The signings in the secular Barnes & Noble bookstores were less well-attended than those in the Catholic ones attached to, for example, to the cathedral in Oakland, California, or the National Shrine in Washington, DC. The biggest turnout was for the lectures — essentially onstage discussions about the Catholic novel. Cardinal Stafford, the former Archbishop of Denver and Prefect of the Apostolic Penitentary, was in the audience at the Dominican School of Theology at Berkeley, California. I shared the platform in Santa Clara with a fellow Catholic novelist, Ron Hansen — author of Mariette in Ecstasy and Exiles. Some of the questions put from the floor asked why The Death of a Pope was not being published in the UK. I tried to explain the change in the zeitgeist that had taken place in Britain in my lifetime. In the 1950s, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene wrote triumphalist Catholic novels with miracles as part of the story — Brideshead Revisited, The End of the Affair. They were bestsellers. Since Vatican II, however, the tenor of Catholic fiction has been doubt, dissent and disillusion — David Lodge's How Far Can You Go?, John Cornwell's The Spoiled Priest, Jill Paton Walsh's Lapsing. The Christian consensus had evaporated, replaced by an animus against Catholicism. I suggested that the observation made by Bryan Appleyard some years ago was even more pertinent today: "To the modern imagination, Catholicism is the biggest enemy of all. As a result, ‘I hate Catholics' is quite commonly heard in otherwise civilised circles..." We discussed the way in which various pundits now used the rise of Islamic jihadism to castigate all religions.

There are, of course, circles in the US that see Catholicism as a force of reaction — particularly the brand of Catholicism promoted by "the Vatican". One of these circles is that of the self-styled "liberal" or "progressive" Catholics. Such is their residual influence that many of the orthodox Catholics I encountered on my tour — friends of the Ignatius Press who fetched me from airports — were unwilling to send their children to Catholic schools. Home-schooling seemed to them the best way to raise their children in the faith. They did not watch TV or appear to participate in the secular society around them. Some were graduates of Ave Maria College in Florida, founded by the Domino's Pizza millionaire Tom Monaghan, and where Fr Fessio is Theologian in Residence. Unlike many young Catholics in Britain who take the Church's teaching on chastity with a pinch of salt, they eschew sex before marriage and use only natural methods of birth control. The mothers do not work — they are, as Pope Pius XI put it, "the queen of the home". The fathers are not ambitious in any worldly sense. One worked as a chef in a restaurant; another drove a truck. Eccentric? A retro sect like the Amish in Pennsylvania? An Evangelical schoolteacher with whom I conversed on the flight from Maine to California thought home-schooling wrong: one's faith should be strong enough to survive in a secular society. Perhaps. But I recalled how many young Catholics in Britain had lapsed, adopting the values of EastEnders, Friends and Frasier rather than those of their eccentric Catholic father.

The same dilemma cropped up in discussions about the role of the Catholic novelist in a secular society: the Catholic novelists versus the novelist who is a Catholic. Should a Catholic author write only for his or her devout co-religionists or try to reach non-Catholic readers and address their preoccupations — particularly, in what Pope John Paul II called our "aphrodisiac civilisation", their preoccupation with sex?