In some Company you can feel very much the odd man out if you can't tell your conversion story. I can't: I'm a ‘cradle Catholic’. At least, until recently I thought I couldn't. But after all, faith is man's response to God's action in history, and history includes us. (Is this why it's ‘bunk’?).

‘What do you ask of the Church of God?’ ‘Faith’, said my godmother for me. My convert friends said it for themselves. And yet in a sense, in a very important sense, otherwise the priest would never have let them get that far, they already had faith. To ask for faith is an act of faith.