Ambiguous tendencies

The much-anticipated Vatican guidelines for the admission of homosexuals to seminaries were finally released this week. But they seem to have raised more questions than answers as to their true meaning. Our Rome correspondent explains the thinking behind the thinking...

Fears, hopes and chastity

Many Church thinkers have spent much of this week poring over the Vatican Instruction on homosexual seminarians in an effort to find its true meaning. Here is a selection of their initial responses to the increasingly controversial document...

Lost champion

To football fans, George Best was a miracle worker. But in his decline into hedonism and his drawn-out public death he told us something about ourselves...

From the Orthodox East to Oxford Street

Today, Santa Claus is a symbol of the Yuletide consumer frenzy. However, he can trace his origins back to Byzantine Asia Minor, and the opportunist St Nicholas. His veneration was first marked on 6 December and later spread, via nineteenth-century New York, to our high streets...

Prescription for change

Scandal is knocking at the doors of Ampleforth, from allegations of fee-fixing to the results of a number of cases of sex abuse. The newly elected abbot, Cuthbert Madden, has been thrown in at the deep end. The former doctor tells Michael Hirst how he is coping...

Doing what comes naturally

Catholics have long struggled with the Church?s rejection of artificial contraception. Now, as an advocate of a natural method of family planning has discovered, a younger generation is turning to the Church?s ideas, inspired by a desire for a more holistic approach to health...

To one end, which is always present

For a visitor to a Carmelite monastery, the daily rhythm of prayer, reading and work creates an awareness of the layers of time ? liturgical, seasonal and calendar ? that gets clouded in everyday life. It allows a kind of freedom that no amount of choice and leisure can give...

A month of Sundays

One of the participants in the TV series The Monastery spends four weeks at St Hugh?s Charterhouse and discovers the liberating simplicity of Carthusian life...

Hope after the storm

When the tsunami hit Sri Lanka last year, one parish was able to respond quickly, supplying aid through well-established links...

Advent reflections

In the second of our reflections for Advent, Gerard W. Hughes SJ examines the connection between God?s Coming for all peoples and our experience of desire....

Windows onto Advent

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