My summer reading has included Evelyn Waugh's great wartime triology, Sword of Honour, often classified as definitively Catholic novels. They are also definitively honest about what it feels like to serve in a war: long periods of tedium, absurd rules and regulations, and sudden, terrifying encounters with death.
The three linked novels, written in the mid-1950s, also evoke a Catholicism which is seldom glimpsed now, but which comes across as profoundly beautiful. That is to say a faith that was humble, restful, quiet, devotional, dutiful and restorative to the spirit. This is particularly so in the first book, Men at Arms, and in the third, Unconditional Surrender. The authorial voice - expressed by the main protagonist, Guy Crouchback - is genuinely, and often very amusingly, about a man seeking to lead a life of the Faith in worldly circumstances.
The reforms of Vatican II, issued in 1963, were a necessary updating and there are many aspects of the Catholic Church which no doubt still need reform. Human institutions are never perfect and will always need review, and even modernising.
Bickering
But Evelyn Waugh's narratives really do bring back the balm and restfulness of the old Catholic Church. What I have come to dislike about almost all modern religious discussion is the constant bickering, fighting, quarrelling and name-calling.
My husband, an Anglican, expressed this adroitly when I asked him if he approved of women priests: ''I don't really know,'' he said. ''I just don't want to hear any arguments about it. I hate all this arguing. Switch on Songs of Praise.''
The language of adversarial political discourse has entered, and even come to dominate, aspects of faith. When Jennifer Sleeman called for women to stay away from Mass on September 26 as a form of protest, she said that the Church treated women as ''second-class citizens''.
But adhering to a faith is not the same as being a ''citizen'' - a political word derived from French Revolutionary rhetoric for a secular state. Adherence to a faith is of quite a different order.
And actually, if the institution of the Church were to treat any of us in a disparaging or derogatory way, the proper, authentically Christian response would be to accept it in a spirit of humility. St Paul tells us to ''suffer in silence'' in response to an injustice.
Old traditions
No doubt there are good reasons to review some of the old traditions, and I often felt, from my convent schooldays onwards, that the humility ticket could be overdone - there's a difference between the exercise of humility and being a doormat.
But the Catholicism that Evelyn Waugh depicts is still enormously attractive - because it really grasps the truth that the kingdom of Christ is not of this world, and the Catholics in these narratives accept that worldly values can never apply to the light of the spirit which burns so bright in their inner lives.
Suffering can define us
In fairness, there are entirely modern people who still live that life of the spirit, and understand the meaning of a Christian experience.
Andrew Sullivan, an American writer and somewhat unorthodox Catholic - he was an early advocate of gay marriages - has written beautifully about the serious illness, and, perhaps, impending death of his friend Christopher Hitchens. Sullivan, a committed believer, has responded to Hitchens, a campaigning atheist, simply with love, acceptance, and respect.
Andrew Sullivan, who has watched friends die of AIDS, and is himself HIV positive, has a real insight into the meaning of a grave illness: ''Christianity's radical claim is that it is in suffering alone that we approach our defining condition, mortality, just as Jesus's intense suffering on the cross makes sense only as an act of God's solidarity with us in this mortal, existential panic.'' He explains, so well, how suffering can indeed define us, and our spirituality.
We should set the time
The British Prime Minister, David Cameron, is keen to end the tradition of putting back the clocks in October: he wants permanent summer time all year round.
The objectors to permanent summer time are mainly the Scots, whose geography would not suit the arrangement.
But I don't see why Scotland shouldn't have a different time-zone to England. Russia and the United States manage just fine with several different time-zones.
Before the First World War, the Irish Catholic bishops campaigned for Ireland to have a different time zone from England and Wales, arguing that in Dublin, sunrise and sunset were at least 20 minutes behind London - and the West of Ireland 20 minutes later again. In accordance with nature and geography, I'm all for Ireland having its own time zone. All of Ireland should act together, too, in setting the time.
