Alys breaks off, momentarily. ‘You have that look on your face,’ she observes.

‘What look?’ I try my best to expunge the look, whatever it may be.

‘That look of quiet but deep resistance,’ she elucidates.

‘God’s Secretary,’ I say, smiling brightly, wiggling my fingers as if poised over a typewriter.

Alys pointedly ignores my attempt to lighten the atmosphere. ‘One of the several tasks St Faustina had been instructed to perform by Jesus’ – she returns to her story – ‘was to commission an artist to produce a painting of his “Divine Mercy”, which was essentially a painting of Jesus, as she saw him in her visions, standing in a white robe, one hand slightly raised as if in blessing, the other placed over his heart from which two bright arcs of light emerge, one blue-white, the other red. These arcs of light were to represent his “Divine Mercy” – the blood and water that poured from the wound cut into his side by the Roman soldier, Longinus, to finally establish that he was dead on the cross.’

I nod, keenly, still trying (possibly failing) to hold back ‘that look’.

‘Well it was very difficult for St Faustina to get the painting commissioned. There was a great deal of suspicion and resentment directed towards her at the nunnery. And at one point – alone and despairing – she almost caved in under the great weight of the combined opposition she faced. Then Jesus appeared to her in a vision and said, and I paraphrase this, obviously; he said, “If you neglect to complete the tasks to promote my Divine Mercy, as I have described them to you, on the Day of Judgement you will have to answer not only for your own soul, but for a whole multitude of other souls which will have been lost for all eternity because of your …”’

‘Stop, Alys!’ I explode, almost laughing at the pure indignity of it all.

‘What’s the problem?’ Alys demands.

‘Isn’t it obvious?!’ I throw up my hands, exasperated. ‘The very idea that it’s considered acceptable for someone to try so hard, give so much, sacrifice so much, and then, at their lowest ebb, in their darkest hour, face the sadistic wrath of an apparently heartless God!’

Alys looks shocked by my analysis.

‘St Faustina was a “suffering soul”,’ she patiently explains, ‘like Orla. The greatest saints aren’t built like the rest of us, Carla. They empathize with Jesus – identify with his pain, and the sorrow of his Holy Mother – at such an intense level that they voluntarily take on the burden of his suffering to save souls. It’s their mission. A kind of reparation. It’s what they do.’

‘I just don’t understand how anyone could actively embrace suffering like that,’ I tell her. ‘It seemed – it seems … crazy – wrong. There’s enough pointless suffering in the world already. Why this misguided need to conjure up still more?’

‘Because they are suffering for love, of course!’ Alys laughs, quite astonished by my ignorance. ‘It’s their sacrifice to God, their gift to God.’