Clouds of glory

Clouds of glory

It’s fifty years since Apollo 11 was launched from Cape Kennedy, taking a man to the moon for the first time. It might have been a scientific triumph but it played havoc with our understanding of what was going on when at the end of his earthly ministry the Lord Ascended into heaven. With the help of the mesmerising sixth-century Syriac illustration featured on this week’s cover, Erik Varden recalibrates our theological imagination.

John Baldovin’s defence of the Missal of Paul VI provoked a sharp letter from Joseph Shaw of the Latin Mass Society last week; on the Letters pages in this issue, several readers come to the defence of the Novus Ordo. Stephen Bullivant brings little comfort to either traditionalists or reformers: he shows that the collapse in Mass attendance was not the result of the liturgical reforms of Vatican II – the Council had been specifically intended to address the problem of plummeting levels of sacramental practice.

Our leader laments the Church’s catastrophic failure to share its leadership with women; and Melanie McDonagh is struck by how it was the parish sister who carried the show at her son’s Confirmation. Sara Maitland notices a beautiful and mysterious detail in the resurrection narrative in John’s gospel that has changed for ever how I imagine Easter morning, and in the third of our six-part series in which priests talk to Blanche Girouard about their hopes and fears, Anthony Cho discusses pre-sermon nerves, the challenge of celibacy, trying to get a parish group going, and the hurt caused by his encounters with racism.

As a new emperor is enthroned, old ghosts are coming back to haunt Japan; Kevin Rafferty fears that the country’s “no war” constitution is under threat. As twilight falls on Mrs May’s time in Downing Street, Peter Hennessy writes that the talk in Westminster is turning to what lessons might be learnt from the paralysing Brexit miasma; and the Jesuit director of the Vatican observatory, Guy Consolmagno, learns at first hand how astro-tourism has transformed the local economy in a village in New Zealand.

Reviewing a new survey of the global influence of Maoism, Chris Patten admits to a concern that the Vatican’s rapprochement with Beijing might be driven more by hope than realism; Lucy Popescu picks at a smorgasbord of novels in translation from Finnish, Jane Thynne enjoys Mark Haddon’s mash-up of myth and history, and Chris Nancollas is intrigued by the latest in what seems to be an unstoppable flow of new medical memoirs. In Arts, Joanna Moorhead speaks to the people behind the winning design for the largest Christian structure to be built in the UK for decades, and Lucy Lethbridge, Mark Lawson and D. J. Taylor select some of the best of current television, theatre and radio.

Christopher Lamb reports from Rome, where the rosary-wielding populist leader Matteo Salvini has been trying to provoke “The Enemy”, as Salvini's ally Steve Bannon has called Pope Francis. In seven pages of news, Christa Pongratz-Lippitt reports on the shocked reaction in Germany to the acquittal of the Austrian priest and CDF official Hermann Geissler of charges of solicitation during Confession; Nicholas Hudson, auxiliary bishop in Westminster, speaks to home news editor Liz Dodd about the funeral of Jean Vanier in the village in northern France where he had founded the first l’Arche community; and in News Briefing from Britain and Ireland its director tells us why the matchmaking service in Knock is being wound down.

I hope you enjoy the issue.

Brendan Walsh
Editor of The Tablet