Then they convene press photographers and parade the suspect before them. The police hand the suspect a weapon to brandish (a gun for a robber, a tie for a man accused of strangling his wife) or a token of his crime – a pair of spectacles, perhaps, for someone who has burgled an optician. The procedure is known as the presentacion, and it is a hallowed tradition in Mexican crime reporting Police arrest a delinquent. Every week accused men and women agree to be photographed in incriminating poses for Chavez, the crime photographer of La Prensa, Mexico City’s leading tabloid newspaper.

THE MAN on the right is a Mexican who has been charged with murder; the man in the picture above, Salvador Chavez, is one of the tabloid photographers for whom he is posing. It may seem a foolish moment to feel the power of words, particularly such ancient ones; but when words fail, the bombs fall Eleison imas; miserere nobis Happy Easter.. In the words themselves are not only the bones of our language by which we assure ourselves of a tiny immortality every time we write a letter or speak our thoughts to those who will live after us; but also a moment of reconciliation, not just of the Great Schism, but also of the two cultures, the one of contemplation, the other of conquest and power.In Kosovo they will be mourning their dead by rubble-strewn graves, reconciliation as far away as resurrection. The Greek and the Latin: the two languages from which our civilisation sprung. I read them at my mother’s funeral in the depths of this winter, and once again in this last Holy Week of the millennium they would call and answer across the sanctuary. It’s a simple petition for mercy, but oh, the words in which it is sung: Agios o Theos: Sanctus Deus Agios ischyros: Sanctus fortis.

Agios athanatos, eleison imas: Sanctus immortalis, miserere nobis. It would be at the Good Friday Mass, during the Reproaches, when two choirs sing the simplest threefold invocation to the unnamed God, the holy, the mighty, the immortal. Why is it that I still worry that God will be angry with me for being, on impeccable intellectual grounds, an atheist? And why is it that, even though things are pretty OK at the moment, I know for sure that Rome, at Easter, would have me back again, absolute belief surging in my bosom?I even know the moment when this would happen. It was daily Mass and the breviary in bed, until I came to what I regard as my sense and decided, once again, that it was all a fable designed to make us feel better about being poor sods who had no idea that things could turn out like this.But there are two things that continue to puzzle me.

I am so glad that Jesus loves me, Jesus loves even me,” and every instinct urged me to tear my clothes off and leap from the organ loft, brandishing a giant phallus like a club and shouting, “Don’t be so bloody sure, you smug bastards! I’ve had your wives! I know your secrets!”Conflicted? I should say so, but the borne-up-by-invisible-hands stunt had me on my knees within hours. “I am so glad that Jesus loves me,” their little offering went, “Jesus loves me, Jesus loves me. The first hymn was by two prolific aesthetic criminals going under the names of Moody and Sankey, and you can just imagine them played by Ronald Fraser and Gordon Gostelow. And then the something comes along and bears you up, and you think: what’s going on?They say you should never talk about politics or religion, but it’s Easter Day, and, anyway, Tony Blair? William Hague? Is that, excuse me, it? So there I was, borne up, and for a while I thought: this must be the hand of God, which is a rather grandiose thing to think, rather like when I was much younger and stood in for the organist at the local Methodist church. It’s a leaky boat, hull rotting away, rudder gone, but we’re all in it together and only pride and hope keep its brave tattered sails filled.