A robber who was guillotined in 1957 for shooting a police officer might be considered an unlikely hero for most archbishops.
But the Most Rev John Wilson, the new incumbent in Southwark, is not the first of his rank to see merit in the story of Jacques Fesch; the Frenchman’s Cause was opened by Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger of Paris in 1987 on account of his intense religious conversion while on death row.
The fact that Archbishop Wilson is proposing Fesch as a model of sanctity indicates a certain originality of thought, which grows increasingly evident as we sit in his library in London discussing the saints in general, soon after returning from the canonisation of St John Henry Newman in Rome.
