| Vagary of the Vatican's instruction Free
IT IS NOT EASY to understand how the Vatican could issue an Instruction on homosexuality and the priesthood, long in preparation and much discussed and revised, that is still open to widely differing interpretations. The key passage declares that ... | |
|
Texts in full
Sexual abuse: a multi-faceted response
Cardinal Levada addresses Rome conference
"Toward Healing and Renewal" is the title given to this Symposium for Catholic Bishops and Religious Superiors on the Sexual Abuse of Minors. For leaders in the Church for whom this ... | Prayer for Queen's Diamond Jubilee
Chapter of St Paul's Cathedral issue text
The Chapter of St Paul's Cathedral has written a prayer for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee which will be used at the cathedral's service of thanksgiving on 5 June. The Archbishops of ... |
|
Features
Ambiguous tendencies Free Robert MickensThe 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...
| From the Orthodox East to Oxford StreetJeremy SealToday, 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...
|
Doing what comes naturallyCatherine PepinsterCatholics 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 presentLucy BeckettFor 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...
|
Prescription for changeMichael Hirst 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...
| Fears, hopes and chastityVariousMany 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...
|
A month of SundaysNicholas BuxtonOne 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...
| Advent reflectionsGerry W. Hughes SJIn 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....
|
Lost championJimmy BurnsTo 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...
| Hope after the stormUrsula MottWhen the tsunami hit Sri Lanka last year, one parish was able to respond quickly, supplying aid through well-established links...
|
|
|
|
Columnists
Madeleine Bunting ?Have we made a Faustian bargain? Have we traded in our dignity for a pay rise?? Libby Purves ?Consider the lilies ? they do not spend a lot of time filling in Revenue forms?
|
Books and arts
BOOKS OF THE YEAR Free
Our critics tell us what they have enjoyed reading most this year
Various
P.J. Kavanagh
Richard Bradford’s life of Philip Larkin, First Boredom, Then Fear (Peter Owen, £19.95) is a work of detection, relating Larkin’s poems to his ... |
|
|
|
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 ... The pain of being a coeliac Catholic
Sr M, guest contributor
"Whoever comes to me, I shall not turn (him) her away" (John 6:37). Many readers will recognise ...
|
|
