The reader must judge whether the author lives up to this promise. In his final chapter, Professor MacCulloch sums up his thesis thus: “Many modern Western-based Churches would dearly love not to speak about homosexuality at all, but they end up talking about little else.” That, certainly, is the view of the media elite, exemplified by the BBC’s John Humphrys, who in a pre-conclave interview brusquely informed his octogenarian interlocutor, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, that the words “paedophile” and “priest” had become “virtually synonymous”. Professor MacCulloch lends academic respectability to such simplifications when he caricatures conservative popes such as John Paul II and Benedict XVI as “defending a sandcastle against the tide”.

Finally, he speculates that we are witnessing a “new ‘Axial Age’ in the understanding of religion and religious authority”. The reference here is to the philosophy of Karl Jaspers, who saw the period from 800 BC to 200 BC as decisive for the emergence of the great world religions. The collapse of clerical authority in the wake of scandal prompts him to suggest that what he calls “the divine wild-track” is much to be preferred to the “mood music” of the New Testament, which is “just plain wrong: on homosexuality, anti-Semitism and slavery”.