A STEAMSHIP called the Sirio, crammed with perhaps 1,000 migrants, when it had room for 600, broke open on a reef off Cartagena, Spain, on 4 August 1906. Captain Giuseppe Piccone rapidly abandoned ship himself, but 400 or so drowned. Brave local fishermen helped save 554.

A good bad painting of the event by the Brazilian painter Benedito Calixto shows the bishop of São Paulo giving absolution to two kneeling monks while a mother with a baby under her arm looks distinctly worried. That bishop, and one of the monks, Dom Boniface Natter, the first abbot of Buckfast, bound for a visitation of the Argentine, were drowned. The other monk, the abbot’s assistant, was saved, and six weeks later, aged 30, was elected abbot of Buckfast in his stead. He was Dom Anscar Vonier.

I knew none of this when I read Anscar Vonier’s rather alarming book on the Eucharist a few years ago. Those early twentieth-century monastic theologians can be rather hard-hitting. Dom John Chapman’s apophatic notion of God sometimes make Buddhism seem cuddly. Anyway I’ve just been rereading Vonier’s Key to the Doctrine of the Eucharist. Its great thrust is to hold fast to the body of Christ.