IS THERE ANY HOPE FOR THE CHURCH? I have been pondering this question for a long time now. Maybe it’s an age thing but I am so tired of the language of crisis. It must be twenty years now that I am listening to talk of the various crises facing the Church with a host of names attached to them including, crisis of faith, crisis of vocations, and crisis of identity. This talk has oftentimes been accompanied with a…

Recently I was a little alarmed to hear someone,  whom I thought would know better,  display a huge ignorance with what happens at Mass. Of course there are many things that happen at this beautiful and most extraordinary of experiences that we call The Mass or The Eucharist, including sorrow for sin, the communal expression of what we believe in the Creed and a missioning back into the world to spread, and indeed live, the Gospel. However at the core…

                A PLETHORA OF CLOTS AND A MYRIAD OF PRAYER So I have been on a journey, a journey which had its own language. It was the language of hospital, doctors and nurses, of scans and tests and my new key term, the D-dimer! This term is now an important one in my vocabulary. The closest I had got to this, up until a few weeks ago, was one of the treats of my youth, the dime bar! I now…