THERE'S nothing new under the sun (saith Qoheleth). Whether attributed to the Church’s unchanging temporal mission – or just a dearth of original thinking – this seems nowhere truer than in the Ecclesia Dei. Last week’s much-vexed papal pronunciamento on family life is a perfect case in point. The Pope has had, as Christopher Lamb wrote in a Tablet online piece this week, a bee in his mitre about couples choosing pets over progeny for a long time: before his name was Francis, in fact. Go back a decade and you’ll find one Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio raising the alarm over Fido’s long march through the nursery room.

“Whatever has happened, will happen again.” Go back a century and Vincent McNabb OP – theologian, preacher, arch-distributist, Tablet contributor and possible saint (the last two aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive) – was singing from the same hymnsheet in 1926. Encountering a perambulator in Hyde Park, McNabb looked inside, expecting smiling sprogs within. But, to his horror, the pram was empty of offspring. Cross-eyed and unlovely, out peered – a pug.