Or better still, a case of providence: the Holy Spirit guiding the Roman conclave to elect the popes this world most needed.

Of course, the intellectualism is of a particular, studied kind — a deliberate attempt to reintegrate the divided worlds of faith and modern critical thought. You can see it in the entire life of John Paul, whose greatest work may prove to be his reintegration of the Second Vatican Council into the history of the Catholic Church. Too many Catholics — back in the days when he became pope in 1978 — imagined that Vatican II represented a radical break with the past. Some of them wept, and some of them cheered, but whether they were traditionalists on the far Right or spirit-of-Vatican-II types on the far Left, they all seemed to believe that the new Church was no longer in direct continuity with the old Church.

Part of John Paul's success came simply from the fact that he was able to be a Vatican II Catholic, while drawing deeply on the wells of ancient faith. Remember when the new Catechism of the Catholic Church was completed back in 1992? There were those who insisted that Vatican II had produced only such systematic heresy that no catechism was possible, and there were those who insisted that the whole idea of a systematic statement of doctrine and morals had been abolished by the changes in the Church. But John Paul insisted that this new Catechism was possible precisely because the Church remained one in essence with its past — indeed, that the Catechism was indispensable "in order that all the richness of the teaching of the Church following the Second Vatican Council could be preserved in a new synthesis and be given a new direction."

A precise parallel is what Benedict XVI is trying to achieve with his new book. In 2007, he published Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration, the first volume in his investigation of the biblical account of the life of Jesus. And now he has added the second volume, Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week: From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection (Catholic Truth Society, £14.95) — to a very curious reception. If the first volume produced what the pope himself called a "predictable variety of reactions," the new volume is already doing much the same.