Lay Australian Catholics are dramatically limited in what we can achieve. But we have endless power to thwart our home-grown counterpart to the Patriotic Chinese Church. This power we must wield.

Through scarcely credible naïveté, Robinson seems to believe that he has disposed of Bryant’s ethical pretensions. His hubris calls to mind those self-destructive British Labour parliamentarians who elicited the jibe that, when granted a choice of weapons, they always selected boomerangs.