The charismatic, socially progressive, doctrinally cautious head of one of the Vatican’s most powerful departments talks to Catherine Pepinster of his hopes and fears for the post-Covid world

Getting to talk to Cardinal Luis Tagle is a hard task. We’re all set to chat in the days before he gives a talk to the Westminster Abbey Institute – but then he cancels. We fix it again: and with just an hour to go before our meeting, his office cancels, saying there is a crisis. And then, third time lucky: it happens.

As a cardinal who is both prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples and president of Caritas Internationalis, as well as the Catholic Biblical Federation, one expects him to lead a busy life. But it turns out that Covid-19 is making his life even more complex than usual.

When we finally chat, he is profusely apologetic. It turns out that the crisis which his staff mentioned was to do with the coronavirus pandemic. “I’m in quarantine!” he says, and I peer, via Facetime, at a casually dressed man sitting in a cell-like room with typically Italian shutters, that show he is in Rome. It turns out that one of the seminarians that he ordained priest a few days earlier tested ­positive for Covid-19. Like everyone else involved, he has had to hunker down for 14 days.