This has to be a time of metanoia, of moral and spiritual renewal. There can be no return to the world as it was before the appearance of the virulent coronavirus that caused the disease Covid-19, leaving virtually no corner of the inhabited world untouched. There may eventually be a vaccine; there may even be a cure. But whether there is or not, civilisation has been tested and found wanting, and the pieces cannot be reassembled exactly as they were. Three-quarters of a million people have lost their lives directly from Covid 19; countless more will suffer and die from the economic depression that is bound to follow. There are profound lessons to be learnt, some of them still only half understood.

Yet this is the right time to take the measure of the challenge ahead and to prepare to rise to it. Prominent among the forces available to do so stand the Christian Churches, and the Catholic Church in particular. It has the largest membership of any single organisation on the planet and, though its credibility may have suffered a severe blow when its handling of the scandal of clerical abuse was exposed, it retains greater moral power than any single government. Its promise, in the stirring words of the Second Vatican Council’s final decree Gaudium et Spes, that “The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the people of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ” may be imperfectly realised, but remains its lodestar.