Catholicism

Letters: How lads’ mags spawned OnlyFans

21 June 2025 9:00 am

Bad lads Sir: The articles on Britain’s relationship with porn were fascinating and frustrating in equal measure. Fascinating in that…

Can Pope Leo end the liturgy wars?

14 June 2025 9:00 am

Last weekend, under windswept banners depicting the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Virgin Mary, nearly 20,000 young pilgrims marched…

The Renaissance master who rescued polyphonic music

14 June 2025 9:00 am

Last month I watched conductor Harry Christophers blow through what sounded like an arthritic harmonica but in fact was a…

Vampires, werewolves and Sami sorcerers

14 June 2025 9:00 am

Animism, divination and shape-shifting witchcraft continued to be powerful forces in the Baltic long after the conversion of Europe to Christianity

The problem with Pascal’s wager

17 May 2025 9:00 am

Graham Tomlin focuses on the Catholic philosopher’s search for intellectual certainty, but the cosmic gamble’s serious flaws don’t get the attention they deserve

How silence makes music

10 May 2025 9:00 am

‘What!? But they won’t let you in!’ and ‘What!? But they’ll detain you at the border!’ and ‘What!? But they’re…

Anselm Kiefer’s monstrous regiment of women

3 May 2025 9:00 am

Women are found everywhere in Kieferland – martyrs, queens and heroines of the revolution, haunting, teasing and unknowable

How Rome copes with the Conclave

26 April 2025 9:00 am

Ordinary Romans, famous for their cheerful working-class familiarity, loved Pope Francis for his common touch. For the first time in…

The extraordinary scale of the crisis facing the next pope

26 April 2025 9:00 am

At 9.47 a.m. on Easter Monday we heard the words ‘con profondo dolore’ from a cardinal standing in the chapel…

Pope Francis had his priorities right

26 April 2025 9:00 am

After he emerged from the Gemelli hospital in Rome last month, Pope Francis put out a reflection on ‘hospital’. Some…

We need to learn to pray again

23 November 2024 9:00 am

God is real, Rod Dreher insists, and we’re born to be in communion with him. But the focus and mental commitment that prayer requires are impossible if we’re forever doom-scrolling

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…