"Will you go and sit down? Will you sit down AT ONCE!!" There are different ways of greeting people to church, and that is one. I had just gone on my day off into a large religious building near Victoria Station - as one does - in order to "see what was going on". I wasn't wearing my collar, but my battered day-off clothes, which may have accounted for it.

What was going on was a 'big' Mass, already begun. I stood respectfully at the back and listened. Cardinal Hume was finishing his sermon with a sentence of which I much approved: "Is it better to be an animated pagan or a lifeless and self-satisfied Christian?"

At that point my reflection was abruptly broken off by the words at the top of this column. They were uttered by a very officious verger-sidesman-usher (call them what you will) clad in an imposing red gown. There were others, strategically placed in the building presumably to exercise instant crowd control. It reminded me of Nuremberg rather than Nazareth.

Under other circumstances I would have gone through the ceiling. As it was I devoted myself to this reflection: (1) I had never been addressed thus in a Catholic church before and (2) it symptomised what I suspect is increasingly true -we are becoming respectable, the Establishment under another name.

Heaven help us if that is so. I never tire of reminding candidates in the Journey in Faith of what was said to me when I became a Catholic 26 years ago: "Congratulations; you don't have to be respectable any more".

Because the point about the Catholic Church was that it was the church for all sorts, God's raggle-taggle little army. Rather as in the Orthodox churches, in the sanctuary rich ceremonies unfolded to whet the appetite for the life of Heaven; down in the nave the Lord's motley crew got on with their spiritual life as they chose, whether it was some harmless tramp snoring in a side chapel or Mrs. O'Shaughnessy causing mayhem as she battled against the flow to light that essential candle to St. Anthony of Padua. (Where are they now?) No one was ever told to SIT DOWN!

Do we want an odour-free Last Supper? Do we want a Feeding of the 5000 by ticket only? We can have them both. But by then those who most need feeding will have fled. DS