I discussed this with a Catholic author, Andrew McNab, whom I met in Portland, Maine. He has recently published a collection of exquisite short stories (really short: some little more than a page in length) entitled The Body of This. In some there are candid depictions of sex which would not raise an eyebrow in the average secular reader but might shock the devout. In The Death of a Pope, there is a love affair but there is nothing that would bring a blush to the cheek of a maiden. But expletives used by one of the characters, a member of Scotland Yard's Special Branch, were toned down at the request of my editor at Ignatius. And what would the devout customers of Ignatius Press make of some of the scenes in my earlier novels? Or in a new novel, The Misogynist, to be published next year?

Many of the Catholics I encountered on my tour had anti-abortion stickers on their cars. Abortion is an acute issue in the US in a way it is not in Britain. Here the debate is about the number of months after conception after which it should be unlawful to terminate a pregnancy. There the debate is about whether a termination should be lawful at all. A survey taken while I was on my travels showed that more than 50 per cent of Americans described themselves as "pro-Life". My Catholic friends believe that there should be a total ban on abortion, as in Chile. Also coinciding with my tour was the honouring of President Obama at Notre Dame University — a scandal in the eyes of many bishops and my orthodox Catholic friends because of his consistent support of abortion, including partial-birth abortion in which the baby's head is crushed as it leaves the womb. "An unborn baby is a person" read one of the stickers. It is impossible for a Christian to dissent from this view: God became man at the Annunciation, and in the account of the Visitation in St Luke's Gospel the unborn John the Baptist "leaps in the womb" as he recognises Jesus in utero. However, there is a danger, it seems to me, that the fight for the right to life of the unborn comes to define Catholicism, to the neglect of core beliefs that God became man as Jesus of Nazareth, that he was the Messiah promised by the prophets of Israel, that he died for our sins on the Cross, the Eucharist authorities of the Pope. 

I also felt misgivings about the way in which orthodox Catholics, finding common ground with Evangelical Christians on the question of abortion, seemed to bundle it together with other right-wing positions on purely political issues. There was a palpable hatred of Obama not just because he was "pro-choice" but because he was "a socialist" and in favour of gun control. Opinion in the US seems polarised in a way it is not in the UK, partly because the conduits of information about the outside world are themselves polarised. My Catholic friends would watch Fox News because they feel affronted by the liberal stance of CBS or NBC. When I asked if there was anyone who, like Pope John Paul II, was against both abortion and the war in Iraq, they could only come up with the Catholic blogger Mark Shea.

Also coinciding with my four-week book tour in the US was an issue of the Economist with a special report on business in America. The view taken was that American business, though battered by the recession, would bounce back because it had an inherently optimistic propensity to take risks. This was unquestionably true of the Ignatius Press. It is a non-profit-making enterprise, an apostolate as much as a business. Most who work in its office in an old fire station in San Francisco pray together three times a day. 

But they saw an opportunity with The Death of a Pope to reach out into the secular market and made a major investment to bring this about. It is inconceivable that a religious publishing house in the UK would take the same risk. It may not turn out to have been cost effective but, like Mother Angelica's EWTN, it shows how the entrepreneurial energy found in the US can be harnessed to evangelisation and the propagation of the faith.