You hear Catholics complaining about, even being disillusioned with, the church because of its priests. I did yesterday, from a cradle RC whose memory goes back a generation in a parish where “you had to be Irish or Italian” to get any notice (he being neither: my guess is the Italians said you had to be Irish).

He was leading up to recounting a recent incident which gratified him greatly. So to be fair, he softened his critique. However, reading in recent years of Vatican chicanery and hostility to republicanism (in the 19th-century European sense), he finds himself increasingly critical and, as I say, disillusioned.

Good. It means he is developing into a grown-up Catholic, forced to ask himself why he still embraces the faith of his fathers and mothers. The short answer is that it’s the one, true church.

“To whom shall we go?” the apostles asked Jesus when they had found his preliminary Eucharist announcement hard to swallow and he had asked if they were about to leave him. “You have the words of eternal life.”

In other words, you are in for a dime? You’re in for a dollar. And not to quibble. Too much is at stake.