Since his death on 26 April, John Wilkins has been described as embodying the ‘loyal opposition’ to the direction in which St John Paul II took the Catholic Church. Yet his instincts were theologically cautious and deferential to church authority

looking and sounding the part of a bachelor don, John Wilkins’ main sartorial themes were beiges, browns and yellows, along with a slight stoop, a melancholic smile and a honeyed voice. And he was scholarly in the way he agonised over ideas and stories, gathering others’ views, as if, via endless kindly exchanges, we might all find Truth waiting patiently for us just round the corner. Editorial meetings were seminars; all had to give a view – “Now, what do you think?” he’d ask anyone who hadn’t spoken – until John found the clarity to commission the right contributor and file an editorial that was a masterclass in nuance and balance. Long before we were all using the word, Wilkins was synodal.

Donnish, too, because The Tablet under John – who was steeped in the nouvelle théologie currents of Vatican II – wasn’t afraid of mixing in some academic depth and complexity, such that we were often described in the mainstream press as a “heavyweight Catholic journal” (or, less charitably, “lofty” and “smug”). He regarded it as a service to the People of God, for example, to shoehorn John Paul II’s encyclicals and post-synodal apostolic exhortations, as well as Cardinal Ratzinger’s sledgehammer “Instructions”, into a three-page precis at the back – a task he came to relish handing to me against an impossible deadline. Dominus Iesus in 2,000 words by 4 p.m.? Sure, John!