Posts By Date - Catholic Herald

December 13, 2018

Bookshop outside Westminster Cathedral to close after 90 years

December 13, 2018

The CTS bookshop is the second Catholic shop to close in the area because of rising rent

December 13, 2018

What’s still unfinished in your life? Well, there’s always a lot that’s unfinished in everyone’s life. Nothing is ever really finished. Our lives, it seems, are simply interrupted by our dying. Most of us don’t complete our lives; we just run out of time. So consciously or unconsciously, we make a bucket list of things

Heretic of the week: James Pike

December 13, 2018

James Pike (1913-1969) had an enormous importance. Born and raised a Catholic (and believing he might have a vocation), Pike lost his faith studying under the Jesuits at the University of Santa Clara in the early 1930s. Moving on to UCLA, USC and Yale Law School, he served in naval intelligence during the Second World

Prize crossword 0572

December 13, 2018

Cryptic across 5 With sea being stormy, king conned fellow king in Assyria (10) 7 Book about one Viking’s end in Cornwall:… (6) 8 …accepts book is to be returned to a place in the wilderness (6) 9 Getting Ebay to deliver some bits, Asa fortified this place (4) 11 With rough perimeters, street’s picked

Mass readings

December 13, 2018

Ordinary Form Divine Office Week III Sunday, December 16: The Third Sunday of Advent (Gaudete Sunday) Zep 3:14-18A; Is 12:2-3, 4, 5-6; Phil 4:4-7; Lk 3:10-18 Monday, December 17: Weekday of Advent Gn 49:2, 8-10; Ps 72; Mt 1:1-17 Tuesday, December 18: Weekday of Advent Jer 23:5-8; Ps 72; Mt 1:18-25 Wednesday, December 19: Weekday

How to… Use Holy Water

December 13, 2018

Water covers two-thirds of the earth’s surface, and makes up almost the same proportion of the human body. No living thing, from the giant squid to the cactus pot plant, the African elephant to the amoeba, can survive without it. It’s fitting, then, that Our Lord instituted water as essential to baptism, and so to

A hymn to a great saint

December 13, 2018

I have been listening to a wonderful recording of an Advent carol service from King’s College, Cambridge. It begins with the hymn Come, Thou Redeemer of the Earth. With the regular “feet” of its iambic meter it makes a good processional. The choir starts singing at the west end of the chapel. Thus the music

Omnium Gatherum

December 13, 2018

”Gaudete!” (Rejoice!) is the nickname for this Third Sunday of Advent. I hope you will see lovely rose vestments in your churches. They remind us that our penitential preparation will soon be completed, so as to make our Christmas even brighter. Let’s look at the Collect for the Mass in the Roman Church’s traditional, Extraordinary

The Word this week

December 13, 2018

Third Sunday of Advent Zeph 3:14-18; Phil 4:4-7; Lk 3:10-18 (Year C) ”Truly, God is my salvation; I trust, I shall not fear. For the Lord is my strength, my song, he became my saviour. With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation.” The responsorial psalm articulates the mounting joy with which

The wit and wisdom of a superlative priest-writer

December 13, 2018

A Year with Fr Rutler By Fr George William Rutler Sophia Institute Press, 744pp, £200/$250 About time last year I flew to New York with a single purpose: to ask Fr George Rutler to write an “Agony Priest” column for the Catholic Herald. Considering Father’s decades as a columnist, television host, and general man-of-the-cloth about

The visions that lit up the trenches

December 13, 2018

A Supernatural War By Owen Davies OUP, 284pp, £20/$28 “There are no atheists in foxholes” – that’s the common perception of spirituality on the battlefields of the First World War. But it’s a lot more nuanced than that, according to social historian Owen Davies in his new book, subtitled Magic, Divination and Faith During the

A Reformation history with few villains

December 13, 2018

To Gain at Harvest: Portraits from the English Reformation By Jonathan Dean SCM Press, 220pp, £20/$35 In this elegantly written, heartfelt book, Jonathan Dean sings the praises of “10 remarkable figures” from the Reformation era. Everything is a little rose-tinted, but then these people are Dean’s heroes – “icons of faithfulness”, as he puts it