Something unexpected happened to me the other day. A minister of another Church rang me up and said that he had been given a Sacred Host by a member of his congregation, with the request that the said minister should pass it to a Catholic priest.

Naturally, I said I would call round and collect the Sacred Host that very afternoon. I did so, recovered the Host, placed it in a pyx and heard the story.

A young lady had been at a Catholic Mass and had gone up to Holy Communion, even though she was not a Catholic – she had gone up because she had been urged to go up by the people sitting around her. Once at the altar the priest had placed the Sacred Host in her hands. She, not being in communion with the Catholic Church, did not want to receive the Host, so carried it away with her, and then entrusted it to the minister of her own church, who then called me.

Although separated from her by three centuries, an ocean and major cultural differences, Jesuit Father Paolo Molinari absolutely loves Kateri Tekakwitha, the Native American who will become a saint in October.

While the 88-year-old Italian Jesuit was forced to give his successor most of the sainthood causes he still was actively promoting when he turned 80, "thank God, they let me keep Kateri."

Father Molinari, one of the church's most prolific postulators -- as the official promoters of causes are called -- inherited Kateri's cause from his Jesuit predecessor in 1957.

He shepherded her cause to beatification in 1980 and is now in talks with the Pope's master of liturgical ceremonies to ensure Kateri's Native American brothers and sisters will have a prominent role during her canonization Mass Oct. 21 at the Vatican.

Pope Benedict XVI issued a decree in July, 2007 concerning the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite, called by many either the traditional Latin mass or the Tridentine liturgy. He explained that the ancient liturgy of the Church, normative for more than a thousand years until Pope Paul VI released the new missal in 1970, had never been abrogated. Rather, he claimed, the old mass was such an important part of Catholic tradition that it “must be given due honour for its venerable and ancient usage.”

A Jesuit priest who inspired Catholics across the country has died at the age of 95.

Fr Hugh Thwaites converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism following his experience as a prisoner of the Japanese during the Second World War and later became a Jesuit priest.

He was a strong supporter of the Extraordinary Form Mass and the Legion of Mary, and he linked the abandonment of the rosary with a loss of faith, writing: “If we want in any way to be like Jesus, we must do what His Mother asks. If we do not, can we expect things to go right? We cannot with impunity disobey the Mother of God.”

Following his conversion, Fr Thwaites was passionate about evangelisation and he was renowned for asking people: “Are you a Catholic?” and then adding: “But you would like to be, wouldn’t you?” He also once compared the Anglican Church to “whisky with three parts water”, while saying Catholics were “straight out of the bottle”.