By the Editorial Staff of The National Catholic Reporter (USA), 23 April 2019 Pope Francis, known for kissing the feet of Muslims, warning about the dangers of fossil fuels, and speaking prophetically on the spiritual death of wall building, has earned a reputation as the anti-Trump. What we've learned about Donald Trump over the past…
Blog
Look up at the altar, where are the women?
By Phyllis Zagano in The National Catholic Reporter (USA), 22 April 2019 If you had the chance to attend Holy Week services in person or via television — and I hope you did — you probably noticed the more things change, the more they stay the same. It's a men's church. The clerics — all vested…
What kind of people throw rubbish out of their car window? It’s time to shame the litter louts
by India Knight in The Sunday Times Magazine, 21 April 2019 We were driving back from the supermarket one evening and the light and the hedgerows and the fields were so beautiful that we went the long way. The sky was pink. The lanes were empty. There were loads of hares. Pheasants were bumbling about…
Pomegranates and Easter
by Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times, 21 April 2019 The rediscovered Botticelli at Ranger’s House is very good news — not least for what it tells us about pomegranates this Easter Day. A good thing to do at Easter is to find an Old Master image of the baby Jesus sitting on his mother’s…
Homily, Maundy Thursday 2019
Streets in first century Palestine were not the clean and paved roads that we can take for granted today. They would have been rough and filled with human and animal waste, so much so that anyone walking them, mostly in sandals, would have filthy and very smelly feet. So when guests arrived at a house…
The old man manages a Manhattan Lenten meditation
By Garrison Keillor In church on Sunday, we sang a hymn unfamiliar to me in which we asked the Lord to deliver us from “love of pleasure,” which, as I sang it, I realized I have no intention of giving up. None. Okay, it’s Lent but I was raised fundamentalist and it took me a…
Homily, Palm Sunday (C) 2019
The second reading for our Mass on this Palm Sunday existed as a hymn in the early Church before St Paul adopted it for his letter to the Philippians. It opens with the declaration that although Jesus was ‘in the form of God’, i.e. divine, he did not remain in this condition, as was his…
Benedict’s letter about sex abuse crisis is a regrettable text
by Michael Sean Winters in The National Catholic Reporter (USA), 11 April 2019 When a friend first sent me Pope Emeritus Benedict's article about the root causes of clergy sex abuse, I thought the text was a hoax. Here, it seemed, was a caricature of both Joseph Ratzinger's once powerful intellect and of conservative explanations…
James Cracknell’s flaws as a husband helped to make him a great sportsman
By Matthew Syed in THE TIMES, 10 April 2019 Like many readers, I was struck by the piece by Beverley Turner on these pages on Monday. It was about the break-up of her marriage with James Cracknell, a story that some will feel should never have been aired publicly, but which I found wise and moving. Cracknell,…
Homily, The Fifth Sunday of Lent (C) 2019
A demonstration was held outside the Dorchester Hotel in London yesterday after the Sultan of Brunei – the owner of the hotel – and his regime passed a ‘death by stoning’ law as punishment for homosexuality in their country. Watching the TV News last night, I noticed that one of the protesters carried a placard…
