John Guillaumier, in his letter ‘No regrets’ (June 20), says that one of the best decisions he ever made in his life was to quit the Catholic Church. Whether he is aware of it or not, in so doing he left behind him a major part of his identity because we are irreversibly moulded in Christian values and beliefs even if these are latent or dormant at some time or another.

In this regard, I can do no better than quote from A.N. Wilson (himself probably an agnostic) in his book Paul, the mind of the Apostle.

“Even if we do not subscribe to the old view that ‘the Faith is Europe and Europe is the Faith’ (Hilaire Belloc – Europe and Faith), the very idea of European civilisation is impossible to extricate from the story of Christendom.

“Would the writings of Plato have survived to us if they had not first been filtered through the Fathers of the Greek Church? If the monks of Benedict had not preserved manuscripts in their libraries, how much of classical literature would have survived in the West? Even if we posit that there would have been other powerhouses of ‘civilisation’ during the ‘dark ages’, it is still unimaginable because what history in fact provided was a Christian civilisation.

“Europe without Benedict, Europe without Dante, Europe without the cathedrals, Europe without the medieval universities, Europe without the 15th-century humanists, Europe without the reformation; Europe without the crusades, the inquisitions, the religious wars. No Ambrose, no Augustine, no Aquinas, no Marsilius, no Duns Scotus. No Hume, Marx or Voltaire reacting against them. No Bach, no Michelangelo, no Shakespeare. No Kant, no Schopenhauer, no Wagner creating other imaginative worlds.

“Of course, if the Faith had not been European and Europe had not adopted the Faith, there would have been some other story. But it would not have been our story”.