‘England is not a Catholic country." This claim seems trite even to an outsider like me, but over the course of my recent visit, it became hard to sustain. I had not taken the transatlantic flight with the idea of arriving at any religious insights, let alone of making a pilgrimage. I did not wander from church to shrine like an Anglophilic Henry Adams.
No, my goal was simply to have good dinners with friends (under the heading of business, of course). And yet, I found myself confronted, time and again, with relics of faith and hints of resurrection, as though saints with strange names like Cuthbert and Etheldreda were ready to burst from their tombs, and the Tyburn Tree were quietly sending forth the blooms of a second spring.
