Just over 12 months ago, on Christmas Day 2021, the James Webb telescope was launched into space on a rocket from French Guiana. It eventually reached its destination in space nearly 1m miles beyond the earth. It’s the largest optical telescope in space and allows astronomers to view objects too old, distant or faint for other…
Blog
Homily, Baptism of the Lord 2022
It is generally understood that his baptism was the moment when Jesus became fully aware of his true identity – that is, who he truly was and what God was calling him to do. It may have taken some time for him to develop this understanding but it appears that his baptism was THE moment,…
Homily Christmas 2022
Christopher Reeve was an unknown Hollywood actor when he was chosen in 1978 to play the leading role of Superman in the films of the same name. Originally, Superman was a comic strip serialised in newspapers in the USA and beyond. (I read it every morning before going to Junior school and discussed it with…
Homily, Fourth Sunday of Advent A 2022
(Some of the details in this homily are provided the Biblical commentator John J Pilch in his ‘The Cultural World of Jesus’. He died in 2016.) Very few families in our day can be immune from the misunderstandings, tensions, divisions, breakdown, hostility or bitterness that can beset family relationships. Sadly, as we have seen in…
Homily, Third Sunday of Advent (A) 2022
There is a question, I think, that most of us ask ourselves at some stage in life and how we answer it shapes our lives. It is: “Is Jesus Christ who He says He is?” Many people respond with either Yes, he is, or No, he is not. However, for some of us there is…
Homily, Second Sunday of Advent A 2022
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…
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…
Sunday Mass: Saturday 4pm, Sunday 10am 