Today Jesus makes very strong statements which seem to be at odds with what we think of his message of peace and reconciliation. How are we to reconcile the Jesus who preaches nonviolence in the Sermon on the Mount with the Jesus who says in today’s Gospel Do you think that I have come to…
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Don’t shoot the messenger, Your Eminence
From The Editor, THE TABLET, 17 August 2019 The gross evil of child sexual abuse by Catholic clergy would have gone unexposed had it not been for three principal agencies, all secular. In the lead were the media, both electronic and print. They were followed by the police and other statutory agencies; and then came…
Tackle clericalism first when attempting priesthood reform
By Fr Peter Daly in The National Catholic Reporter, 13 August 2019 If the priesthood is to be reformed, we must tackle the disease of clericalism. It won't be easy. Clericalism is so deeply ingrained in our structures and way of thinking that we almost can't imagine how things could be otherwise. In his 2018…
Homily, 19th Sunday of the Year C, 2019
In The Brothers Karamazov, the Russian novelist Feodor Dostoyevsky tells the tale of a guardian angel who wept before God because the woman in his charge had been so wicked that she was stuck in hell. When God asked if she had ever done anything good, the angel said she had once given an onion to…
Pew survey shows majority of Catholics don’t believe in ‘Real Presence’
by Mark Pattison, Catholic News Service in The National Catholic Reporter, 8 August 2019 WASHINGTON — A new study about the level of Catholic belief in the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist showed that a majority of Catholics do not believe that the bread and wine used at Mass become the body and blood of Christ. The…
From the people and of the people
From the Editor, THE TABLET, 8 August 2019 The victims and survivors of child sexual abuse committed by Catholic clergy are almost invariably Catholics themselves, at least at the time of the offence. And others in the household of the faith are wounded too – parents or siblings who are disgusted and angry with the…
Someday you’ll understand what I’m telling you
From the always wonderfully entertaining Garrison Keillor My birthday is this week, which I mention by way of saying, “Please. No gifts.” My love and I went through major downsizing in January and we are pretty much done with Things now, even a picture of a wilderness lake taken by you or an inspirational book…
Homily, 18th Sunday of the Year C, 2019
When the poet W B Yeats died in France in 1939, he was buried, as he requested, in a temporary grave before being repatriated to Ireland. The outbreak of the Second World War meant that repatriation was delayed until 1948. His remains now lie in the cemetery of the Protestant Church in Drumcliffe, County Sligo…
Let the bishops take on Boris: or are they ‘clerical fossils’?
By Andrew Pierce in THE TABLET, 24 July 2019 One enduring public image of Theresa May’s premiership will be her faded smile for photographers as she arrived at St Mary’s church in her Maidenhead constituency. The vicar’s daughter has never made any secret of her Christian faith. “I am a practising member of the Church…
Homily, 16th Sunday of the Year (C) 2019
In last Sunday’s Gospel about the Good Samaritan, we had Jesus’ teaching about the need to be actively involved in responding to the needs of others, whatever their race, culture, gender or ethnicity. That story of the Samaritan traveller is found only in St Luke’s Gospel as, indeed, is the story that immediately follows it…
