|
Sign up to our Weekly Newsletter.
 |
|
Timothy RadcliffeAs the scandal of child sexual abuse and its cover-up swirls around the Church, some Catholics are considering their options as regards their very membership of the institution. Here a former Master of the Dominicans explains why the Church is stuck with him, whatever happens Free
From the editor’s desk
Features
 People’s agenda finds favourAusten IvereighWith the general election now scheduled for 6 May attention is turning to politicians’ visions for society. Both the Conservative and Labour Parties are showing an interest in grass-roots action that can help renew local communities. They are ideas borrowed in large part from Catholic Social Teaching... |  Illusions of moralityAlasdair MacIntyreIn a series of lectures in Dublin first published in the middle of the nineteenth century under the title The Idea of a University, John Henry Newman examined the purpose of higher education, highlighting at one point the dangers of the then prevalent moral idealism. It is just as relevant today... |
Common law and the CuriaMichael Sean WintersThe Catholic Church in the United States is, again, engulfed in crisis. Twenty-five years after the depravity of a priest in Louisiana raised the issue of clergy sex abuse, the scandal is back and reverberating in Rome. The US adversarial legal system is playing a significant role in driving events...
|  Passionate about the new activismJames PurnellA record number of MPs are to stand down at the general election on 6 May. One of them, a former Cabinet Minister, is filling the gap with an enthusiastic interest in community organising – neighbourhood action which, he says, can transform the political process... |
Human actions done divinelyDaniel McCarthyGod does divine actions humanly and the faithful do human actions divinely. Human maturation, from a Christian perspective, says Daniel McCarthy, concerns how God acts on our behalf by human means and how our actions come to embody God’s actions for the good of others...
|  News on your doorstepAndy BullLocal newspapers have historically not only kept people informed but helped maintain a healthy local democracy. Now many have been forced to close. Could ‘citizen journalism’, making use of websites and blogs, step in to boost a community’s identity?... |
One with usJames LeachmanChrist’s real presence in the Mass is one of the central mysteries of the Church. The sense of his presence can be sharpened by ritual that calls attention to this truth and by improving our understanding of the different ways he is with us...
| ‘We confess …’Christa Pongratz-LippittIn Vienna, the Church came face to face with the victims of clerical child abuse when Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, the city’s archbishop, led a service of lament and reconciliation marked by a remarkable degree of penitence and frankness...
|
|
|
|
Columnists
Catherine Pepinster‘We are all ultramontane in a way that would once never have been imagined’ Julia Langdon‘Would we rather have “St” Vince Cable as Chancellor if there were enough protest votes?’
|
Books and arts
Telling the truth, after a fashion Free
Burying the Bones: Pearl Buck’s life in China
Hilary Spurling
Who reads Pearl S. Buck nowadays? Not many. Yet for 30 years her novels sold in millions. She was a Nobel laureate (1938) and campaigner for civil rights; she had the ear of presidents. ... |
|
|
|
Can the Church support abuse victims on its own terms?
Elena Curti
The clear message that emerged from the symposium on child sexual abuse held in Rome from ... Is the Church too slow in recognising that academies are the future for Catholic schools?
Christopher Lamb
According to the chairman of governors at the Cardinal Vaughan School, west London, one ... Goodwin the scapegoat
Elena Curti
There was an old Sixties TV series, Branded, about a disgraced soldier that always began ...
|
|
|
