By Nicola Woolcock, Education Correspondent, in THE TIMES, 3 May 2019 Being middle class is now seen as a sin rather than a virtue, the head of a private schools’ group said yesterday. Barnaby Lenon, the former headmaster of Harrow School, criticised the way in which parents were judged harshly for paying for their children’s education…
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THE ELECTION OF POPE FRANCIS: AN INSIDE ACCOUNT OF THE CONCLAVE THAT CHANGED HISTORY By Gerard O’Connell
By Michael Sean Winters in The National Catholic Reporter (USA), 29 April 2019 Somewhere out there is a cardinal who has excommunicated himself latae sententiae! That is the conclusion one draws from reading Gerard O'Connell's newly published The Election of Pope Francis: An Inside Account of the Conclave that Changed History. We all have theories about what…
Homily, Second Sunday of Easter (C) 2019
This Thursday will be the 500th anniversary of the death of Leonardo da Vinci, the Italian Renaissance master who died on 2 May 1519. Perhaps best known for his painting The Mona Lisa, Leonardo is widely considered to be one of the greatest polymaths in human history, being an inventor, artist, musician, architect, engineer, anatomist,…
The young are teaching us true leadership
By Alice Thomson in THE TIMES, 24 April 2019 Greta Thunberg has been derided as a “millenarian weirdo”. The campaigning Swedish schoolgirl is being called out by middle-aged men on social media for her “monotone voice” and hounded for the “look of apocalyptic dread in her eyes” as if she were some bizarre cult leader.…
If immigration was the problem, Brexit wasn’t a practical solution
By David Smith in THE TIMES, 24 April 2019 A bit of a debate has been running on Twitter about the extent to which the vote to leave the European Union was driven by immigration. It is unresolved: most of the evidence suggests that immigration was a key factor, but far from the only one,…
Bannon’s emerging anti-Francis movement threatens church unity
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…
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…
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