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Pope Benedict Emeritus
Pope Benedict is very frail now – the first Pope Emeritus in the history of the Church, waiting in silence and peace for the Lord. He is part of our future. His wonderful intelligence has served and will continue to serve the Church: science and religion, physics and metaphysics, thought and prayer, the beauty of…
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“Small Is Beautiful” – E. F. Schumacher
A good business makes a fair profit so that it may continue to grow, pay fair wages/salaries to employees who feel appreciated and are happy, and serve the people who are assured of value and honesty. So simple – the economic theory I studied for A level and later taught. That three-part analysis is an…
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Rose
I read about a little girl, Rose her name. She was in her early teens. Her mother had died and Rose had taken her mother’s place in looking after the younger children, including the baby, Michael, just one year old. Her father desperately sought part-time work to try to earn enough for the family to…
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A Church In My Home (2)
Last week I told you about the tradition of the “poustinia” in the Russian Orthodox Church, a setting aside space for God. The original “space” was a comfortable hut in the forest near the village but when the idea came to Western Christianity that space became a small room in the house, even a corner…
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A Church In My Home (1)
A poustinia is a place set apart for God and comes from a tradition in the Russian Orthodox Church. Imagine a small hut in the woods or forest near the village. Someone wishing for a quiet time with God would live in that hut, even for a few days, trusting the community to bring meals…
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St Hugh Of Lincoln School
I don’t like exams. Students freeze, questions can be complicated, markers and adjudicators differ and the students are crammed to produce good results in order to justify high school fees. “Exam factory” said one student to me who reached Cambridge University from his expensively selective public school “and I hated it there. We were exam…
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Compassion For All
I wrote a story about dying and coming before God. I was welcomed but warned I would not be happy. There would be so many regrets and as I looked back at life and understood I might have done so much more. Would I like to return and do that much more? I was startled…
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Stella Maris – Apostleship of the Sea
Today is Sea Sunday, a special time for Stella Maris (formerly called the Apostleship of the Sea), the official maritime welfare agency of the Catholic Church. This is the day every year when the church celebrates and prays for all those who live and work at sea. As a global maritime charity, Stella Maris has…
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Titanic Covid
The Ship of State sailed serenely on its way, hiding its inner workings from well-paying and lower-deck passengers alike. Lower deck were paying basic, hoping to begin a better life when the ship made shore; the well-paying were the real passengers and their return journeys would give them dinner-party conversation for ever – including the…
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Holy Communion For The Sick
In the early days of the Church the community would gather at home on the Lord’s Day, the Eighth day, the day after the Sabbath (they were still faithful members of Synagogue and Temple) and celebrate the Eucharist. There were no church buildings for a long time. All present received the sacrament and families would…
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Ask For Everything
A strange fable. A man died, came to the pearly gates, welcomed by St Peter who offered him a quick tour before he met God who was lovingly busy with a group of war victims, refugees, exiles, cruelly imprisoned, consoling them “and showing them how to make heaven of earth when they had had little…
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G7 Nation Leaders
Four of the seven heads of government at the G7 are Catholic. We know that Joe Biden bases his world vision on Catholic Social Teaching – how about the others and the other three leaders? Should we expect these heads of government to follow Catholic teaching? Shall we condemn them if they don’t? Certainly, Biden…
Daily Prayers
Prayer is Love, I want to Love