Piers Paul Read, Author at Catholic Herald

Piers Paul Read

Piers Paul Read: Channel 4’s post-Christian culture

August 11, 2016

Last Monday, flicking through the channels on my television in search of BBC Two’s excellent programme on the Battle of the Somme, I found myself faced with an array of naked male buttocks. They were being assessed by two clothed women, one of whom had to select, through a process of elimination, which appealed to

Piers Paul Read: Why did Catholics vote to leave?

July 07, 2016

Last month I visited Thorens-Glières in the Savoyard Alps, the birthplace of St Francis de Sales. I have felt a particular devotion to this saint since first reading his Introduction to the Devout Life, which is so understanding of human frailty yet so uncompromising in the high standard of holiness to which he feels the

Piers Paul Read: The Europhile whose wisdom we need

June 09, 2016

Hugo Young was head boy at Ampleforth when I was a lowly fourth former. I never spoke to him when I was at school. I left prematurely at 16 (there were no girls) and, after three months cramming with a tutor in London and gaining a place at university, I went to live in Paris.

Piers Paul Read: Mercy can have victims, too

May 12, 2016

It is hard to know quite what to make of those ambiguous footnotes attached to passages in Amoris Laetitia about whether divorced and remarried Catholics should be admitted to the Eucharist. Overall, I take Pope Francis’s point that it jars to see smug bon chic, bon genre Catholics file up for Holy Communion while it is denied

Piers Paul Read: Graham Greene’s unexpected kindness

April 21, 2016

When I was a child, I envied my older brother and sister because their godfathers were famous. My brother Tom’s was Eric Gill, my sister Sophie’s was Graham Greene. Sophie’s was the most enviable, not just because Greene was the more famous but because he was also exotic. He went from one to another of

Piers Paul Read: Knights of war and peace

March 10, 2016

It is often said, following Voltaire’s quip about God, that if such-and-such did not exist it would have to be invented. This is not the case of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta. It is so particular and unusual and improbable that it would defy invention. How can it be that a military religious order

Piers Paul Read: When history is fiction

February 11, 2016

Last month, I delivered a lecture at Ushaw College at the invitation of the Centre of Catholic Studies, part of the department of theology at Durham University. Before delivering my lecture, I was given a tour and was astonished by Ushaw’s architectural and artistic treasures. They include chapels and liturgical artefacts designed by the Pugins,

Piers Paul Read: The Jewish stumbling block

January 21, 2016

Given the many different rites in the Catholic Church, one wonders why there is no Jewish rite, with a liturgy in Hebrew and the words of consecration in Aramaic, the language spoken by Christ. This thought came to me after reading the recent publication of the Vatican’s Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews. Published

No need for self-loathing

December 10, 2015

My 12-year-old granddaughter is studying German and, as part of an exchange arranged by her school, a girl from a Gymnasium in Bonn came to stay for 10 days. She was around the same age, unsophisticated in comparison with the west-London cool of my granddaughter. Her north European physiognomy reminded me of those enchanting Madonnas

How did we forget about hell?

January 16, 2013

Two theologians bear much of the blame, as a new book shows

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