Posts By Date - Catholic Herald

March 30, 2024

Easter Vigil: We must roll away the stones in our hearts, preaches Pope Francis

March 30, 2024

ROME – Presiding over the Easter Vigil Mass on Saturday night Pope Francis drew particular attention to the concerns of the women who went to Jesus’s tomb after his crucifixion to anoint his body. He focused on how they were worried about the stone that would be blocking them from getting to the tomb. And

Joseph of Arimathæa artefact at V&A offers rare window into ‘how England really looked’ in Middle Ages

March 30, 2024

“And after this Joseph of Arimathæa, being a disciple of Jesus, but secretly for fear of the Jews, besought Pilate that he might take away the body of Jesus: and Pilate gave him leave” (John 19:38). The Victoria & Albert Museum has launched a campaign to save an exquisite 12th-century ivory carving of the Deposition

How the State failed ‘WASPI women’ and Secularism and Feminism failed all women

March 30, 2024

In re-reading Aemon Dufy’s Stripping of the Altars, I was very struck by the way in which rood screens incorporating Mary and John at the foot of the cross became so important. The restoration of the Catholic faith in Queen Mary’s reign saw one of the most substantial efforts to re-catholicise the parish churches involved, getting

Hilaire Belloc’s masterful ‘The Cruise of the Nona’ invites us to navigate life’s mysteries

March 30, 2024

“I am now off to sail the English seas again, and to pursue from thought to thought and from memory to memory such things as have occupied one human soul, and of these some will be of profit to one man and some to another, and most, I suppose, to none at all.“ So writes

Between the Cross and Resurrection: The Harrowing of Hell, according to J.R.R. Tolkien

March 30, 2024

Easter time seems to get me reflecting on Tolkien’s Catholic imagination. I have previously written about how the dynamic of grace was portrayed in the experiences of the hobbit-protagonists of Tolkien’s Middle Earth sagas. A key facilitator to this dynamic is, of course, the wizard Gandalf and the various ways in which he plays a

‘A hurricane of grief’: Contemplating the Passion at Bologna

March 30, 2024

When in Rome, do as the Romans do. When in Bologna, ask for ragù, but absolutely do not ask for it with spaghetti. Despite a certain dish being Italy’s best-known export since the Roman Empire, Sophia Loren, a few years ago the then-Mayor of Bologna, Virginio Merola, launched a culinary-awareness campaign in which he described