I was interested to see, on the admirable Protect the Pope website, the intriguing headline “Archbishop Conti challenges Archbishop Nichols’ dismissal of the UK persecution of Christians”. Deacon Nick thinks that in a recent sermon, “it seems pretty clear” that Archbishop Conti was responding to Archbishop Nichols’s recent statement, published in the Guardian newspaper, that Christians are not persecuted in this country and should not claim that they are: "I personally don't feel in the least bit persecuted. I don't think Christians should use that word," Andrew Brown reports him as saying (in a tendentious opinion piece, of which more presently). I’m not at all certain it’s absolutely “clear” that Archbishop Conti was in fact targeting Archbishop Nichols, or was even aware of what he had said (I don’t somehow see Archbishop Conti as the archetypal Guardian reader); but he was certainly expressing, with admirable eloquence and force, a very different point of view: