Now Miss Brown was back in Sydney, back on the North Shore indeed, working for a television company, missing the chips, and this afternoon intending to see Hail Mary, which was being shown as part of the Sydney Film Festival. We accompanied her to the cinema after lunch, puzzled as to the amount of noise we could hear in that part of the city and wondering why there were so many policemen on the streets and why so many thoroughfares were cordoned off. Then we turned into Market Street and might have been excused believing we were in Beirut. Women wearing shawls and veils were on their knees in the roadway outside the cinema, rocking to and fro and wailing. Some tore their hair. Some screamed. ‘They should take this movie to Lebanon,’ one woman was shouting, ‘they would eat him there – they would drink his blood!’

‘Our eyes are faced towards Heaven,’ one of them said to me as I approached, ‘where do you cast yours?’

I looked to a nearby policeman for help. He shrugged and stared at the pavement. I did the same.

We took our farewell of Elizabeth, and watched her brave the fury of the Christian mob. It was frightening enough to be on the road, but the real threat was to those blasphemers who were actually entering the cinema. Despite the line of policemen, abuse of the most violent kind rained down on her, she who in North Cornwall still was held to be a paradigm of loving kindness, an example to us all of gentleness to slugs. ‘You should be dead!’ a handsome, well-dressed Italian woman in furs called after her. ‘All of you in there should be dead!’

Someone chanted, ‘Hail Mary full of grace – a virgin always.’

A more cultivated voice called out, ‘Blasphemy is NOT art.’

I removed myself a little from the crowd to get a better look at it. There weren’t only followers of our Lady of Lebanon here; it was just that they were the most hysterically vociferous. But the Italians ran them close. And then of course the Greeks. Followed by the Irish. Nor were there only women. I saw priests and mafiosi, thug-believers of several southern European nationalities, and hag-ridden boys, one of them bawling through a megaphone, ‘Everyone has got a mother!’

More’s the pity, you had to be insane not to think, watching a spectacle such as this. The moment the word spread that the film had started, that only a few yards away the blasphemy was afoot, a new hysteria grabbed them. Those who were not already on their knees fell to them. Some beat their chests. Others looked to Heaven, holding their palms open, their faces contorted into ghastly expressions of beggarly supplication, their eyes cast piteously upwards, in imitation of the suffering depicted in two thousand years of largely tawdry religious art.