When Adenauer became West German Chancellor after the war, he drew on that same tradition. And one of his major achievements – shared with those other Catholic statesmen, Alcide De Gasperi in Italy and Robert Schuman in France – was the work of European unification which would become the European Union.

Whatever the EU is today, its beginnings are inseparable from Catholic thought. When the British government, in the early 1950s, was weighing up the pros and cons of joining the European project, one significant worry was its noticeably Catholic flavour. Conspiracy theorists still argue that the whole idea of European “union” is a Vatican plot, probably inspired by the Antichrist.

Recent popes have recognised that Europe has problems that need to be addressed. “But they have never suggested that we will do this if we abandon the European project or the quest for ever closer union.” What’s needed, Father Ashley Beck, who teaches at St Mary’s University, Twickenham says, is for Catholics to involve themselves in European institutions, and reconnect the EU with its Christian roots. Those roots run impressively deep.