Homily of Cardinal Nichols at his Golden Jubilee Mass, 21 December 2019 Year by year, and increasingly so, I love hearing the first Reading of our Mass today, from the Song of Songs. It is so full of emotion and of the language of love. I hear my Beloved. See how he comes leaping on…
Author: Fr Michael Campion
People who sneer at tin-openers should can it
From Carol Midgley in THE TIMES, 6 January 2020 Sorry to dazzle you with sheer glamour but my first purchase of 2020 was a tin-opener. Quite a snazzy one, too: £8 and promising easy handling if I get arthritis, so there’s much to look forward to there. But people said: “Oh. You know that owning…
Homily, Epiphany 2020
The visit of the Magi was the first public revelation or appearance of Jesus. It is symbolically enacted in the crib before our altar. In addition to Mary, Joseph, the shepherds and some animals (including the Holy Name rabbit), the figures of three Magi are kneeling in homage before the Infant Jesus. In the cultural…
Boris Johnson and the Churchill factor
What does Boris Johnson stand for? Perhaps his admiration for Britain’s wartime leader reveals some clues as to where the new prime minister will take the country in the 2020s By Jimmy Burns in THE TABLET, 2 January 2020 I first met Boris Johnson in early 1988. Johnson was a slightly chubby trainee reporter with…
Wave your arms, kick your feet, do the 2020
By Garrison Keillor I don’t do New Year’s Eve anymore because the parties never were that much fun and we wound up trapped in corners in the usual intense conversations (kids, schools, political lunacy), and some people drank too much and forced the rest of us into a guardianship role and the sheer awkwardness of…
This has been the decade of disconnection
By Clare Foges in THE TIMES, 30 December 2019 The Roaring Twenties, the Warring Forties, the Swinging Sixties; what is the essence of the decade that ends tomorrow? When we think of decades gone — whether we lived in them or not — they have distinctive moods, colours: the sepia-tinted Seventies, the brash Eighties. This…
Sparkling service? Forget it if you’re elderly
By Edward Lucas in THE TIMES, 30 December 2019 I offer a new year’s resolution for anyone who provides a product or service to old people. Before designing anything, try it yourself. But not with your youthful or prime-of-life limbs, senses and reflexes. Wear thick, uncomfortable (preferably painful) gloves to mimic the effect of weak,…
Homily, Christmas 2019
At this time here in the northern hemisphere the earth is furthest from the sun and we are enduring the shortest and coldest days of the year. For thousands of years our pagan ancestors used these winter days to celebrate and look forward to longer days and extended hours of sunlight. For them the end…
After Boris gets Brexit done, what’s next for Britain?
by Austen Ivereigh in AMERICA, The Jesuit Review, 20 December 20 Combining an appetite for power with ideological vagueness and counterintuitive alliances, the world’s most successful election-winning machine has done it again. Just as the Tory squires in the 19th century made common cause with angry workers against the rising middle class and their new-fangled…
The scriptural case for women deacons
By Micah D. Kiel in AMERICA, The Jesuit Review, 18 December 2019 The synod on the Pan-Amazonian region re-opened the question of whether women can be deacons in the church. But we can return to the beginning as we contemplate the future. The New Testament not only gives us women deacons, but we know one…
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