Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches – while admitting they “do not yet see” a solution to differences over “female clergy and sexuality”. The author of the Telegraph report, John Bingham, pointed out that “strikingly” the religious service in which the Pope and the archbishop took part involved “a female priest”, the archbishop’s interim chaplain, the Revd Julia Pickles.