SPIRITED THINKING SINCE 1888
February 13, 2020
Bishop Barron: What I learned at St Paul’s tomb
February 13, 2020
I write these words on the airplane taking me home from my first visit as a bishop ad limina apostolorum (to the threshold of the apostles). This is the pilgrimage, required by canon law of every bishop, to pray at the tombs of St Peter and St Paul and to meet personally the successor of
What my husband’s great grandfather and Phillip Schofield have in common
February 13, 2020
“Coming out” used to mean attending a debutante’s ball. Nowadays, as we know, it means a person announcing that their sexual orientation is gay or “non binary”. The television presenter Phillip Schofield has taken the ceremony of “coming out” one step further – by making the announcement on live television. He has been hailed as
Raised Lutheran, I found my way to Anglo-Catholicism – before a final twist
February 13, 2020
Ever since the victory of Protestant Prussia over Catholic Austria at Königgrätz (Sadowa) in 1866, there has been talk in conservative-Protestant and liberal circles in German territories of the “ultramontanes”, those people who were guided by forces “beyond the Alps”. My conservative grandfather also spoke like this, his meaning clear: a vom Hagen is Prussian
England was cruelly wrenched from the Church – but the story isn’t over
February 13, 2020
Over the past two years, the statue of Our Lady of Walsingham has been visiting every Catholic cathedral in England with a mission to pray for the re-evangelisation and conversion of the country. The Dowry Tour culminates in Catholics in England being invited to renew their personal consecration to Our Lord and Our Lady. They
The couples who give thanks for Catholic dating apps
February 13, 2020
Superficial, creepy, useful just for a fling … dating apps are called all sorts of things, yet many happy marriages show Catholic online dating really works. Born into a family of nine children in the rural Midwest, Morgan, Cadence and Samara McManimon were all in their early 20s, with stable jobs and facing the challenge
Would I get 10 votes or 10,000? In Dún Laoghaire, impossible to say
February 13, 2020
It is a strange thing to belong to a country you had always imagined to be more or less normal – whatever that means – and then, all of a sudden, realise that it is anything but. For the past couple of weeks I have been doing something I never thought I would find myself
At the Irish elections, a Catholic vision was hard to find
February 13, 2020
Ireland has just voted in a new Dáil, and it’s one that represents a well and truly post-Catholic Ireland. If the recent same-sex marriage and abortion referendums were in part about rejecting Ireland’s Catholic past, the general election of 2020 felt like the one in which the Church and Catholicism were mostly beside the point.
Diary: A visit to a Jerusalem poet
February 13, 2020
Tel Aviv gleamed like a jewel beneath us as we landed at Ben Gurion Airport at night and went through Israeli border control. “Who invited you to Israel? And your wife, what does she do?” I had not been back to Israel since 1981. In Jerusalem, half an hour away by train, we unpacked at
Rwanda’s new cathedral will be built on the site of a notorious prison
February 13, 2020
The Catholic Church has sometimes had a tense relationship with the Rwandan government. But last month officials announced that they were donating a 14-acre plot for the construction of a new Catholic cathedral in the capital, Kigali. It will be built on land that was formerly occupied by one of the country’s largest and oldest
DRC’s president tries to win the Church over
February 13, 2020
When the Independent National Election Commission declared Félix Tshisekedi the winner of the presidential election in January 2019, the Catholic Church was swift to contest the outFélix Tshisekedicome. The then Archbishop Fridolin Ambongo Besungu of Kinshasa declared that he believed the true winner of the Democratic Republic of the Congo election was Tshisekedi’s rival, Martin
McCarrick’s coat of arms removed from Washington cathedral
February 13, 2020
Disgraced former archbishop Theodore McCarrick’s coat of arms has been earased from the Cathedral of St Matthew the Apostle in Washington, D.C.
The political battle over gender transitions for children is just getting started
February 13, 2020
With states across the country introducing bills to ban gender transitions for children, the issue of transgenderism, or as Church documents often call it, gender ideology, is heating up in the United States. As of late January, in eight states legislators had introduced bills to ban child gender transitions, with a handful of others likely
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