In a searing sermon preached by the then-Archbishop of Canterbury in the Anglican church of St Paul’s Within the Walls in Rome, Rowan Williams compared Christian churches to the steelworks in his native Wales. Just as the factories were filled with the crashing din of constant production, so our liturgies can be noisy performances aimed at the manufacture of some product – “religion” – that makes us feel good about ourselves, that justifies us to ourselves.

It was, I thought ruefully at the time, hardly an accident that he made these remarks in Rome, the city where so much “religion” has been manufactured over the centuries. I always found it odd when people speculated that Williams might one day become a “Roman” Catholic. The man is more nonconformist than he looks. “Religion”, for him, is a deeply suspect affair.

As it is, increasingly, for so many of our contemporaries. I have just returned from a month teaching in Australia, where I worked with more than 2,000 staff at Catholic schools across the state of Victoria. In these communities, the sexual abuse crisis has left the institutional Church in tatters. I say “institutional Church” advisedly, because people’s commitment to the practice of the Gospel was luminous and inspiring. What struck me was the fact that this seemed to coexist with an almost complete disengagement of lay Catholics from parishes, priests, bishops.