To mark our anniversary, we have invited 50 Catholics to choose the person from the past 175 years whose life has been a personal inspiration to them and an example of their faith at its best. “Ernest always agreed with Caroline that the True Church was awful, though, one couldn’t deny, true.”This, from Muriel Spark’s first novel, The Comforters, says a good deal about her Catholicism. She herself came to the faith in 1954 just at the point when she began writing novels, and Catholicism gave her a way of looking at the world in terms of the economy of salvation which meant that disparate things were part of a larger whole. It would be wrong to call her a Catholic writer – she wasn’t a proselytiser – but it is impossible to read Spark and not take