John Wilkins, who has died aged 85, was the leading secular British Roman Catholic commentator of the last 40 years.
As editor of the weekly Catholic magazine the Tablet, one of the oldest periodicals in the country, for nearly 22 years between 1982 and 2003, he was quite capable of infuriating the Vatican and the church’s more strident conservative polemicists with criticism of its reactionary stances on issues such as birth control, the place of women in the church, and ecumenism. Cardinal Basil Hume, the former leader of the church in England and Wales, once accused him of promoting a rival magisterium (church teaching).
