Vincent Nichols, Archbishop of Westminster, leader of Roman Catholics in England and Wales, is remembering his first parish, on the outskirts of industrial Wigan. "The church was built in the early 19th Century and its front looked just like a house. The church was hidden: there was no tower or steeple. It was the Roman Catholic Church re-emerging in England, but keeping a very low profile."
There will be nothing low profile about the state visit of Pope Benedict XVI to the United Kingdom on Thursday.
More than £20 million – £12 million of it from the British taxpayer – is being spent on the four-day tour, taking the pontiff from Edinburgh, where he will meet the Queen, on to Glasgow and then to London and Birmingham.
A mass for 80,000 people is being organised, police drivers are practising on the Popemobile at Hendon and anti-papists are preparing demonstrations against a man they regard as the reactionary head of a regressive global force.
Archbishop Nichols is the man preparing the way, the salesman for an event which, if polls are to be believed, is actively supported by at best a quarter of the population, and regarded with varying degrees of indifference or opposition by the rest.
Safe to say that Pope Benedict, the quintessential Vatican insider risen to ultimate earthly office, is a less sympathetic figure than John Paul II, who visited Britain in 1982.
A theological conservative, he has been accused of condemning the Catholic Church to increasing irrelevance in a liberalising world, while overseeing a cover-up in regard to sexual misconduct by clerics, particularly paedophilia.
Archbishop Nichols, who succeeded Cormac Murphy-O'Connor in 2009, has his work cut out. Lucky then, that he is a deft media performer, a Liverpudlian grammar school boy, ambitious but unburdened by pomposity, able to navigate the trickier stretches of Catholic doctrine. So first: the cost.
"This, remember, is a state visit – the Pope has been invited by the British Government. Benedict is the spiritual leader of a fifth of the world's population, and the Catholic Church is the world's second biggest development agency – this is a substantive visit.
The relationship with the Holy See is also Britain's oldest formal diplomatic relationship: we've been exchanging ambassadors since 1479. Don't forget, the last G8 meeting in the UK cost £28 million. Who's complaining about that?"
Quite a few, one would imagine. Is it difficult defending a man regarded by so many as reactionary?
"That's unfair. He is out there intellectually and spiritually. He engages with the contemporary world but retains an inner peace and a rooted spiritual life. He is a man of real poise, gentle and respectful.
"His view is that the Church should not be a closed place, trying to preserve tradition, but that it should be a luminous place. And he believes the only way the Church can shine is by being deeply rooted. People try to construct him as a conservative pope, but he's not. What he's trying to say is that, as a society, we need deep roots from which to draw this luminosity."
The issue of sexual misconduct is a running sore in the Catholic Church, as more and more examples of abuse by priests are made public. Will the Pope meet British victims?
"The pattern of the last four or five visits is very clear: the Pope has met victims of abuse. The rules surrounding those meetings are that they are not announced beforehand and that they are private. And those two rules operate this time as well."
The crimes of the past, he says, will not be repeated. "It is a difficult and painful issue. It is vital that we ask advice from people from outside the Church, and that they take the lead. The sexual abuse of children is the most hidden crime, and it's taken a long time to be understood.
"Let me give an example: there was a priest in Birmingham who in the late Sixties or early Seventies was reported to the police by the diocese and brought before the court. He was given a £600 fine and told not to offend again.
It wasn't just the Church that didn't understand the nature of the offender and the gravity of the offence. Remember, there was a movement in the Seventies to make sexual intercourse with minors of 14 legal. So there was a whole different culture.
"Now, that is no excuse at all for the way we didn't get it right, but we are now on the right road. I can assure people that children in the care of the Catholic Church, in schools and parishes, will be safeguarded. They can be confident of that."
Those who allege a global cover-up orchestrated by the Vatican fail to understand the devolved power structure in the Church, he says. "People think the Catholic Church is a big international concern with Pope as CEO. Until 2001 the responsibility for oversight of priests fell on the bishop, and that's where we got things wrong.
"It was mostly about bad judgment, not bad motives. There is within the Church a great tradition of forgiveness, of giving a person another chance and saying 'well, with prayer and help you will get over this'. We know that paedophilia is much more difficult than that to get over.
"I have learned that when I am in conversations with priests and those telling me about these things, I have to apply much stricter criteria about who I believe. Sometimes it's difficult to believe the stories of those who have been abused. Their parents find it difficult to believe; I have found it difficult to believe. And I have found myself too willing to believe what the priest who has offended says to me. That's why it's crucial to have a system that doesn't leave a bishop on his own."
The son of teachers, Vincent Nichols was a keen football supporter. He once talked of how God refused to leave him alone as he watched Liverpool from the Kop. Born 64 years ago in Crosby, he was educated at St Mary's Collge, a grammar school run by the infamously disciplinarian Christian Brothers, along with the future BBC director general, John Birt. Birt loathed the regime, but Nichols is less condemnatory.
"There was physical punishment," he once told the Liverpool Echo. "But it was never gratuitous. Punishments were always given for a reason."
As general secretary of the Catholic Bishops Conference of England and Wales in London, he worked closely with Cardinal Basil Hume, and is said to have hoped to succeed him. Instead, he was created Archbishop of Birmingham.
His mild, local-priestly manner belies a keen political ability. In 2006 he forced the Government to junk proposals to enforce by law quotas of pupils from non-faith backgrounds in faith schools.
His equally hard-fought campaign to exempt Catholic adoption agencies from rules enforcing equal treatment for gay prospective parents was less successful.
Should the Church one day accept the reality of gay partnerships? "I don't know. There is in the Book of Nature an inherent connection between human sexuality and procreation; and those two things cannot ultimately be totally separate. People who are of a homosexual orientation say: 'Well, hang on a minute. How is the Book of Nature written in me?' The most important thing the Christian tradition says is, don't see yourself simply as an isolated individual but as part of a wider family. The moral demands on all of us made by that tradition are difficult. That tradition says human sexuality is for an expression of total self-giving in fidelity in a way that is open to the creation of new life. Now, that's tough, that's a high ideal. I'm not sure many people have ever observed it in its totality, but it doesn't mean to say it has no sense."
The old language – of mortal sin, for example – was, he says, a misguided attempt to motivate the faithful.
"Fear is never a good motivation. The whole point of the Catholic journey is that it is a journey, and we try to hold together high ideals and understanding. That is the same for people who struggle in whatever way with their sexuality. It's an aim."
Cardinal Newman, father of modern Catholicism in England, is to be beatified – the third of four steps on the road to sainthood – by Pope Benedict at a mass in Birmingham. He is clearly an inspiring figure for his modern successor. Does he, leader of some five million English and Welsh Catholics, ever doubt the existence of God?
"Never. Newman has a wonderful phrase: trying to envisage the world without God would be like looking in a mirror and not seeing yourself. To look at this world and not have an instinct that there is something behind its majesty would be strange to me. But I accept that other people don't see it like that."
So he never doubts that after death he will live again? He pauses.
"No. I mean, that's a struggle. My older brother has just died, very suddenly. It's quite a shock when somebody that close just dies like that. The promise of Christ is that there is a fullness of life, not a repeat. Something that St Paul tells us is as different as a seed to a flower. Christ rose from the dead to tell us this is not the whole story. If life is just snuffed out like a candle then it has been a bit of a charade."
And his boss – is he infallible?
A wry smile: "The understanding of the Church is that when the Pope speaks definitely and in clear circumstances, and says 'this is the faith of the Church', then the gift of God is that this is not a mistake. But that is done in very strict circumstances which have not been claimed in the last three pontificates."
He remains confident about the Church in England and Wales. It will evolve, he says, but maintain its essential integrity.
"It is a long and winding road, but we are hanging on in there."
SIC: TG/UK