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Roy Jenkins’ guest this week is one of five children of a Welsh Congregationalist policeman from Bridgend, and a French Roman Catholic who lived through the Nazi occupation of her homeland.  They met in the ruins of Berlin in 1945.

The Catholics did rather better from this union than the Nonconformists.  Dr Gemma Simmonds was educated by the religious order the Congregation of Jesus from the age of three and a half, and she entered the order at 18.

As a student in Cambridge, she was known for flying around the streets on her bike in full habit (dressed, as she’s put it, like a 17th century widow), and nearly 40 years on her schedule can still seem pretty breathless.  

She’s been a teacher and university chaplain, worked with street children in Brazil, spent 26 years as a volunteer chaplain at Holloway Prison.  She’s in demand as a writer, translator and broadcaster, and lectures and leads retreats around the world, for people from a range of traditions - Salvation Army officers in Canada, Pentecostal and Lutheran pastors in Sweden, Catholic teachers in the United States…and not least in Wales at the Jesuit retreat centre, of St.Beuno’s near St,Asaph.

Specialising in the spiritual formation of priests and of women entering religious orders, she’s passionate about promoting the recognition of women in the Catholic church, and is currently a senior lecturer at Heythrop College in the University of London, and director of the Religious Life Institute.

This programme was first broadcast in January 2017