CRISPINA AND HER SISTERS: WOMEN AND AUTHORITY IN EARLY CHRISTIANITY By Christine Schenk, CSJ 480 pages; Fortress Press; 2017 Review by Laurie Brink in The National Catholic Reporter (USA), 11 July 2018 Is there such a thing as reverent glee? If so, then that's how I would have described St. Joseph Sr. Christine Schenk as…
Why the Church Should Change Her Mind on Priesthood, Sex and Gender
This is the text of the lecture by Terry Wright, Emeritus Professor of Literature at Newcastle University, given at Holy Name, Jesmond on Wednesday 4 July. Change is not a word that trips easily off the Catholic tongue. There’s a type of ultra-traditional Catholic, often active on social media, who argues that the Church has…
Medical Update
Thank you to everyone who has enquired about my progress and offered good wishes. At long, long last - after five months - I am free of the foot/leg cast and able to walk with the aid of an Aircast 'moon' boot. This allows you to walk, unlike a cast which restricts you to crutches,…
I’ve mastered the art of funerals
From Melanie Reid in THE TIMES, 9 June 2018: A friend I hadn’t seen for a while stopped to chat. He had a dilemma, he confessed. His wife’s friend’s husband had died, and his wife wanted him to go to the funeral. But the date was when he was away on a four-day trip he…
Pope Francis: the Church is ‘us who walk’
From THE TABLET, 6 June 2018: 'The Church is us who walk, us who are here in the square. It's everyone' Pope Francis has said the church should be understood not as a hierarchy but as “us who walk”. Continuing his series of reflections dedicated to the Sacrament of Confirmation, Francis told pilgrims gathered…
A plastic tax would slow the tide of poison
By Jenni Russell in THE TIMES, 24 May 2018 For millennia mankind has been using the sea as a giant trash bin. We could get away with that as long as what we threw out were the natural products of the earth. But in the past few decades that has…
Challenging Trump’s Christian Apologists
By E. J. Dionne Jr. in Commonweal (USA), 23 May 2018 Maybe it takes a royal wedding to offer lessons in what a good sermon sounds like. Maybe it takes one of the world’s most elitist institutions—a monarchy, for goodness’ sake—to provide a view of Christianity rooted not in conservative cultural warfare (or unrelenting support…
The pope says God made gay people just as we should be – here’s why his comments matter
From Ruth Hunt, chief executive of Stonewall UK, in THE GUARDIAN, 21 May 2018: It is immensely powerful to hear that Pope Francis, the leader of the Roman Catholic church, reportedly told Juan Carlos Cruz, a gay man: “God made you like this and loves you like this.” Cruz is a survivor of clerical abuse who…
Pope Francis tells gay man: ‘God made you like this’
From Stephanie Kirchgaessner in THE GUARDIAN, 20 May 2018: A survivor of clerical sexual abuse has said Pope Francis told him that God had made him gay and loved him, in arguably the most strikingly accepting comments about homosexuality to be uttered by the leader of the Roman Catholic church. Juan Carlos Cruz, who spoke privately…
Review: ‘Too Many Pills’ by James Le Fanu — stop taking the tablets
By Gavin Francis in THE TIMES, 19 May 2018: One of my elderly patients, a delightful housebound woman called Agnes, has very high blood pressure, a condition that puts her at an increased risk of stroke and heart attack. For years I attempted to reduce Agnes’s stroke risk with medications, but after a week or…
