An odd characteristic of Advent this year, which of course only occurs every few years, is that effectively it is only three weeks. The fourth week of Advent will end shortly after it has begun and we will then fall straight into Christmas Eve. This makes some of our reflection
Continue readingIf you go to weekday Mass now, towards the end of the Church’s liturgical year leading up to Advent, the Scripture readings day by day focus on particular themes such as the Last Judgment and martyrdom. Those from the Old Testament come from the latest books in that part of
Continue readingTHIS SUNDAY was designated earlier this year by Pope Francis as the first World Day of the Poor and it will be an annual observance on this Sunday in November. The announcement and the message were made in June on the feast of St Anthony of Padua (of whom we
Continue readingWell known verses from the second chapter of the book of Isaiah (repeated in the book of Micah) are sometimes used as a canticle in the Divine Office, in Morning Prayer which we say at the beginning of Mass in our religious communities: ‘They shall beat their swords into ploughshares,
Continue readingLAST WEEKEND the Holy See hosted in the Vatican an important international conference entitled (Re)Thinking Europe – A Christian Contribution to the Future of the European Project. It was sponsored by the Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the European Community. Among those who went from here were Francis Campbell,
Continue readingThese are extracts from a statement issued last week by the Bishops of England and Wales and of Scotland to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the 1967 Abortion Act: ‘Over the last fifty years, the bishops of our countries, along with many other people, have spoken consistently in favour of
Continue readingTHIS MONTH sees the five hundredth anniversary of the beginning of the Protestant Reformation in Europe. At the end of October 1517 the German Augustinian monk and professor Martin Luther published his Ninety Five Theses (allegedly also nailing them to the door of a church in Wittenberg) which began his
Continue readingONE of the distinctive things about Catholic Christianity is that we have something to say about virtually every moral or political issue in the world. Back at the end of 1996 in their teaching document The Common Good our bishops in this country memorably wrote, ‘Nothing is beyond the scope
Continue readingBACK IN 2004 the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales issued a very important teaching document, one of the most impressive documents of this kind to come from any of the churches in this country in recent years, the product both of deep theological reflection and of the experience
Continue readingMANY YEARS AGO I remember my late father, who was a Presbyterian from Northern Ireland, telling me that apparently at church services led by the Revd Dr Ian Paisley people were told by the legendary preacher just before the collection was taken that he didn’t want to hear any money
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