In April, Pope Francis named an English bishop who said he knows little about Wales to be Wales’s leading prelate. Archbishop Mark O’Toole now governs two of the three Welsh dioceses.

“I’m a great believer that we’re in a kind of new apostolic era,” said the former secretary to Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor. “There’s an opportunity here, that we’re living through a period which is very similar to those first three centuries in the life of the Church, when the Church was maybe quite small. Nevertheless, the challenge is to be confident and to be outgoing in terms of our witness.”