Ten years ago, a priest at the Brompton Oratory began a sermon with the words, ‘At last, we are witnessing the final disintegration of old mother damnable, the Church of England.’ At about the same time, Paul Johnson suggested that the cause for which Thomas More was martyred and Cardinal Newman preached was ‘now in sight of victory’. Cardinal Hume, throwing his usual caution to the winds, speculated that the Elizabethan Settlement was at an end. The Protestant nostrils of Ferdinand Mount detected ‘an intrusive whiff of incense’ in public life: writing in The Spectator on 29 January 1994, he said it would be ‘much nicer if some of our best friends could continue to be the affable and self-effacing papists we used to know’. Well, you may have noticed that the papists are self-effacing again. The last few years have witnessed a reversal of fortune on both sides of the ecumenical divide.
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