Catholicism

What prompted Vivien Leigh’s dark journey into madness?

7 September 2024 9:00 am

Did her many miscarriages so unhinge the beautiful actress that she ended up a sex-crazed harridan, screaming obscenities at those she loved?

Keep fun out of funerals

24 August 2024 9:00 am

There are two untraditional ways to take your leave of this world in Britain. The bleaker is the ‘direct cremation’…

The plotting to find the next Pope

27 July 2024 9:00 am

The Hollywood adaptation of Conclave, Robert Harris’s thriller about a conspiracy to rig a papal election, won’t be in cinemas…

We’re serviceless, stateless – and still off grid

6 July 2024 9:00 am

You need a personal public service number to get married in Ireland, but in order to get one, you need…

The trials and tribulations of getting a plumber

15 June 2024 9:00 am

‘Please, I’ll do anything,’ I told the plumber. ‘I’ll give you all the money I have if you just come…

I’m setting up a ‘climate crisis hub’

1 June 2024 9:00 am

‘We thought the house would make the most fantastic centre for climate action,’ I heard myself telling the cat rescue…

The firebrand preacher who put Martin Luther in the shade

17 February 2024 9:00 am

Andrew Drummond traces the short, turbulent career of Thomas Müntzer, the rabble-rousing revolutionary behind the peasants’ uprising in 1520s Germany

The FBI has a problem with Catholics

19 August 2023 9:00 am

  On board Aello She was built in 1921, a beautiful wooden ketch that is as graceful to look at…

Pope Benedict helped me know and love Christ

2 January 2023 4:40 am

It was Benedict XVI’s election as Pope, his speeches and his writings that prompted my conversion, and it was his…

Why has Oxford killed off a much-loved Catholic college?

1 October 2022 9:00 am

Why has Oxford killed off a much-loved Catholic college?

What is Pope Francis up to?

27 August 2022 4:00 pm

If you think your diary looks busy over the next few days, spare a thought for Pope Francis. The 85-year-old,…

Rocked by rebellion: the short, unhappy reign of Edward VI

20 August 2022 9:00 am

As Tory writers reflected on the safe passage of the Stuart dynasty through the Exclusion Crisis of 1679-81, an anonymous…

Why was Henrietta Maria, Charles I’s beautiful wife, so reviled?

20 August 2022 9:00 am

On 15 June 1645, as Thomas Fairfax’s soldiers picked over the scattered debris on the Naseby battlefield, they made a…

Three men on a pilgrimage: Haven, by Emma Donoghue, reviewed

13 August 2022 9:00 am

I used to envy Catholic novelists – Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, François Mauriac – as having that extra point of…

An intimate, lucid and unforgettable new James MacMillan work

9 July 2022 9:00 am

On Tuesday night I was at the world première of a motet by Sir James MacMillan and I don’t think…

Fresh air and fascism in the Bavarian Alps

14 May 2022 9:00 am

The village of Oberstdorf lies in the Bavarian Alps, geographically remote but, as this gripping book demonstrates, deeply etched by…

Friend of Elizabethan exiles: the colourful life of Jane Dormer

7 May 2022 9:00 am

Thomas Cromwell’s biographer Diarmaid MacCulloch once told me that my father’s family, the Dormers, had been servants of the great…

A tale of forbidden love: Trespasses, by Louise Kennedy, reviewed

23 April 2022 9:00 am

Kenneth Branagh’s Oscar-winning recent film Belfast chronicles the travails of a Protestant family amid sectarian conflict in 1969. Louise Kennedy’s…

Is the Virgin Mary being sidelined by Rome?

2 April 2022 9:00 am

The Catholic church has always venerated Mary (‘Mother of God’) above other saints. But in recent years there has been…

Poland’s abortion culture war is a battle for the country’s soul

12 December 2021 7:30 pm

This week it emerged that a hospital in the city of Białystok in Poland refused to grant an abortion to…

Profound and original and unashamedly religious: Midnight Mass reviewed

13 November 2021 9:00 am

I was turned on to Midnight Mass by Ricky Gervais who raved about it in one of his social media…

Why I left the Church of England: an interview with Michael Nazir-Ali

23 October 2021 9:00 am

Michael Nazir-Ali on his decision to join the Catholic church

Pope Francis is losing his culture war

23 July 2021 7:48 am

Since I wroteabout the Pope’s declaration of war on the Old Rite, something unexpected and beautiful has happened. Many bishops…

The word ‘mother’ isn’t offensive. The Catholic church should say so

26 June 2021 9:00 am

I’m used to waiting for the Catholic church to make sense. I’m a convert to Catholicism, and Catholic ideas sometimes…

Orcadian cadences: celebrating the reclusive poet George Mackay Brown

5 June 2021 9:00 am

Maggie Fergusson on the reclusive poet George Mackay Brown