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Q: Even as Pope Francis is welcomed with unprecedented vigour by the popular culture?

A: That’s one of the main reasons they can’t stand it. They don’t want to be accepted.

Q: You say Anglicanism is similar to Catholicism, with many shared beliefs, but the split between the Vatican and the Church of England is longstanding, deep and wide. How did you come to cross it?

A: Yes, of course, otherwise, logically, why would I have bothered? … My father was Jewish, I was raised in a very secular home, sort of semi-culturally Jewish, but no religion. I became a Christian in 1984 and I’ve never wavered. I was received into the Catholic Church in 1985 when I was 26. I’d been interested in Christianity since I was a teenager, actually, and I think I just kept on crawling further and further. It was sort of two feet forward and one foot back the whole time. There was a certain inevitability about it. There was no bunker experience, there were no bullets flying over my head. I think I’d achieved quite a bit early. I’d always wanted to be in literary London, and have books published, and I had all that by about age 24. They were very bad books, but they were published. I was in literary London and there was a certain emptiness.

Q: Was that discovery of faith an intellectual experience? Had you read the grand old Christian apologists like G.K. Chesterton (who converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism) and C.S. Lewis (Anglican)?

A: I had. Actually, I sometimes think the seed was planted very young, because I remember when I was about six years old, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (by C.S. Lewis) was read to us, and I had no knowledge at all of the Christian metaphors, or more than that really, the Christian substance. It wasn’t taught in that way, but I’m sure something was set at that point.