To pray for someone’s death is morally wrong, yet it will be difficult for many Roman Catholics to resist the temptation of wishing Pope Francis were off the scene just now.

Last Friday Francis crowned eight years of sniping at his Church’s more conservative or orthodox members, accusing them with monotonous regularity of being ‘rigid’ and ‘backward-looking’, by making it harder for them to attend the traditional Latin Mass, to which they are attached.