It’s not every day you find a person who’s experienced an actual miracle but it happened to someone I knew. I was visiting a friend whose husband had died and another friend of hers was there, a nice woman, one of the stalwarts of the parish. I knew of her background in Pakistan and remarked that she must have grown up as one of the beleaguered Christian minority. Not so, she said. Her background was entirely godless. But it was godless in a Muslim context.

So, how come she was a Catholic? “No one believes me”, she said, “but I was living in Newmarket” (she was on her second husband) “and I would walk over the bridge on the way to work. And I heard a voice saying quite clearly: ‘Come to Me’. It happened three times. I saw there was a Catholic church on the other side of the bridge, and I went and knocked on the door. A priest answered, and I said to him: ‘I want to be a Catholic.’ And he said: ‘What, now?’ And I got instruction and I was received there. It sounds really weird, but that’s how it was.”