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 Dietrich von Hildebrand was a close friend of my parents, and a strong presence in my upbring­ing. Even though I never met him (he died the year before my birth), I shared their reverence for him. But I only truly discovered him as a teenager.As an aspiring violinist of 16, I came across his little book, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert. I had never read anyone who spoke of my beloved composers with such depth and ardour, someone who articulated my experience of beauty as a unique path to God.What fired my moral imagination was the discovery that, when Hitler came to power in 1933, Hildebrand had sacri