My first podcast

On its Catholic Society Podcasts page, Canmore has the talk I gave recently on the Church. There is one of my talks on the Faith website but the Canmore one is the first that is actually available for a genuine iTunes podcast.

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Cradle Catholic snobbery as ridiculous as any other kind

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It was not until my first year at University that I became aware that some converts were unhappy about making a qualitative distinction between converts and cradle Catholics. I was told that the comparison was usually to the disadvantage of the converts.

Until then, I had just admired converts because they had found their way to the faith and taken the trouble to go through whatever steps were deemed necessary in their local parish before being received into the Church. My youthful reading included John Henry Newman, GK Chesterton and Ronald Knox, all of whom I enjoyed immensely; they helped me to have a certain reverence for the category of people “converts” and it simply would not have occurred to me to think of someone as a second class citizen in the Church as a result of their having made a conscious adult decision to join it.

Later, I came to understand how much of a price some converts had paid in their family and social lives for becoming Catholic. As a priest, I have had the…
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Saint Ignatius on heresy, and the capsizing boat

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On the feast of St Ignatius, I offer my prayers and good wishes to some great Jesuits. Just off the top of my head, I think of Fr Joseph Fessio SJ the founder of Ignatius Press which has not only published the English translations of various works of Cardinal Ratzinger/Pope Benedict, but has also given a break for good Catholic authors both of theology and of Catholic fiction. Then there is Fr Bob Spitzer SJ, with whom I studied in Rome many years ago, and Fr Paul Mankowski SJ who has written some superb articles over the years. Here in England, I recall Fr Anthony Meredith SJ, the great fatherly commentator on the Fathers of Cappadocia and in Rome, there is Fr Gilles Pelland SJ, the fierce French-Canadian patristics scholar was a bit harsh when I first arrived in the Holy City, but seemed to soften a bit when after 5 years he seeme satisfied that, though English, I was not a modernist.

Many of my Jesuit priest friends and mentors have now reached “that night when no man can work” an…
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CD 291: Confession now I am older and have fewer temptations

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I go to Confession twice a year, at Easter and Christmas because I feel I should. My I find it difficult to know what to say as I no longer seem to be assailed by the temptations of earlier years. One priest told me rather irritably not to come to Confession if I had nothing to say.
I am sorry to hear that a priest was irritated with you. Say a prayer for him asking the Lord to give him the virtue of patience. I don’t agree with his advice. In your letter, you spoke of another priest who encouraged you to go to confession more frequently. He is on the right lines, I think. People who go to confession frequently usually remember more to confess. This is not because they are greater sinners but because their conscience becomes more sensitive to venial sins. This is not some kind of morbid “guilt” but a desire for holiness in small things. When you say that you do not have the temptations you used to have, perhaps you are thinking that the sacrament is only for mortal sins.

In fact it is…
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Was the Canaanite woman correcting Jesus’ mistakes?

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The story of the Canaanite woman (Matthew 15:21-28) is a good example of how there is not necessarily a plain and simple meaning in the scriptures. If we look at it purely on the surface we are not going to get anywhere fast by asking naively “What does this passage mean to me?”

First of all, we need to submit our minds to that of Christ made explicit in the magisterial teaching of the Church. From this source, we know that Jesus Christ is truly God made man, and that his humanity is perfect and free from sin. Following the settled teaching, we do well also to listen to St Thomas Aquinas who asks the question of whether Christ learned anything from man, and answered in the negative. (ST 3a q.12 art.3) As St Thomas says, Our Lord did advance in acquired knowledge from experience, as is affirmed in Luke 2.52, but not in His infused knowledge or (still less) His beatific knowledge (ST 3a q.12 art.2). Put in another way, Our Lord grew in human knowledge from experience, but did not grow …
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An edifying newsletter from a monastery with a welcome problem

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Silverstream Priory kindly send me their twelve page newsletter In Coenaculo. Parish priests receive a lot of newsletters and I am afraid that I don't tend to bother with most of them, but I find that news from Silverstream is always both encouraging and edifying. Father Prior (Mark Kirby OSB) has to preach sermons quite regularly for the clothing of new novices; he manages to come up with great personalised addresses each time. The diary is great to read, too. The newsletter is available as a pdf download at the website. Here is the link: In Coenaculo. Summer 2017 (pdf)

Silverstream has a serious problem, though. They have recently completed the construction of some new monastic cells and they are all now full. In the house Oratory, new members of the community have to sit in the window sills as there are not enough places for them.

(Just incidentally, as a matter of interest and nothing to do with any of this, of course, Silverstream celebrates the sacred Liturgy according to th…
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