Posts By Date - Catholic Herald

July 03, 2023

HM The King, with Dr Kadiatu Kanneh Mason (left) and Wigmore Hall director John Gilhooly (right), presenting Royal Philharmonic Society Honorary Membership to Master of the King’s Music, Judith Weir. A keen-eyed visitor to St James’s Church in London’s Spanish Place might be able to pick out two stone crowns high up on the north

On Pilgrimage With: Emma Edwards

July 03, 2023

Where would you go? To Sénanque, in Provence, in its quiet valley right in the centre of the Luberon. It’s the place made famous by all the photographs of its gardens full of lavender. The Cistercians are still there, singing the sevenfold office every day. It’s a beautiful part of the world and it’d be

Episcopal hierarchy, not lay democracy: Bishop Schneider appeals to Pope Francis to rescind new synod norms

July 03, 2023

Bishop Athanasius Schneider is appealing to Pope Francis to rescind new norms that grant equal voting rights to bishops and laity at the October 2023 Synod on Synodality in Rome, saying they are a “radical novelty” that undermine the Church by “conforming it more to a Protestant or even secular model”. The norms, issued on April

Our free will may seem obvious, but philosophers and scientists challenge it

July 03, 2023

It’s my decision – or is it? This month, I’ve decided to write about free will. I could have chosen to write about other topics, and if you want to know what these might have been, then you’ll have to wait for future issues of the Catholic Herald. But the claim that I could have

The joys of conviviality

July 03, 2023

Mark the calendar: I have been to Cambridge, having taken up a kind invitation from Piers Brendon, one of our reviewers, to have lunch with him at Churchill College. Apart from his company and conversation I wanted to hear more about the book he is writing about his friend Tom Sharpe, the great novelist and

Perhaps I should leave teaching to the trained professionals

July 03, 2023

I have sat in numerous hospital waiting rooms over the past few weeks trying to get to the bottom of why one of my children spends most of the night crying and complaining of leg pain. I had heard of these things called “growing pains”, but never realised they literally keep your child and indeed

Synodality, ‘Instrumentum Laboris’ and the culture wars

July 03, 2023

It was forty years ago that I walked into an Anglican Communion service in Canada and encountered my first Anglican woman priest in the liturgy. I was rather excited. I was not long out of Anglican theological college and no one had quite understood what the fuss was all about. The issue about priesthood had

Vatican’s new doctrine chief Archbishop Fernández wrote book advising couples to kiss during sex

July 03, 2023

The new head of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith is an Argentine archbishop who wrote a book advising couples to kiss during sexual intercourse if they wanted to stop their relationships from growing cold. Pope Francis announced on Saturday that Archbishop Víctor Manuel Fernández, 60, his longtime personal theologian and ghostwriter, is