In May 1985, the Vicar of the University Church of St Mary the Virgin Oxford, Peter Cornwell, mounted the pulpit to announce that he had decided to seek admission to the Roman Catholic Church. He was following the path his predecessor John Henry Newman had taken 140 years before, and The Times mooted a “third spring” for Catholicism in England, with a wave of further conversions. It was an acknowledgement of Cornwell’s influential standing in the Church of England. Less than three years later, he was ordained a Catholic priest. He died on St David’s Day after a brief illness. He was 86, and had been an Anglican priest for nearly 25 years, and a Catholic priest for nearly 33.

His conversion, like Newman’s, came from a deep pondering of church history and a yearning for communion with the universal Church with and under the Pope. The Second Vatican Council’s vision of renewal and ecumenism had excited him, and continued to do so for the rest of his life. After the election of Pope Francis, he said that after years of loyal opposition, it now felt like being in government.