At a major event last week to celebrate this paper’s 175th anniversary, the historian Eamon Duffy considered the Catholic imagination of the Irish poet Seamus Heaney. This is an edited version of his talk Seamus heaney, at his own request, was buried in the context of a Requiem Mass. He had long since ceased attending Mass regularly, did not receive Communion when he did attend, and reflected publicly and often   on the repressive effect of the Church of his youth – the “agonies” of “desire, of guilt, of dread at confessing” during what he called the “nay-saying age of impurity”. He wrote ruefully about the “hard line, the pulpit bark, the articulated and decided authority of unam, sanctam catholicam et apostolicam Ecclesiam