That Letter - Update

We now have hundreds of signatures on the letter in support of our priests, thanks to the many bloggers who carried the letter (see here for a list), and many other people who spread the word.

 However, we would like hundreds more. It seems some people think that signing the petition that has been doing the rounds, and signing the letter, are the same: they are not. Please sign both.

The deadline for signatures is Monday morning.  Please sign now, if you have not yet got around to doing so: and please encourage others to do so.

Supporting Our Priests: Progress Report

Mark Lambert and I had the idea to get lots of UK Catholic bloggers to post the same post at the same time on Sunday. We wanted to show solidarity with the priests who wrote to the Catholic Herald recently, in support of marriage.

The irony is that I have not blogged here for so long that I couldn't remember my login details, and in the haste of trying to contact lots of other bloggers, omitted to post it here myself until today... But as this blog has been dormant for so long, and has relatively few readers, I don't think that was a great loss.

As far as I know, the post was posted at the following blogs (if you know of any more, please tell me):

All Along the Watchtower
bara brith
The Catechesis of Caroline
Catholic Book Reviews
Catholic and Loving It
Catholic Reading Group
Catholicism Pure
Countercultural Father
Cum Lazaro
defénde nos in proélio
De Omnibus Dubitandum Est
Dolphinarium
Eccles and Bosco Is Saved
Faith in our Families
The Guild of Blessed Titus Brandsma
Juventutem Hexham and Newcastle in Durham
The Latin Mass Society in Gloucestershire (Clifton Diocese)
Lucas Cambrensis
Men Are Like Wine
A Miscellany of Musings
Mulier Fortis
The Muniment Room
Non angelus, sed Anglus
On the Side of the Angels
Porta Caeli
The Sensible Bond
That The Bones You Have Crushed May Thrill
Twelve Mini Pilgrimages
Umblepie
White Smoke Ahoy
Young Catholic Adults


Thanks to all the bloggers for supporting this! Especially those who did so with some misgivings (eg Eccles - only the second-ever serious post on his site). Apologies, too, to anyone whom we should have contacted, but failed to. It was all rather a rush.  And further apologies to anyone who has posted the story, but whom I have missed from the list: let me know and I will update it.

I am happy to report that the signatures are flowing in to mine and Mark's email addresses, as well as in the comments boxes of various blogs: but we still want more. 

So if you have yet to sign, or if you know others who might be interested in signing, you know what to do. It is important to demonstrate to these priests, and to the wider Catholic world, that they do not stand alone.

In fact, we have already heard from many priests who would have liked to sign, but for one reason or another were not able to do so, whether because they were away when the letter arrived, or because they were not on the database that was used.

You may sign up by leaving your name and diocese in the Comments box at the foot of any of the numerous posts on the subject (links above), or by emailing either me or Mark.

And please pray for our priests and bishops, and for the forthcoming Synod.

UPDATE

I had missed a few: thanks to those who pointed that out. The list above has been updated, but please let me know of any further omissions. 

In support of our priests, our families, and our Church

You may have seen the recent letter from more than 450 priests in support of the Church’s teaching on marriage.

We would like to invite you to sign the letter below, to be sent to the press in support of them, and to encourage others to sign it.

To sign, please leave your name and your diocese in the comments box below, or if you prefer email them to me or to one of the coordinators:

Mark Lambert or Andrew Plasom-Scott 

The Letter:

Dear Sir,

We, the undersigned, wish to endorse and support the letter signed by over 450 priests in the recent edition of the Catholic Herald.

As laity, we all know from our own family experiences, or those of our friends and neighbours, the harrowing trauma of divorce and separation, and we sympathise with all those in such situations.

It is precisely for that reason that we believe that the Church must continue to proclaim the truth about marriage, given us by Christ in the Gospels, with clarity and charity in a world that struggles to understand it.

For the sake of those in irregular unions, for the sake of those abandoned and living in accordance with the teachings of the Church, and above all for the sake of the next generation, it is essential that the Church continues to make it quite clear that sacramental marriage is indissoluble until death.

We pray, and expect, that our hierarchy will represent us, and the Church’s unwavering teaching, at the Synod this autumn.

 Yours faithfully, 

Reasons to Believe

Reasons to Believe by Adrian Lickorish Published by CTS

This is a very useful and timely booklet. The dominant narrative of our time seems to be that science and reason have supplanted God, that we no longer need God in order to understand reality, and that to cling to the idea of God is somehow anti-intellectual and anti-scientific.

That's all bosh, of course, and real scientists, who are trained to think critically, do not tend to see things that way. But the popularisers of science, and the popular media more broadly, take that narrative for granted, and so it seeps into the cultural zeitgeist and becomes the unspoken assumption of many, without any serious examination.

Adrian Lickorish is a retired lawyer, and brings an analytical mind to the task. He presents, after a brief introduction, twelve reasons to believe. As he notes, 'Different reasons will speak more strongly to different readers, and a different times in their lives;' so for me to say that I found some of his explanations more compelling than others may simply be a reflection of that truth.

He builds on the classical proofs of God, presenting them, and some additional approaches, in a clear, contemporary and intellectually robust way. He also breaks each explanation down into brief paragraphs, outlining the structure of his argument, which makes the whole book easy both to read and to understand.

His twelve reasons are as follows:

Reasons 1 & 2: First and Independent Causes
Reasons 3, 4, and 5: Design
Reasons 6 & 7: Desire and Purpose
Reason 8: Objective Morality
Reasons 9 & 10: Belief and Experience
Reason 11: Life after Death
Reason 12: The New Testament.

He also has a section on the end, addressing some of the problems that people express when struggling to believe: Evil, Hell, Difficulty in Knowing and the Role of Science.

This is a valuable booklet for anyone wishing to understand their own Faith better, and particularly for anyone who ever finds his or her Faith challenged by others as being unreasonable, irrational, or 'medieval.'  I would also strongly recommend it for any teenager heading off to University...

Pier Giorgio Frassati

Pier Giorgio Frassati by Glynn MacNiven-Johnston CTS Great Saints Series

Pier Giorgio Frassati is another modern saint (or technically, beatus, but this is published in the Great Saints Series, and I am sure he is on his way to formal recognition as such).

Born of an influential Turin family (his father owned and ran La Stampa, until forced to sell it for refusing to print pro-fascist articles) he had quite a tough childhood, and yet from an early age developed a very active faith.

Founded in prayer, his life was characterised by an active love of the poor, a cheerful disposition and love of life, and singular generosity of spirit, to the point of heroism.  Like his father, he would have no truck with Fascism and was public in his disdain for it; he even single-handedly chased off a bunch of Fascist thugs who had been sent one night to intimidate his family.

But it was his generosity towards, and solidarity with, poor people that was most notable.  He gave away almost everything, from his clothes and food to his tram pass and his university text books, to people who had less than he had, and clearly did so in a way that was not patronising, for poor people  turned out in huge numbers (to his family's astonishment) to pay their respects to him when he died at the age of 24.

He seems to me to be a model for saints in modern times; and his story is told in a clear and vivid manner in this booklet, which I highly recommend.

Unlike the last CTS booklet I reviewed, this is remarkably free from typos and other infelicities.  In fact I only found one, which was the picture credit for the front cover image: 'A Catholic Man kisses the coffin of Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati.' Clearly they changed the cover, but forgot to change this detail.

Gemma Galgani

Gemma Galgani by John-Paul Kirkham CTS Great Saints Series

Gemma Galgani was the first saint living in the 20th Century to be canonised - and is a wonderful saint for the 21st century Christian to contemplate and emulate.

Born in 1878, she died in 1903 a few months before her 25th birthday,  and she was canonised in 1940.

The reason I think that she is a great saint for us to cultivate a devotion to, is that she exemplified so many facets of the Christian life that are currently unfashionable.  She was a stigmatic, she saw and talked with her Guardian Angel, she embraced her suffering, and indeed sought additional mortification, she was humble and obedient.

All this and much more about her life is made clear in this 60 page biography by John-Paul Kirkham, which takes us through her life chronologically, with quotations from the saint at the start and end of each chapter.

Unfortunately, this is one of those CTS booklets that really needed (better) editing. Intrusive apostrophes, capitalisation and the hyphenating of random words, along with syntactical and other grammatical errors combine to distract the reader repeatedly from the text.

Nonetheless, it is well worth reading, and comes highly recommended.

Faith in the Family

Faith in the Family by Anne Burke-Gaffney and Fr Marcus Holden Published by CTS

This is larger than the usual CTS pamphlets, being an A5-sized book, of about 88 pages.

It is designed as a Handbook for parents, and in particular to help them to answer their children's questions, and then use those questions as a starting point for deepening faith.

The book is in three sections: Creation and Created; Knowing God, and Catholic Life and Times. That makes sense, I suppose, but I did think it odd that it did not follow the structure of the Catechism (and the preceding Catechism, from Trent, come to that).  I will return to this point.

Each of these sections has five chapters: so Creation and Created, for example, has chapters on God and Creation, Angels, Saints, Holy Souls and Mary.

Each chapter is made up mainly of the types of questions that children ask, with reasonably full explanatory answers: longer and fuller than the old Penny Catechism, for example.    So the first Chapter, on God and Creation, has questions such as: Who made God? Why did God create Satan, and Why did Adam and Eve spoil everything?  The answers are good: clear and accurate, and suitable for reading to and discussing with children.

Each chapter also includes, at the end, two further sections.  The first is Points to Ponder: these are a few deeper questions for the parents to ask themselves and discuss; the second is Practical Application: a few suggestions for things to do as a family, to build on the lessons of the chapter.

The layout is clear and sensible, and nicely illustrated with children's drawings (so much better than the faux-naif drawings such books occasionally use).

However, I was struck by the huge gaps. In a sense that is inevitable in a work of this size, but I found it very odd that it discusses relative trivia in some detail (Why do we give eggs at Easter?) whilst omitting (for example) anything about the Sacramental system, and so on.  I think this flows from my comment earlier that the authors did not follow the structure of the Catechism. By making their own structure up, the risk was always going to be that some things fell through the cracks.

My other gripe is the lack of an index.  If my child raises a question about baptism, for instance, how do I know if there is anything in here about it.  There is no chapter on the Sacraments; is it in the one about Prayer? Or the one about the Mass?  Or somewhere else?  That seems to me a missed opportunity.  Also, references to Catechism paragraphs would be extremely helpful.

Nonetheless, what is here is good and this is certainly a useful book to have on the shelf; so I recommend it with the caveat that it misses a good deal which you really should teach your children, so you will certainly need other resources (such as the Catechism or Youcat) to supplement it.