Think of the “Second Spring” of English Catholicism and you will probably picture converts such as Cardinal Newman, Ronald Knox and GK Chesterton. Oscar Wilde – who converted on his deathbed in 1900 – is not usually associated with them. But The Happy Prince, a new film about the final years of Wilde’s life directed by Rupert Everett, may help to change that. The sincerity of Wilde’s conversion is often questioned. Some point out that Wilde was semi-comatose on his deathbed. Others, like Wilde’s biographer Richard Ellmann, question whether his conversion was about faith or fashion, comparing the “application of sacred oils to [Wilde’s] hands and feet” to the playwright’s habit of “putting a green carnation in his buttonhole”. Fr Cuthbert Dunne, the young priest who attended Wilde on his deathbed, kept silent about the controversy for most of his life. But before he died in 1950, mindful of the historical importance of the event, he set down his recollection of it: