The televised final of Myanmar’s Got Talent last year featured a mesmerising performance by Erasmus – the stage name of the American magician Angelo Stagnaro. Erasmus began his act by randomly selecting a volunteer: he did this by throwing 10 paper aeroplanes into the audience, one of which contained a message to come to the

In January, life in my parish of Turda – a scattered community in an impoverished part of the southern Philippines – went on as normal. We celebrat­ed our fiesta – the feast of St Joseph Frein­ademetz – in grand style. All our 13 mission stations, scattered around seven barangays (villages) and six sitios (hamlets) on a

On a Saturday morning in July, I stood for a few moments on the edge of the main road that runs from Slough to Maidenhead, somewhere between the site of the Taplow Giant Car Boot Sale and the Nike Factory Shop. And then, turning heel, I began walking south, away from the hum of traffic,

The church I grew up in was about as far from Catholicism as it is possible to get. From a very young age my parents took me to a local school hall every Sunday, where around 300 people would sit in a horseshoe-shaped arrangement, sing a spontaneously arranged medley of 1970s-style “praise choruses”, share testimonies

A journey to the Holy Land reminds us of where true life is found

This month marks the 10th ann­ivers­ary of Pope Benedict XVI’s historic visit to the United Kingdom.

Rome in August is always slow. Under the mid-August ferragosto holiday – the remote origins of which reach into Pagan antiquity – the city until very recently would become a ghost town. I recall one year – probably 2014, when Pope Francis went to South Korea for five days in August so we were all

Mesco dux Polonie baptizatur, (“Mieszko, the Prince of Poland, is baptised”) was the rather laconic phrase that hailed Poland’s adoption of Christianity in 966, the most crucial moment in Polish history. For, as it would subsequently turn out, there is perhaps no other country whose survival has been so bound up with the actions of

According to official statistics, nine in ten Poles are Catholic. But what does that mean in practice? I put that question to a group of other young Catholics in Kraków, the city where we live, and a long and heated discussion emerged. We all agreed that our faith has been greatly influenced by living in

2,000 artefacts shed light on the devotion of a recusant household

The survival of the thousands of artefacts recently recovered from the attic of Oxburgh Hall is remarkable

The Global God Divide is the Pew Research Foundation’s new report on religion. Most of us, without reading a word of it, would probably guess quite correctly what it says. Europeans, and people in related Anglophone countries (Canada and Australia) are less religious than anywhere else. Poorer countries care more about God than rich ones.