Niall Gooch, Author at Catholic Herald

Niall Gooch

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Articles

September 09, 2021

On the last day of the summer term, it was prize-giving at my children’s school. The chapel was full of youngsters, scrubbed and polished and shining in their best uniforms. The Head Boy and the Head Girl wore their gowns of office. The Headmaster and the Chairman of the Governors were also dressed for the

In praise of ‘an odd-looking building’

April 24, 2021

Westminster Cathedral is not only one of the finest churches in the capital, but one of London’s best buildings of any kind. The exterior is glorious, with its neo-Byzantine domes and bold patterning. The mosaic over the west door — liturgical west, at any rate — portraying Christ the King is quite unlike anything I’ve

In praise of church ladies

April 13, 2021

After Mass on Easter Sunday, a sweet elderly woman came up to us and gave each of my children £2 because they had been so well-behaved and because she wouldn’t have a chance to see her own grandchildren this Easter. I say this not to boast about my children’s behaviour in church, which is, shall

Investigating a local saint

April 09, 2021

About twenty minutes’ drive from my house is St Augustine’s golf course, near Ramsgate in Kent. If you make a mess of your approach to the green on the eighteenth hole, your ball may end up in a small enclosure between the fairway and a minor road. This enclosure, bound by an elderly wooden fence

A grammar of longing

April 01, 2021

It seems very apt somehow that some of the key milestones in the easing of the Covid-19 restrictions should fall around Easter. Monday of Holy Week saw the resumption of outdoor sport and the beginning of the end of the strict ban on close-quarters household mixing. The first Monday after the end of the Easter

Why should Catholics care about Jordan Peterson?

March 25, 2021

If you spend any time at all on social media, you have probably heard of Jordan Peterson, the Canadian academic. Until about five years ago he was a fairly obscure figure, outside of his field of psychology. He had a successful academic career in the US and Canada, and wrote a highly ambitious book of

Finding fault, seeking grievance

March 18, 2021

The prolific Evangelical writer Adrian Plass, best known for his gentle satires of Christian foibles, invents in one of his books a short ditty: Freely I confess my sins, For God has poured his grace in. But when another lists my faults, I want to smash his face in. Many a true word spoke in

The real solution to empty churches

March 11, 2021

A short video was doing the rounds on Twitter a few weeks back, showing the demolition of a French church, the Chapelle Saint Joseph, in Lille. The video shows the east end of the church already gone and the chancel gaping open, as a JCB with a long extendable arm crashes its way through the

Mass in the “new normal”

March 04, 2021

The Prime Minister says we are on our way back to normality. In England, the schools are back next Monday, and all being well outdoor sports will resume at the end of the month. In the week following the Easter Octave (which concludes on 11 April) gyms, shops and outdoor tourist attractions will reopen –

Counterfactuals

February 26, 2021

If Henry VIII had died in 1536, after the death of Anne Boleyn and before marrying his third wife Jane Seymour, England would have remained a Catholic country. Or would it? Perhaps there would have been a civil war in the 1540s instead of the 1640s, with England convulsed by the violet religious conflicts that

How I (mostly) stopped worrying and learned to love Pope Francis

February 18, 2021

I’ll be honest. It took me a while to warm to Pope Francis. I was a great fan of Benedict; I loved his scholarly precision and well-constructed arguments, his weighing of words and his attention to detail, and his liturgical conservatism. As well as all that, he was the Pope when I was received into

Miraculous ignorance

February 11, 2021

This week, I saw someone Tweet about the rapid development and rollout of vaccines against coronavirus that “We’re living through one of the greatest achievements in human history, never mind just scientific history”. To a certain kind of modern atheist mind, a ready-made narrative will leap into action when they reflect on such successes. Science

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Squabbling over the Old Rite

August 29, 2021

The internal debate about the Latin Mass has little effect on the Church’s outreach and is unlikely to reverse the decline of Catholicism in the West

The Poetry of The Mass

May 24, 2021

That many aspects of God’s nature and plans remain mysterious, at least during our earthly lives, has been a longstanding theme of Christian writing.

Counterfactuals

February 26, 2021

Counterfactuals are great fun -- and the beginning of the Reformation in England is packed with fascinating ones Niall Gooch likes to explore.

Can the scientific process be rescued from itself?

August 24, 2020

Science Fictions By Stuart Ritchie Bodley Head, 368pp, £18.99 When I gave talks on bioethical issues for the charity Life, for a while a staple of our discussions was the work of the Korean scientist Hwang Woo-Suk, who achieved international fame in 2004 for his apparent breakthroughs in embryonic stem cell technology. However, our presentations

Timelessness and strange traditions: What I love about cricket

July 17, 2020

Last year we finally left the Big Smoke and settled in rural Kent, bringing to an end my many years as a reluctant town mouse. Our village is straight from central casting: it has a 12th-century church next-door to a huge Georgian parsonage; you pass between the churchyard and the latter’s considerable grounds through the

Scruton’s take on Wagner’s Parsifal: redemption without Christianity

May 16, 2020

Wagner was not a Christian believer, but remained fascinated by the rituals of the faith and the way in which it appeared to satisfy our deepest yearnings

Will having kids make you happy? That’s not the right question

May 04, 2020

Even if the outcome of having children is greater happiness, that is not its purpose

Wodehouse, Herriot and travel literature: The best books for lockdown

April 09, 2020

Well, here we all are. Confined to quarters. Recluses, by order of HM Government. No Mass, no pub, no meals out, no sports matches, no public gatherings. The Sealed Knot return to barracks and summer fete committees draw stumps. West London will no longer have to endure its annual invasion by Oxbridge hearties for the

The strange twilight of British conservatism

March 12, 2020

Small Men on the Wrong Side of History By Ed West Constable, 352pp, £20/$20.70 Even before the death of Sir Roger Scruton in January, it was not unusual to encounter thoughtful people on the political right who were worried about the future of conservatism as a serious intellectual endeavour. Since then, the problem has only become

So what if the Nativity story is embellished?

December 19, 2019

Apparently there is some scholarly debate over whether Jesus was really born in a stable. Close textual analysis, and careful study of the expectations and practices of Jews in 1st-century Palestine, allegedly suggest that rather than the draughty lean-to or chilly cave of the traditional imagination, Our Lady in fact gave birth in the more

Christians have committed terrible crimes over the centuries. Why is that?

March 28, 2019

During the Siege of Jerusalem, at the conclusion of the First Crusade in 1099, a priest led devotions on the Mount of Olives, attended by hundreds of Crusaders. After the Christian armies had captured the city, a thanksgiving procession to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre took place, attended by dozens of priests. In the

Ignore the critics. ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ is a wise tribute to everyday heroism

December 20, 2018

It’s almost Christmas, which means that somewhere a critic is sharpening his pen for that staple of Yuletide contrarianism, Your Beloved Festive Film Is Actually Bad. One classic that often comes in for this treatment is a favourite of mine, Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, and I’d like to offer the case for the

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