Posts By Date - Catholic Herald

May 22, 2023

An old manor house on the road to Fátima has its own story of the miracles

May 22, 2023

How Nuno Vasconcelos, now in his fifties, came to quit his life as a banker to run the Quinta da Alcaidaria-Mór, his family’s historic Portuguese manor house near the Holy Shrine of Fátima, belongs in a Peter Mayle novel. In the 1980s, Mayle tapped into a middle-class escapist fantasy of swapping the rat race to

Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, by Nigel Biggar

May 22, 2023

Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning Nigel Biggar William Collins, £25, 480 pages Nigel Biggar’s Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning must rank as one of the most controversial books published this year. So contentious that its existence was temporarily uncertain after Biggar’s original publisher cancelled his contract, citing unfavourable “public feeling”. The greater controversy should be why a

Why the Book of Samuel is my favourite in the Bible, by Andrew Roberts

May 22, 2023

‘There was a certain man from Ramathaim, a Zuphite from the hill country of Ephraim, whose name was Elkanah son of Jeroham, the son of Elihu, the son of Tohu, the son of Zuph, an Ephraimite.” From the first line of Samuel, the reader is hooked. “There was a certain man” could be the opening of

Obituary: The Dowager Countess of Swinton, 1935-2023

May 22, 2023

Parliamentarian, Paralympian and campaigner. Better known through her parliamentary work as Baroness Masham of Ilton, the Dowager Countess of Swinton was a distinguished Para-lympian who in the course of three Paralympic Games – in Rome (1960), Tokyo (1964) and Tel Aviv (1968) – won gold, silver and bronze medals in both swimming and table tennis.

The Rossettis: Radical Romantics

May 22, 2023

The Rossettis at Tate Britain bears serious scrutiny, says Lucy Boswall. Beige walls, beige wood, beige carpet. The almost monochrome décor in the first room of The Rossettis at Tate Britain is so reminiscent of a high-end Indian restaurant that the absence of canned music is startling in itself. I was half-expecting a smiling man

How the stories circulating about St John Paul II are baseless speculation

May 22, 2023

Since March, Poland has witnessed an unprecedented attack on the reputation of St John Paul II. Up to that point, the Polish pope had enjoyed fairly widespread respect in his homeland, and even the critical liberal media had not been openly hostile to him. The climax of the attack came on March 8, with a

New observatory formed in Rome to study Marian apparitions

May 22, 2023

An institution has been formed in Rome to study alleged Marian apparitions and other supernatural phenomena in the Catholic Church. The International Observatory on Marian Apparitions and Mystical Phenomenon (OISA) was established in April and is part of the Pontifical International Marian Academy. The objective of the observatory is to research alleged Marian apparitions and other