Yet for almost 40 years, the Catholic story has been reported in starkly black-and-white terms.

It doesn't matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice.

Black cat or white cat: If it can catch mice, it's a good cat.

Find the Lord, find the saints of the times, but also find the not canonized, simple persons who are really in the heart of the Church.

There's so much grey to every story - nothing is so black and white.

And then there is the black cat. Who has no other name than the Black Cat and who turned up almost a month ago. We did not realize he was going to be living here at first: he looked too well fed to be a stray, too old and jaunty to have been abandoned. He looked like a small panther, and he moved like a patch of night.

One day, in the summer, he was lurking about our ramshackle porch: eight or nine years old, at a guess, male, greenish-yellow of eye, very friendly, quite unperturbable. I assumed he belonged to a neighboring farmer or household.

I went away for a few weeks, to finish writing a book, and when I came home he was still on our porch, living in an old cat ben one of the children had found for him. He was, however, almost unrecognizable. Patches of fur had gone, and there were deep scratches on his gray skin. The tip of one ear was chewed away. There was a gash beneath one eye, s lice gone from one lip. He looked tired and thin.