To mark our anniversary, we have invited 50 Catholics to choose a person from the past 175 years whose life has been a personal inspiration to them and an example of their faith at its best In some ways, Frank Pakenham, later the 7th Earl of Longford, born into a Protestant Anglo-Irish family, who con­vert­ed to Catholicism while at Oxford, conformed to the medieval image of the “holy fool” who humbles himself by seeming to be naive, by identifying with those at the rejected margins of society, by spurning the world’s temptations of riches, power and status. Frank had all three but was unmoved by any.The favourite English way of dealing with power is to lampoon it, to purge it of mystery. Frank, investigating the influence of pornography in the 1970s when few of