The Roman Mass: Early Christian Origins to Tridentine Reform Uwe Michael Lang Cambridge University Press, £89.99, 456 pages The Liturgical Movement and reforms of the Second Vatican Council sought a repristination of the textual sources and ritual practices of the Roman Rite. In Missale Romanum, his apostolic constitution promulgating the 1970 Roman Missal, Paul VI explained how

The Church’s tradition of abstinence reaches back much further than the 1960s, of course. A homily of Pope Gregory the Great is amongst the first sources for the current discipline. This in turn got bound into the earliest collections of the Church’s laws, ended up in the Corpus Iuris Canonici,and later found its way (by means of a reference, at least) into the 1917 and 1983 codes. But with the expansion of the Church’s mission field well beyond the familiar territories (and cuisines) of Europe, the definition of what is and what is not included in abstinence has shifted over time.

The embodiment of this personal journey, which I have always seen as growing from a personal bond with Pope Benedict, came in Anglicanorum coetibus in 2010. The personal ordinariates are the most tangible legacy of Benedict’s pontificate, permanently establishing in structures his liturgical and ecclesiological vision. This is of course why his loss is for us at once a cause for sadness and gratitude.

We will miss him immensely, and we mourn his passing, but we also know that the richness of his thought and his convictions continue in our communities, in our worship, and in the lives of thousands of former Anglicans who now rejoice in the full communion and peace of what St John Henry Newman calls “the one fold of the Redeemer”.

Fr James Bradley remembers a transformative evening in Hyde Park

Greenville, South Carolina, was not a place I knew before I came to America just over three-and-a-half years ago. It is a smart modern town within view of the Blue Ridge mountains, and a hub of the motor industry, playing home to both BMW and Michelin. Greenville is also home to Bob Jones University, a

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Pope Benedict XVI used the same term in the same context of the pastoral care of the divorced and remarried

Lilias Trotter is not a household name, but she almost was, and perhaps one day she might be. Born to a wealthy family in 1853, after a chance meeting in Venice she became a student of John Ruskin, who told her that she had the potential to become the greatest living painter. Her life is

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