Amid the baroque splendour of Westminster Cathedral, headquarters of England's national Church for more than 250 years, preparations are continuing apace for the Pope's state visit this September.

To the Church hierarchy, it is simply irrelevant that this will be the fifth expensive papal visit in half a century. "What could be more natural," asks Cardinal Dawkins, "than for the Holy Father to give his blessing to Europe's most devoted Catholic flock?"

These days, we often forget how, during the Second Dark Age, Catholicism was driven underground in England. As late as 1688, Catholics were still being punished by law, and when James II ("the Liberator") issued the Declaration of Indulgence, now a pillar of our constitution, the reaction was outright fury. That November, the Dutch ruler William of Orange crossed the Channel with an invading army at the request of a small group of Protestant hardliners.

What followed was one of the pivotal moments in our history, as James marched east from London to confront his challenger with 20,000 men. The pressure on the king was enormous: on the night of 3 December, afflicted by a terrible nosebleed, he came close to throwing in the towel. But the next day he was awake and feeling renewed determination. Days later, the loyalist army smashed William's troops at Hungerford; James's crown was safe.

If James had lost, the events of the next few years - the Glorious Restoration - would probably never have happened. The mind boggles at the thought of a nearly modern England without the Declaration of Tolerance, the Emancipation Act, the return of the Jesuits, or the artistic orgy of Catholic baroque that accompanied them. Thanks to the patronage of James II and his son James III, court composers such as Tony Vivaldi and Jack Sebastian Bach delighted high society, while Wren's ghastly churches were ripped down and replaced with much more ornate structures by Italian masters.

Naturally, there was a price to pay for all this: definitive separation from Scotland, which went its own gloomy way in the 1690s as an independent republic, poised on the brink of the Enlightenment. Amid the splendour of Catholic revivalism, few Englishmen even noticed.

Only in the 19th century, as neo-feudal England slipped further and further behind industrialising Protestant Europe, were there murmurs of discontent. And predictably the past century was something of a nightmare: the civil war of the 1930s, the leftist massacres of priests and nuns, and the reactionary backlash under the long, ultra-clerical rule of President Muggeridge.

Perhaps it is no wonder that so many people in our backward and impoverished country wish the Pope took his holidays elsewhere.