We are in a crucial “third phase” of the implementation of the Second Vatican Council. This is the view of one senior Jesuit whom I interviewed for my book, The Outsider, which looks at Pope Francis’ battle to reform the Church and how he is seeking to embed the Council’s vision in spite of well-organised opponents.

A senior Vatican source spoke in similar terms when I was discussing the struggles going on in Rome and the wider Church with him. “It’s like the years after the Council,” he told me. “But this time the opposition is coming from conservative quarters.”

While all popes since John XXIII have sought to follow the mandate of Vatican II, its implementation has come in fits and starts. In a letter to mark the centenary of St John Paul II’s birth last week, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI pointed to the turbulence in the Church after the Council ended in 1965, and praised the Polish Pope for being a “liberating restorer”. There had, Benedict wrote, been an “attitude of doubt and uncertainty” that had even questioned the existence of the Church itself.