Gavin Ashenden, Author at Catholic Herald

Gavin Ashenden

September 21, 2023

Her face was etched with that deep grief that you see masking the expression of a widow in the first few days of shock after the death of her husband. She had sat rather uncomfortably through Mass. She was Church of England, she said, but her late husband was a non-observant Catholic. His body was

The inhumanity of banning conversion therapy

September 18, 2023

News has broken that the government is beginning to think again about bringing forward legislation to ban so-called conversion therapy, if only because of the obvious and tragic consequences thrown up by the misery and confusion of transgenderism. This may be a pragmatic response. But there is an ideological, philosophical and moral agenda that has been

How a persecuted Dutch family found asylum in Poland

September 12, 2023

The fate of children takes a particular centre-stage in the Gospels. Jesus articulates ethics that warn in the starkest terms about the importance of protecting children. So it is perhaps not surprising that the treatment of children might become a battle ground in the struggle between the opposing cultures of a growing secularism and the residual

The transcendental character of an ancient abbey

September 01, 2023

In the forests of the Thar valley, in the shadow of Mont St Michel, lies the Abbaye de la Sainte-Trinité de La Lucerne D’Outremer. Built originally in the 11th century (in the Premonstatensian style) it has flourished, collapsed and been rebuilt over the centuries. During the French revolution it was supressed and turned into a cotton mill.

How good was Good Queen Bess?

August 31, 2023

An ex-Anglican re-learns history. It is surprising how many things we accept second hand and assume they are true without questioning them. In my case, the process of becoming a Catholic has meant re-learning my history. This is embarrassing. I considered myself an amateur but relatively well informed historian. So as someone who is constantly

The Catholic response to protest

August 30, 2023

Piety and prayer may be more effective than demonstrations on the streets. In Wareham, Dorset, there is an Anglican curate, the Revd Hilary Bond, who sets out to keep on getting arrested by the police as she demonstrates against climate change. She explained her motivation to the audience of Radio 4’s “Beyond Belief” programme. It

Synodality: a revolution ‘to change radically the Church’s self-understanding’

August 24, 2023

Diane Montagna’s recent article presenting the ground-breaking book “The Synodal Process is a Pandora’s Box”, complete with a foreword by Cardinal Burke, was rightly disturbing. In it we are all presented with the challenging call of Burke to the Church to resist the processes of Synodality that he and the authors claim are intended to

What do young people actually want? The lessons of Lisbon and the Tupperware Tabernacle

August 11, 2023

World Youth Day was an astonishing and wonderful event. It gathered something like 1.5 million young Catholics together in Lisbon. If the world’s media failed to respond with the interest and astonishment that it deserved then Catholics have celebrated it with respect and appreciation, both to those who came and for those who organized it.

The unexpected return of Christian ethics

August 10, 2023

The Church has been fighting a losing battle in the West over culture, belief and ethics. But rather surprisingly, there are reasons for thinking this may be the moment for a fight-back; a re-energising of the Church’s conviction that Truth matters and the cost of rejecting the Christian vision of truth and ethics has been fatal to

Clerical eco-activists and taking God’s name in vain

August 03, 2023

It is not easy to watch pictures of an elderly protestant clergywoman, sporting her dog collar, being arrested for breaching the peace as she disrupts traffic, as the Rev’d Sue Parfitt did. Or a dignified clerical grandfather from Macclesfield, the Rev’d Bill White, being carted off by uniformed police. Two sets of uniforms, one representing

Climate alarmism is the modern day paganism

July 27, 2023

Chesterton and Voltaire gave us due warning. “He who does not believe in God will believe in anything,” stated the former, while the latter said: “and if God did not exist, we would need to invent him.” And together these aphorisms may explain why modern campaigning groups are beginning to look not so much like religious movements as like

How devotion to the Mother of God helps us to better know God as ‘Our Father’

July 18, 2023

Carol Kellas, writing from Croydon to the Times’ Letters page recently commented on the exciting idea pitched by the Anglican Archbishop of York that the Church should re-think calling God our “Father”. The Most Rev. Stephen Cottrell wanted to represent those people who had had poor fathers. For them the association might be toxic. “Sir

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