During the first pandemic lockdown in 2020 when our roads and streets became traffic free, the lack of transport noise led many of us to appreciate the world of nature in ways we had never done before. In that Spring, we heard rapturous birdsong and on our daily bouts of exercise saw our surroundings in…
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Homily, Christ the King C 2022
In the past few months here in the UK we have witnessed the end of the reign of one monarch and the beginning of another. We now are getting used to having a King instead of a Queen, a new experience for those who were born during the 70 years of the late Queen Elizabeth’s…
Homily, First Sunday of Advent (A) 2022
With Christmas Day just four weeks away, this is the time of year when people buy books or tokens to give for Christmas gifts. And to help us choose what to buy, magazines and newspapers are choosing their Books of the Year as chosen by their critics. One book published recently that has caught my…
Homily 32nd Sunday C 2022
Is there such a thing as life after death? If there is, what will be the state of our relationships with the people we have known and loved here on earth? Will we still be married to our partners? Both the First Reading and the Gospel for today’s Mass deal with these questions. The first…
Asylum seekers and the policy that shames Britain
From The Editor, THE TABLET 3 November 2022 Suella Braverman has described the crossing of the English Channel by 40,000 refugees in small boats this year as an “invasion”. Even some in her own party deplore such language as inflammatory. Since returning to the job of home secretary last month, Braverman has been accused of…
Homily 31st Sunday (C) 2022
If you are a four month old baby here in the UK, since your birth you will have lived through four Chancellors, three Home Secetaries, three Prime Ministers and two monarchs. On Tuesday the UK got its youngest Prime Minister of modern times who, also, happens to be one of the shortest – he’s just…
Married Clergy?
For almost five decades now, the Movement for Married Clergy (MMaC) has been making the case for the ordination of married men to the Catholic priesthood (and also for priests who have married but wish to return to active ministry, to be allowed to do so). Over all this time, we have been trying to…
Homily, 30th Sunday C 2022
For the second Sunday running our Gospel reading today contains Jesus’ teaching on prayer. Last Sunday he encouraged us to be persistent in placing our needs before God. Today he speaks of the attitude he wants us to have when approaching God in prayer. He does this by telling a little story about how two…
Homily 29th Sunday of the Year C 2022
Once again, in today’s Gospel, we have St Luke presenting a woman as the heroine in a story told by Jesus. In this case, the woman, who is not named, is a widow. The word for “widow” in the Bible means “silent one” or “one unable to speak.” In the Mediterranean world of Jesus’ time…
Homily 27th Sunday C 2022
The question posed by the prophet in the first reading is the same as one asked in the last century by millions of Jews and other victims of the Nazis rampaging through Europe and perpetuating the Holocaust. It’s being asked today by Ukrainian Christians suffering at the hands of the invading Russian army. And it’s…
Sunday Mass: Saturday 4pm, Sunday 10am 