What if she was pregnant? The priest, the love interest in the comedy drama Fleabag which held the nation in its emotional grip last month, and the eponymous heroine have a brief affair. But he decides, in the final scene, that he belongs after all to God, not to her. She walks away, her heart broken. The script by the actor/writer Phoebe Waller-Bridge does not take it any further. But the Vatican has coincidentally provided material for a sequel, in a document whose existence has recently been disclosed. It advises bishops what to do when a priest becomes a father in the other sense of the word.

Entirely laudably, the advice centres on the rights and interests of the child, and by extension, of the mother. The child is entitled to a proper family life, with, ideally, two married parents, an outcome only possible under existing canon law if the priest gives up his ministry and is laicised.