THE Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States, the Most Revd Michael Curry, has spoken about his media prominence a year ago after the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex (News, 25 May 2018).

An estimated two billion people watched the ceremony worldwide, almost twice the number who watched the World Cup Final in the same year. Bishop Curry’s effusive sermon was the most talked-about element of the service, prompting 40,000 tweets a minute while he was speaking.

Earlier this month, he was awarded a special trustees award by the Sandford St Martin Trust. Speaking on behalf of his fellow trustees, Torin Douglas, the BBC’s former media correspondent, said that Bishop Curry’s address “wasn’t the shortest in the history of royal weddings . . . but it was one of the most memorable.”

In a video message of thanks, Bishop Curry spoke of the public attention that the sermon has prompted.

“I didn’t know how the sermon was received in any depth, in any real way, until I got to Heathrow, and all of a sudden people were taking my picture, and I couldn’t quite figure out why. . . I had walked through the airport before, and people didn’t take any pictures. What just happened?”

There followed a round of global media interviews. “All of that was wonderful, because it provided me with an opportunity to talk about Jesus of Nazareth and his way of love in contexts where I never would have had that opportunity before.”

But then, on TMZ, a station that majors on celebrity gossip, he was asked about his central message: “Can love really work, in a world of hard-headed politics?”

See how he answered here.