by Catherine Pepinster in THE TABLET, 11 November 2019 Lawyers acting for dozens of victims of child sexual abuse by Catholic priests have called for Cardinal Vincent Nichols to resign. The call came in a letter, published below and in The Tablet this week following the Cardinal’s lengthy evidence to the Independent Inquiry into Child…
Author: Fr. Michael Campion
The shocking lies of the election campaign, and why this matters
From Clifford Longley in THE TABLET, 9 November 2019 When Bill Deedes was appointed editor of The Daily Telegraph in 1974, he asked his proprietor, Lord Hartwell, if he had any guidance to give as to editorial policy. "Just give Conservative Central Office a ring," was his Lordship's advice. Lord Deedes, being a life-long Tory…
‘It might be a bestseller but we need a new version of the Bible – strictly for women’
By Caitlin Moran in The Times, 9 November 2019 Last week, I took a pleasant trot around the British Library’s Permanent Treasures exhibition. I don’t want to spoiler it for those who like to be viscerally, borderline dangerously surprised by literary displays, but there’s a lot of Bibles in it – printed, scribed, lavishly illuminated; in English, Hebrew and…
McAleese calls on Pope to do more for women
From THE TABLET, 8 November 2019 Former president of Ireland, Mary McAleese, has called for the “culture of deference” towards priesthood in a clericalised church to be stripped away and for women to insist on being listened to on equal terms. Speaking at a conference in Trinity College Dublin on "Women the Vatican Couldn’t Silence",…
Homily 32nd Sunday C 2019
It started, I think, with Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin. She’s an actress and he’s the front man for the band Coldplay. When these two people, who were married for 10 years, parted in 2014, they announced their split ‘consciously uncoupling’ ... not separating or divorcing but ‘consciously uncoupling’. This linguistic creativity continued last week…
Bird Brains
Leading Article in THE TIMES, 30 October 2019 We like to think of the robin as a quintessentially British bird. It has twice been voted the nation’s favourite and has posed its way on to countless Christmas cards. Yet the redbreast pottering about your garden could well have flown there from abroad. For the first…
Explainer: When can someone be denied the Eucharist?
By James T Keane in 'America', The Jesuit Review, 30 October 2019 Have the “wafer wars” returned? The recent news that former Vice President (and current presidential candidate) Joseph R. Biden was denied Communion at a Catholic church in South Carolina suggests that a neuralgic issue for Catholics has once again reared its head: When…
Homily, 30th Sunday C 2019
Little Jack Horner sat in the corner, eating his Christmas pie; He put in his thumb, and pulled out a plum, and said 'What a good boy am I!’ For the second Sunday running our Gospel contains Jesus’ teaching on prayer. Last Sunday he encouraged us to be persistent in placing our needs before God.…
Homily 29th Sunday of the Year C 2019
We have just heard Jesus tell a story about a widow who kept on nagging a judge until he heard her appeal for justice over a wrong done to her. To appreciate what she achieved and why Jesus chose her as an example, we need to be aware of what this widow was up against.…
Childless elderly are abandoned to their fate
From Jenni Russell in THE TIMES, 24 October 2019 Early this summer one of my friends caught a train to see her increasingly difficult and distant father. He is a proud and independent man in his eighties, a former successful businessman who has been living alone since his divorce 20 years ago. For months he…
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