Posts By Date - Catholic Herald

December 06, 2018

After China deal, two underground bishops step down at Vatican’s request

December 06, 2018

Two underground bishops in China have agreed to step aside in favor of bishops of the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association, in the wake of a deal signed between the Holy See and the Chinese government. AsiaNews reported Dec. 13 that Bishop Vincent Guo Xijin of Mindong (Ningde) has agreed to become auxiliary bishop and that

Escaping the loneliness of modern art

December 06, 2018

Friar Alejandro Arias is a 22-year-old Conventual Franciscan who is in formation to be a Franciscan Brother. Originally from Colombia, Friar Alejandro began painting around the age of 12. Ten years later, and despite no formal training, he presented one of his works to the Habsburg family. “You don’t paint an icon: you write the story of

The most startling gesture on an opera stage in years

December 06, 2018

Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem was composed for the opening of the new Coventry Cathedral in 1963, as a choral work to be performed in concert; but the way it spikes the Latin Requiem texts with poetry by Wilfred Owen has a vivid sense of drama that occasionally encourages directors for the stage (and sometimes cinema)

The Brothers who would not be moved

December 06, 2018

With the beatification of the seven Trappist monks of Tibhirine (and 11 other male and female Religious killed during the civil war that raged in Algeria throughout the 1990s) due to take place on Saturday, December 8, I recently rewatched Of Gods and Men, the 2010 film about their tragic story. When I first watched

Houston, we have a problem

December 06, 2018

On November 28, District Attorney Brett Ligon of Montgomery County, Texas, led the raid on the chancery of Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of Houston-Galveston, the president of the US bishops’ conference, alongside Texas Rangers, the Conroe Police Department and an unnamed federal agency. The search warrant in Houston was issued to obtain evidence against Fr Manuel

Letters & emails

December 06, 2018

Why St John Vianney’s heart matters SIR – I can imagine an atheist reader scoffing if he stumbled on Michael Warren Davis’s account of the tour of St John Vianney’s heart in the United States (US news analysis, November 30). Why, I can hear him asking, would anyone think that a heart that stopped beating

The leader who signed his own death warrant

December 06, 2018

In the late autumn of 1921, Michael Collins, Arthur Griffith and their team of four others travelled to London to engage in talks with the British government about what we might now call a kind of “Irexit” – Ireland withdrawing from the United Kingdom. It followed a bitter Anglo-Irish war and a gradual realisation by

Many comedians have a Catholic background – and no wonder

December 06, 2018

Back when the United States was primarily dominated – both in numbers and in culture – by the WASPs, a strange paradox emerged which has remained with us ever since: whatever has passed during a given period as popular entertainment for the Sons of Puritans has been dominated by three marginal elements – blacks, Jews

Why they shouted ‘Heil Hitler’

December 06, 2018

In a village in Poland in 1942 you, as a member of a company of German soldiers, are raising your rifle at a crowd of women, children and the elderly. Your commander has given leave to any soldier not to take part in the massacre. Out of 500 soldiers only 15 choose to opt out:

Cardinal Dulles was a quintessentially American thinker

December 06, 2018

A quarter of a century of friendship with Cardinal Avery Dulles, SJ, who died 10 years ago this month, left me with many happy memories. Two of them involve his investiture as a cardinal in February 2001 and bring his accomplishment as a theologian into focus. On the evening of February 23, Cardinal Dulles celebrated

The values that defined Bush 41

December 06, 2018

George Herbert Walker Bush – the 41st US president – never wrote a post-presidential memoir. His son, George W Bush – the 43rd president – gave a possible explanation in the book he wrote instead, entitled 41: A Portrait of My Father. “Dorothy Walker Bush [41’s mother] was a woman of strong faith,” Bush 43

Newman’s greatest achievement: putting the personal over the abstract

December 06, 2018

What were Shakespeare’s greatest play and Leonardo’s greatest painting? The very questioning is contentious and sparks verbal wars, most violently among pedants. We then tread fields of landmines when looking for Newman’s greatest achievement, exclusive of the fundamental and definitive achievement of heroic sanctity. But just as Alexander Pope cautioned that fools rush in where