Outside the Carmel after morning Mass, I bump into Patricia Kelly, an Irish-born nurse in her sixties from Bromley, south-east London. She has, she says, a photographic memory for faces and thinks I am someone else. She has been coming to Lisieux for three decades, sometimes three or four times a year. "Thérèse is very good for young people," she tells me. "She always answers your prayers. She will give you many roses if you ask for them." The metaphor of flowers is one that Thérèse used often in her writings — even referring to herself at one point as the "Little Flower", a nickname that has stuck with her admirers. As she approached death, she told her sisters not to grieve for her. "You will see, after my death, I will let fall a shower of roses."

I ask Patricia about the bones coming to England. "It will be very nice for people who can't get here," she answers carefully. Clearly, she believes that you really need to come to Lisieux to enjoy the full experience. Mightn't the English, in their rather reserved way, and after 500 post-Reformation years as an officially Anglican country, find the presence of a reliquary peculiar? "Perhaps," she laughs. "But it is just like if your young brother or sister died and you had something in memory of them. With the relics it is just a connection."

The late Cardinal Basil Hume was one of those who feared the reaction that bringing Thérèse's relics over the Channel might prompt. In the late 1990s, he blocked efforts to arrange a visit (all requests must be supported by the leader of the Catholic Church in that country). The official reason given was that the time wasn't right ecumenically to welcome Thérèse, but some suspect there was another reason for Hume's opposition. The veneration of relics was precisely the sort of traditional "peasant" Catholicism he had spent years spurning, in an effort to dispel any remaining suspicions that Catholicism was odd or foreign in its practices and so move it into the mainstream of national life.

It may be that his very success in doing this made it possible for his successor, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, to give his endorsement to the visit. "There is a different atmosphere now," says Father McGoldrick. "We've moved on. We're more multi-cultural, more tolerant." But mightn't the progress of the reliquary round England make some at least think that Catholicism remains, at heart, a superstitious, medieval credo? "Yes, I suppose, realistically, that may happen, but there has been such a response around the world to her visits — such a totally unexpected response — that it makes sense to bring her over now because she is clearly doing something for people, bringing them spirituality and meaning, for some mysterious reason that we don't quite understand but have witnessed elsewhere."

When I head, after morning Mass, up to the Basilica, I am shown round by Melanie, a 21-year-old student from Bordeaux who is volunteering there during her summer holidays. For her, Lisieux isn't just about Thérèse but about the saint's whole family. "There are many problems in the world with the family today that make good Christian families very important," she says. "Lisieux is a chance to celebrate how the family should be."