I believe that the Queen sends special letters to people who are 100 years old; I haven’t got one yet as you can guess. I’m not royalty by any means, but I conceived an idea of sending birthday letters to members of this parish and offering Mass for them around the day. It’s a side-effect of the parish census we…

Too lenient a punishment, said some. Too harsh, said others. A fair and proportionate decision made by Pope Francis, said Archbishop Leo Cushley. Yesterday’s decision by the Vatican regarding Cardinal Keith O’Brien made headlines across the country, and inevitably produced a wide range of comments. Those who made them did so from various points of view. Some had expected an…

Despite my deep interest in history, the commemoration of the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War last year prompted me to realise how little I knew about it. In order to fill in the gaps, I bought a book on the Great War and started reading it. Very soon I noticed a distinctive difference between what I thought…

The biblical readings we’ve just listened to are supposed to give me an easy ride either to moralistic rant based on the Ten Commandments (the first reading) or to a clichéd call for moralistic purging as derived from the Gospel reading. I considered that – by following either of these routes – I would be guaranteed the prospect of losing the…

The revelations in recent days about the so-called ‘Jihadi John’ have drawn our attention yet again to the process of the religious radicalisation of ordinary young people which turns them into murderous fanatics. Politicians, journalists, commentators and the general public try to understand why there are those ready to abandon their relative comforts in order to support an ideology which…