Anthony McCarthy, Author at Catholic Herald

Anthony McCarthy

The Temple Mount encapsulates the tragedy of religious conflict today

April 09, 2024

Easter is a good time to reflect on what the Temple Mount means for the three Abrahamic faiths, especially in the wake of the 7 October attack by Hamas on Israel and all that has come to pass since. While holy to so many different religious believers, the Temple Mount in Jerusalem has also long

The fiery death of self-immolation: a martyr’s moral clarity or misguided calumny?

March 25, 2024

As we enter Holy Week and commemorate the exemplary martyrdom, it seems that martyrdom in general – or a misplaced understanding of it – is reasserting itself. Last month, Aaron Bushnell, a 25-year-old US airman, doused himself with liquid and set himself on fire outside Israel’s embassy in Washington, DC. In a livestream of the event, he

As with the Sexual Revolution, we must heed ‘slippery slope’ warnings about assisted suicide

January 16, 2024

There are determined moves to make assisted suicide legal in both the UK and in Ireland. In advance of any legal decision, the Irish Medical Council has removed the ban on participating in the “deliberate killing” of patients from its medical guidelines. In the UK, the Parliamentary Health and Social Care Committee has been taking

Exclusive Interview: author and historian Adam Zamoyski on Napoleon Bonaparte, the Enlightenment, the Catholic Church and Poland

December 14, 2023

Adam Zamoyski is a British historian of Polish origin. He has written numerous highly acclaimed books, including Poland: A History, and Holy Madness: Romantics, Patriots and Revolutionaries, 1776-1871. He is also an expert on Napoleon, having written the 2019 biography Napoleon: The Man Behind the Myth, 1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow and its sequel, Rites of Peace.

Ridley Scott’s ‘Napoleon’ manages the impressive feat of turning a ‘great man’ of history into an entirely uninteresting character

December 04, 2023

A sadly common feature of human beings is our ability to take something great and reduce it to something tawdry. Think of the wonder of air travel and our typical experience of airports. Think of the incomparable sacrifice of the Catholic Mass and the tawdry and commonplace ways in which it is all too often

Jordan Peterson is right: reason is dead and humanity is suffering as a result

November 06, 2023

An often-heard complaint is that people no longer know how to reason, debate or communicate successfully. Jordan Peterson has deplored this state of affairs in best-selling self-help books. He continually urges his audience to read Nietzsche as a way of understanding the nihilism which engulfs society in the 21st century. While approvingly citing Nietzsche’s dictum that “truth

30 years on, the lessons of ‘Veritatis Splendor’ are being ignored

October 24, 2023

In her ground-breaking paper ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ (1958), Elizabeth Anscombe famously stated “if someone really thinks, in advance, that it is open to question whether such an action as procuring the judicial execution of the innocent should be quite excluded from consideration – I do not want to argue with him; he shows a corrupt mind”. Her target

Interview with Piers Paul Read: ‘Pope Francis unquestionably provides good copy’

October 12, 2023

Piers Paul Read, the Catholic novelist and historian, has just released his new one-volume book A History of the Catholic Church (which can be bought here). Read is no stranger to non-fiction, having famously written Alive; The Story of the Andes Survivors (1974) as well books on the Templars, the Dreyfus Affair and Chernobyl. These historical investigations have

How the 60s paved the way for today’s culture wars

September 13, 2023

Philip Larkin, in Annus Mirabilis, tells us that: “Sexual intercourse began/In nineteen sixty-three/(which was rather late for me)/ Between the end of the ‘Chatterley; ban/And the Beatles’ first LP.” Capturing the spirit of the times, the poet goes on to note the recession of sexual shame and the mores that went with it: “Then all at once

Legalising euthanasia will ‘allow a destabilising exception to the principle that one may not kill the innocent’

August 23, 2023

Keir Starmer may become our next prime minister. In 2010, in his role as Director of Public Prosecutions, he issued guidelines concerning which cases of assisted suicide were more likely and which less likely to be prosecuted. Critics felt that this was a camel’s-nose-under-the-tent strategy, through which assisted suicide would be normalised in some cases because

The Lancet’s misguided invocation of Gramsci

August 15, 2023

Earlier this year, The Lancet, a 200-year-old medical journal, carried an editorial entitled, “We must engage in a war of position”. This unashamedly military term derives from the young leader of Italian Communism Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937). The editorial notes that Gramsci’s “great insight…was to recognise the way in which the dominant group uses culture to exert its controlling

The problems with Jacques Maritain’s political philosophy

August 09, 2023

Jacques Maritain, the most famous Thomist philosopher of his age, contributed to the drafting of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (1948). Three years later, the definitive expression of his political philosophy Man and the State was published. In that book Maritain recalls that people with very opposed ideologies had agreed a draft list of rights,

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