Niall Gooch, Author at Catholic Herald

Niall Gooch

May 18, 2017

Arriving in Durham late one March afternoon, I realised that if I was quick I could just make Evensong at the cathedral. It was well worth the brisk dash along the river. Responses by Tallis, psalms by Barber and Pergolesi’s piercing Stabat Mater Dolorosa as the closing anthem, sung by a visiting choir from a

What my baby son has taught me

July 21, 2016

Perhaps in anticipation of the lengthy debates over leave or remain that would rage a year later, my son took his time deciding to exit the womb, entering the world under the bright lights of an operating theatre a mere four days after my wife had first begun her labour. That period of four days

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It is right that Colston is gone – but mobs are an enemy of justice

June 09, 2020

Niall Gooch argues that protestors were right to topple the statue of Edward Colston, but that angry mobs are often an enemy of justice. So Edward Colston is gone. The statue of the man who made a great deal of money from the cruel trading of human beings was toppled from its plinth and hurled

Is all the world your stage?

June 01, 2020

Avoiding the pitfalls of performative piety in the social media age is not always easy. When I was a student – so long ago that we could smoke in pubs, submit handwritten essays, and make idiots of ourselves without it being recorded for all eternity on indestructible servers – I was an occasional attendee at

Why Christian smart art isn’t smart at all

May 31, 2020

Christian art shouldn’t be too smart – it takes away from the meaning, argues Niall Gooch. In March, a minor shrine at St. Mary’s, a CofE church in Kersey in Suffolk was finally rehallowed, a mere three and a half centuries after being destroyed by Roundhead soldiers during the Civil War. The BBC News website

January 01, 1970

In 1971, a petition was sent to Pope Paul VI, asking that Catholics in England and Wales be allowed to continue hearing the old Latin Mass, which had been formally replaced by a new order of Mass in English following the Second Vatican Council. The new Mass was simpler and more comprehensible but many felt

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