Last weekend I had quite an interesting conversation at the dinner table. The topic put forward for discussion by my guest was a rather pessimistic view of the world order, where a small number of big companies are on the point of taking over control of the entire global market, from commodities to the food chain. Governments will become servile…
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Thanks to a stroke of extremely good luck combined with similarly extreme gesture of generosity, I’ve recently had the pleasure of watching an international football match from the stands. It was a welcome distraction that offered me the chance to have a mental rest from the very intensive and occasionally overwhelmingly busy time I’ve had ever since the beginning of…
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That story began when I was seven years old – or forty years ago, if you prefer to put it that way. Two man-made spacecrafts were launched into space in the August and September of 1977. Perhaps you may remember the old Mini Cooper – that’s one of those was roughly the weight and size of each spacecraft. Yet these…
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How did it come about that you are a believer, a Christian, a Catholic? Some of you will have been born into a Catholic family; some of you will have been raised as Catholics; some of you will have become Catholics later in life. These are the three main avenues, but undoubtedly there are many roads that each one of…
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Five hundred years ago a monk called passionately for reforms of the Catholic Church in order to return it to its evangelical roots. All his ‘Ninety-Five Theses’ were summarily rejected, and the monk in question was urged by Pope Leo X and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V to follow suit. He refused and, as a consequence, he was excommunicated…