A true red letter day. I went to the Pope’s mass at Westminster Cathedral. The service was magnificent and the music specifically composed for the Gospel Acclamation was overwhelming, but the liturgical diet was almost too rich to be absorbed.

That afternoon I drove myself to the Knights of Malta pilgrimage in Walsingham. I arrived in the dark at the Slipper Chapel, a mile from Little Walsingham. I was alone and everything was locked up, but I knelt at the cross outside the church and said a prayer in gratitude for the holy father’s visit and what he had said.

Somehow, in the very special atmosphere and place of Walsingham, where the Saxon noblewoman Richeldis de Faverches had a vision of the Virgin Mary in the eleventh century, the tumultuous events of these four days seemed to fall into place and I fell asleep as happy as one could be.