There is a moment in this book where Paul Collins finds himself on a public bus somewhere between Queanbeyan and Canberra. The phone rings. The caller is Morris West, the author, who, in the years before his death in 1999, became a kind of cardinal in the hierarchy of dispossessed Catholics. West had heard that Collins was in a spot of bother over his views on the papacy and had rung to lend sympathy and support.