Of course, Ronald Knox didn’t have a view on the current crisis. Nevertheless, what he said in a series of sermons to schoolgirls during World War II (later published in The Creed in Slow Motion) was extremely prescient:

“What holds up the conversion of England, I always think, is not so much the wickedness of a few Catholics, as the dreadful ordinariness of most Catholics. There is a temptation for us, simply because we belong to a holy Church, just to sit back and be passengers, and say, ‘I’m not going to bother about being anything above the average; I leave the Church to do the holiness for me.’ But we have got to match the Church, you and I, to wear her colours. And when we say, ‘I believe in the holy Catholic Church,’ we mean, among other things, ‘I believe holiness is a good thing; that holiness would be a good thing for me.'”