Melanie McDonagh, Author at Catholic Herald

Melanie McDonagh

Those Victorian-style prayer cards can be intensely reassuring

August 19, 2020

There are half a dozen in front of me as I write – prayer cards, the kind of holy picture that people would once slip into their prayer books. Now that churchgoers tend not to use them, it’s hard to see their modern function, except in the form of remembrance cards for the dead, which

Even with all the regulations, it is such a relief to be back at Mass

July 06, 2020

Livestreamed Masses have been wonderful. But Catholicism is, after all, a touchy-feely religion

Why is a Conservative government pushing for no-fault divorce?

June 08, 2020

The Conservatives are bent on fast-tracking no-fault divorce; you have to wonder, what are the Tories for?

Galleries are putting their finest paintings online. Here are my top picks

June 03, 2020

Caravaggio, Doubting Thomas, 1601. Potsdam Bildergalerie This is the most disconcertingly carnal take on the encounter in the Gospel of John between Christ and St Thomas, who had declared that unless he had seen the marks in Christ’s side and hands, he would not believe he had risen. Here, with Caravaggio’s characteristic theatricality, Christ’s hand

Catholic bishops didn’t rush to judgment on Cummings. Wise move

May 26, 2020

The CofE hierarchy rushed to judgment before the full story had emerged. They should have counted to ten

Let’s bring back proper Christian names

May 06, 2020

X Æ A-12? Bring back the Napoleonic code

The reaction to Benedict’s ‘dictatorship’ comments just proves his point

May 05, 2020

The humanist ideologies have taken over the culture, and it's not a worldview that welcomes dissent

The German bishops are right to acknowledge their predecessors’ sins

May 04, 2020

If all the hierarchy had condemned the regime, the effects on German Catholics would have been incalculable

‘Farewell great painter…’ Why my favourite epitaph is in a Chiswick churchyard

January 23, 2020

Graveyards are, for those of a sombre bent, a useful way of reflecting on mortality. And the older they are, the better, though there’s an awful melancholy in the number of little graves of children in these places: “died young”, they say with heartbreaking brevity on gravestones in my home cemetery. But being buried in

The nation saying yes to babies

December 12, 2019

One of the most striking policies of the government of Hungary, under its controversial prime minister, Viktor Orbán, is that it encourages couples who want to have children, to have them. At a time when young woke people make principled decisions not to reproduce lest they damage the environment (see Prince Harry and Meghan), Hungary’s

What I found helpful about ‘mindfulness’

November 07, 2019

My only experience of Buddhism was during a visit to Bhutan years ago, to visit a friend who was doing voluntary work there. We travelled through as much of the country as we could manage in a fortnight. Inevitably we visited Buddhist monasteries. Some things have remained with me: the spectral vision of giant hands

The artist who saw the prophet Ezekiel in Peckham

September 19, 2019

The best known of Blake’s works is that bit of his poem on Milton which we know as Jerusalem – the anthem of the Women’s Institute, the raucous bit of the Last Night of the Proms. And being familiar, it’s quite probable we don’t actually register the words: “And did those feet in ancient times

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