The Scottish barrister and human rights campaigner says that in spite of her battles with the Church, her faith remains a vital part of who she is

How to describe what sort of Catholic we are? Once plain “Catholic” was sufficient. “If you don’t like the rules, leave the club,” is how my parents’ generation would respond to any attempt to label degrees of dissent from the official church position.

Now, though, it can be more complicated, as Helena Kennedy found recently when in Rome to meet Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s secretary of state, as a member of a delegation in her role as director of the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute (IBAHRI). “I was one of three, and I began by telling the cardinal that I was brought up as a Catholic, and that I was familiar with Catholic teaching.”

Since she has already told me that she is a Mass-goer, why not just say, “I am a Catholic”? For someone so fluent – she has spent a lifetime addressing and convincing courts as one of our most celebrated human rights barristers – she misses a beat before replying.