With its wonderful talent for tolerance the Vatican will forgive everything except genius. Now, more than a century after Oscar Wilde’s death, L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, finally welcomes Oscar along the difficult path towards the Promised Land. He didn’t make it easy: “I think that God”, he once said, “in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability”.

During his time at Magdalen College, Oxford, Wilde had been interested in the drama as well as the aestheticism of Roman Catholicism. It struck him as somehow more flamboyant than the dull Church of England: “Roman Catholicism is for saints and sinners alone — for respectable people, the Anglican Church will do.” And, on his deathbed, just in time, he raised his hand to show that he accepted baptism into the Roman Catholic Church.

It wasn’t just the Vatican that took a while to come round to Oscar Wilde. He was not commemorated in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey until 1995. Nobody denies that he wrote the wittiest, funniest, cleverest play in English. Nobody denies that he could load distilled wisdom into a paradox like nobody else. It wasn’t the work that was the problem, it was the life. A homosexual imprisoned for acts of gross indecency didn’t, for a long time, pass the audition for the Vatican or Poet’s Corner.

But now the Vatican has relented. No doubt Wilde himself would greet the news with a wry thought. But it is very probable that he would accept the olive branch. After all, as he said himself, “always forgive your enemies — nothing annoys them so much.”