Posts By Date - Catholic Herald

January 01, 2024

Letter from the Editor: Jeremy Irons, the Cotswolds, charity and Da Vinci

January 01, 2024

On a chilly night early in December, I attended a wonderful charity dinner at Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire which raised money for WellChild, the national charity for very ill children with complex medical needs. The festive evening, hosted by Sudeley’s chatelaine, Elizabeth, Lady Ashcombe, included a walk through the “Spectacle of Light” gardens, where St

Lockdown lessons must be learned: don’t shut down the Mass

January 01, 2024

One of the most extraordinary aspects of lockdown during Covid was that it entailed the closure of churches. Catholics could not pray in churches even when they were empty because churches were put in the same category as beauty salons, pubs, cinemas and hairdressers as places where social distancing would be difficult. As a result,

Christians in the Holy Land

January 01, 2024

This Christmastide issue of the Catholic Herald is a reminder that, for Christians, the festive season is still festive. Secular society may regard New Year’s Day as the start of a regime of fast and abstinence – or diet and exercise – but it falls during the Twelve Days of Christmas, which means that for

‘On the ninth day of Christmas my true love sent to me’…Mrs Hanrahan’s recipe for Christmas pudding sauce

January 01, 2024

There will be many readers who are still making their way through their plum puddings. The following recipe for Mrs Hanrahan’s Sauce for Christmas pudding comes from Darina Allen’s A Simply Delicious Christmas. This delicious sauce will give extra oomph to pudding served on the Ninth Day of Christmas. The following makes a large quantity,

Mythmaking online and Marshall McLuhan

January 01, 2024

Nick Ripatrazone explores how Walter J Scheirer’s new book A History of Fake Things on the Internet engages with Marshall McLuhan’s ideas. ‘I see no possibility of a worldwide Luddite rebellion that will smash all machinery to bits,” said media theorist Marshall McLuhan in 1969, “so we might as well sit back and see what is

‘White Holes’, by Carlo Rovelli

January 01, 2024

White Holes Carlo Rovelli AllenLane, £14.99, 160 pages Carlo Rovelli is one of the most famous physicists alive today. Last year I discussed his book Anaximander with him; our conversation appeared in the April edition of the Catholic Herald. Since then, Rovelli has published White Holes. In both books, Rovelli’s fascination with physics is clearly apparent,

Scattering the ashes

January 01, 2024

Time was when Catholics simply didn’t do cremations, not least because it might complicate matters on the Day of Judgment, when the dead rise up bodily. Yet in countries such as Japan, cremation has long been accepted by the Church. We can rely on the omnipotence of God to reunite our atoms on the Last Day, no

Did the King’s speech bode well for his faithful subjects in 2024, a year that could prove momentous?

January 01, 2024

In the spirit of apocalyptic optimism, political pundits are prophesying not so much doom rather a great deal of civic excitement for this new year we are now embarking on. They have a point. The American election looks likely to shake America, and so also the West, to its core. The more imaginative commentators are

‘Catholicism in Numbers’: New data highlights the changing Catholic Church in Britain and Ireland

January 01, 2024

A new set of pastoral statistics regarding the Catholic Church in England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland has been released by the Catholic Record Society (CRS). They are freely available from the CRS website under a new project titled “Catholicism in Numbers”. The project begins with data collated by myself, and which draws information from

New Year’s Resolutions from Catholic Herald friends and contributors

January 01, 2024

Fr Timothy Radcliffe, OP: My New Year’s resolution is to listen to more music, especially classical music. Beauty has its own authority, offering us “the light we cannot see” as in the marvellous novel by Anthony Doerr. It gives us a glimpse beyond the veil, of the peace and homeland for which we long. Anyway,

‘On the eighth day of Christmas my true love sent to me’…Fireworks followed by the dawn of New Year’s Day

January 01, 2024

It is New Year’s Day. Midnight has been marked with the usual eruption of noise. If there was silence in heaven for half an hour, there was limitless noise in the city for that same period. The sky filled with fireworks, the air with their smell, one’s ears with the thump of the explosions. In