Before the journalist and former Private Eye editor Christopher Booker died last year, aged 81, he’d just finished a book, Groupthink: A Study in Self-Delusion, published this week.  Under that catch-all heading of Groupthink, Booker nimbly skewers the malaise of the modern age: how an “in-group” polices society with its new form of puritanism, coming down hard on anyone who disagrees with its worldview.   The book’s afterword, by his son Nicholas Booker, includes a touching picture of Booker’s final days.   Groupthink, it turns out, wasn’t his last book. That honour went to Booker’s guide to St Mary’s, the church in Litton, Somerset, where he lived. In the week before he died, he made final corrections to the guide.   In his last months, Booker’s sight became ever worse. He had to use a torch to read, even in broad daylight. It was the same torch that guided him up and down the church path every night to lock the door of St Mary’s.  There’s a long line of journalistic reactionaries who end up turning to the Church. After decades of drinking, smoking and womanising, Malcolm Muggeridge became a devout Christian. In Richard Ingrams’s biography of Muggeridge, he quotes Muggeridge saying, in 1965, “All I can say is that, in all my travels, Christianity is the best thing I have come across.”  Ingrams himself – Private Eye editor, sainted founder of the Oldie and a regular in the Catholic Herald – is an observant Catholic and plays the organ in his local church.   And Auberon Waugh may have attacked everyone and everything in his Private Eye diaries, a work of satirical genius. But he retained an attachment to, and deep understanding of, the Catholic Church he was born into. Bron’s father, Evelyn Waugh, and Wilfred De’Ath, the Oldie columnist who's just died at 82, were devout Catholic converts despite their sublime, scathing prose.   It’s too fanciful to say all satirists and comic, caustic writers are religious. But there is surely a connection between minds that attack humbug and hypocrisy and minds that seek eternal truth.