Pastor Iuventus, Author at Catholic Herald

Pastor Iuventus

January 28, 2016

Why I prayed for Fine Gael On a Friday night I head for the airport and a flight to Dublin. The mysteries of time and space I find slightly fearful when you can have tea in London and supper in Dublin. I am not sure that man was meant to travel that fast, or rather,

Pastor Iuventus

January 21, 2016

You should be able to hear a pin drop before Mass I noticed, out of the corner of the eye that watches the internet, that someone somewhere had said that we Catholics should be thanking God for the insights the Reformation brought us. I didn’t discover what these insights were, but I am sure that

Pastor Iuventus

January 14, 2016

What Catholics get wrong about mercy Thomas Merton says the saints weep for their sins more than we do because they remind them of God’s mercy. The regenerate St Augustine says to the Lord: “I count up your graces and your mercies, because you have melted my sins away as if they were ice. And

Pastor Iuventus

January 07, 2016

Stop playing liturgical roulette It was December 27 and twice in the course of two different programmes on the BBC I heard commentators musing on what this ‘‘limbo time between Christmas and New Year’’ is called. Listeners were invited to tweet their suggestions. Not being someone who tweets myself, I was reduced to squawking with

Pastor Iuventus

December 22, 2015

Let God touch your heart this Christmas I have been reading St Augustine’s tractate on the Prologue to St John’s Gospel. The great rhetorician ponders at length the meaning that words and the Word convey to human senses. He considers this first from the sense of hearing. We use a lot of words in everyday

Pastor Iuventus

December 17, 2015

To St Patrick’s, Soho, for another Nightfever at the start of the Year of Mercy. I approach through throngs of Christmas shoppers on Oxford Street and groups of young men in Santa hats outside pubs and bars, many already worse for wear, though it is barely 7pm. I feel anxious for the missionaries, those young

What ‘mercy’ actually means

December 10, 2015

Mercy is something more than charity

Pastor Iuventus

December 10, 2015

Treason, as a French revolutionary said, is just a matter of dates, and so once again I can bless my poor, benighted RE teachers who, when they might have been teaching me about Diwali or the evils of plastic carrier bags, were cruel enough to teach something called the Catechism. I have heard Catholics of

Pastor Iuventus

December 01, 2015

The Scripture readings for Advent are my favourite of the whole ecclesial year; that is to say, I find they most easily stir me to prayer. Perhaps that is because they are among the most poetic. By this, I mean that the language works on several levels, of which the literal is not always the

The wrong way to celebrate Advent

November 26, 2015

This is a time to prepare for the coming of Christ, not for the coming of Christmas

A community rebuilt from the ashes

October 08, 2015

Classrooms exploded as the pupils stood at the windows, killing them instantly

Pastor Iuventus: WiFi comes to a Saxon chapel

September 24, 2015

When first I started writing in the Catholic press some 20 summers ago, the fax was enjoying a brief hegemony as the acme of communications technology. Each week my copy chuntered through a sort of small electronic mangle which wrung out the typewritten words somewhere down the phone line miles away in a sub-editor’s office.

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