One of the major themes running through St Luke’s Gospel, which we are following every Sunday this year except in Lent and Eastertide, is to be found in what the old man Simeon said to the parents of Jesus’ when they took him as an eight day old baby to the Temple. ‘This child’, he…
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Editorial: In penance for mishandled abuse cases, Benedict needs to give up ‘pope emeritus’
From the National Catholic Reporter (USA), 27 January 2022 In some ways, last week's news was not particularly new: another independent report about sex abuse in the Catholic Church. We've had them from Pennsylvania, from France, and now from Germany's Archdiocese of Munich-Freising, the latest with details of nearly 500 victims over 74 years. But this one…
Boris Johnson’s leadership crisis: New depths of incompetence and hypocrisy
By Julia Langdon in THE TABLET, 26 January 2022 And so it turns out that Michael Gove was right all along. Five long years ago, two weeks after the Brexit referendum, he announced, somewhat portentously: “I have come, reluctantly, to the conclusion that Boris cannot provide the leadership or build the team for the task…
Homily, Third Sunday (C) 2022
About 25 years or so after Christ’s resurrection, St Paul wrote two Letters or Epistles to the Christian community in Corinth, which he had founded. In the passage we are reading today, he tackles the problem of divisions that arose there after he left Corinth to found communities elsewhere. He appeals for unity by…
Homily, Second Sunday of the Year (C) 2022
In the Middle Ages Our Lady was often presented in art as holding in her arms the infant Jesus clutching a bunch of grapes. This was a reference to her presence at Christ’s first miracle (water becoming wine) at what was probably a family wedding. At the end of the same Gospel, Mary is present…
Homily, Baptism of Jesus (C) 2022
In just three short sentences we are presented in the Gospel (Luke 3:15-16, 21-22) with a most decisive moment in the life of Jesus – his baptism in the River Jordan. This event was so important that all four Gospels record it at some length. His baptism is the moment when Jesus became fully aware…
I now believe in the power of prayer – not because it works, but because it helps
by Lamorna Ash in THE GUARDIAN 25 December 2021 I keep a list of words that are strange to me. Any time I find one I half-know or do not recognise, it goes in the list. I find its existence reassuring, as if having more words at my disposal will make it easier to decode…
Homily, Second Sunday of Christmas 2022
I was eight or nine years of age when I was chosen, with a few of my school friends, to be an altar server in our local Church. With the priest facing the sanctuary wall, his back to the congregation, Mass then was mostly a private ritual conducted by the priest, entirely in Latin, which…
Homily, Christmas Day 2021
When the COVID pandemic first hit us in March last year, some of us here at Holy Name took inspiration and hope from the words of the poet Seamus Heaney: ‘If we can winter this out, we can summer anywhere’. Just when we thought the ‘summer’ had arrived, thanks to the invention of successful vaccines,…
All life’s roads don’t have to lead to London
James Marriott in THE TIMES, 23 December 2021I I spent most of my adolescence regretting whatever celestial filing error planted me in Newcastle upon Tyne, rather than (as the Almighty had surely intended, before some low-level cosmic bureaucrat messed things up) Hampstead or Islington. By the time I reached adulthood, I had rejected Newcastle so…
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