Category Archives: Religion
Pope Francis can do without Mrs Fernandez
Trust Argentina’s President Cristina Fernandez to use her first audience with Pope Francis to press her country’s claim over the Falklands Islands. With the demagoguery that has has marked her time in office,Fernandez has seized the opportunity to try and restore her own dwindling popularity by raising a cause that Argentines have historically rallied around. This is the same President that has viewed Jorge Bergoglio as an opponent when he served as Cardinal Archbishop of Buenos Aires and has allowed her allies in the Argentine media to try and wreck …
Farm Street & The Gays
Today’s Guardian, under the headline ‘Church that turned away Wilde opens door to gay flock” may exaggerate a little by suggesting that something akin to a theological revolution is under way at the Jesuit London HQ, Farm Street Church. We are told that the church that 116 years ago refused the disgraced Oscar Wilde –post-trial on charges of sodomy and indecent assault-a request for a six-month retreat, will on an evening two Sundays from now welcome members of London’s Catholic gay community who will no longer be allowed to gather …
Letter to the Holy Spirit
The next Pope I am praying for…: Would be from the developing world, preferably a Jesuit, and not tied in an way to Opus Dei. Start by making a full public act of contrition for where Church has failed to act with sufficient sincerity and justice, and a true sense of God in all things. Carry out a detailed audit of the Vatican’s assets before deciding which can be channelled to mitigating world poverty and supporting major ‘green’ campaigns. Convene immediately a new Vatican Council ,with full representation of …
The dog’s dinner at St Paul’s
What a dog’s dinner the clerics of St Paul’s have made of it. The way they have been going about things shows at best naivety, at worst self-indulgence on an issue they could not have handled more pathetically. First let’s be clear: the British coalition government might be pretty awful in many respects but it is not some South American military junta nor some Middle Eastern dictator, nor is the Met police some repressive, torturing out-of-control secret security force, and nor for that matter are the guys camping outside St …
Lourdes revisited (with thanks to Fr Nicholas King S.J.)
A week away from one’s daily existence seems all that much longer a break when it has been spent in Lourdes and I write this now while the experience is not only still fresh in my mind but also hopefully resistant to old habits settling in again. Pilgrimage is a journey and a discovery, and how ever many times I return to this holy enclave in the foothills of the Pyrenees, the process endures- each trip providing both renewal and a fresh encounter in most unexpected ways. It is in …
Snow Prayer
So you haven’t been able to buy presents , quite on the industrial scale of previous years, or you might have missed an extra day or two at work, or the car you were driving is now abandoned on some minor road somewhere between Bath and Oxford, or your flight to some place in the sun has been grounded, and you’ve slept your last night , not in a manger, but on the hard floor of a crowded terminal. Well I can’t remember the last time I woke, as I did …
The wise Jesuit
I cannot recall ever having been present in a congregation that greeted a sermon by a Catholic priest with more deserving spontaneous applause, not in England at least. But applause was what Fr William Pearsall the Jesuit priest at the Church of the Immaculate Conception, Farm Street got this Sunday after speaking with sensitivity and wisdom about the upcoming Papal visit. Fr William began by telling us how a day earlier he had opened his office window and listened to the raucous song emanating from nearby Hyde Park. He heard …
Not in harmony with Catholic Voices
I’m listening withy difficulty I came away from last night’s debate at the Conway Hall on the upcoming Papal visit with an uneasy feeling I found myself quickly trying to dispel, drowning a pint with a sympathetic friend at a local pub. I write as a journalist, author and Catholic who found myself poorly represented by Austen Ivereigh and Fr Christopher Jamison OSB, coordinator and patron respectively of Catholic Voices before a packed audience, in which a majority appeared less than enamoured with our current Pope. Catholic Voices is a …
