The Reformation was also about independence from a distant bureaucracy

One of the joys for a priest on holiday is going to pray where no one knows who you are. So last Sunday I joyously pottered down to the spectacular monastery church at Alcobaca in central Portugal – still the largest church in the country – to sit quietly at the back and contemplate the meaning of life.

I don’t speak a single word of Portuguese, but it mattered not. I understood when to kneel and when to stand, and I understood pretty much everything the priest was saying during the service. And that’s because we use almost the same service back home in south London. We say roughly the same prayers in roughly the same order.

Nearly 500 years after we broke with Rome and instituted the first Brexit, the Church of England and the Roman Catholic church have maintained a surprisingly high degree of regulatory alignment. The Church of England is independent – we can decide for ourselves if we want to have women priests, for instance – but we haven’t disappeared off into a totally different theological universe. And we can increasingly celebrate all that we have in common. This is surely a pretty good model for the current Brexit, too.

Every schoolboy will tell you that the English Reformation was initiated because Henry VIII wasn’t able to keep it in his codpiece. And there is, of course, much truth to that – Henry is the nearest thing to Donald Trump we have had in this country. But the Reformation was also about sovereignty, about not having to do what we were told by some bishop over in a southern European city.