Richard III: not as nasty as you thought?
Notebook, August 31, 2012 A car park in Leicester may be home to the last king of England to die in battle: Richard III. Last weekend archaeologists from the University of Leicester brought in heavy...
View ArticleI was wrong and uncharitable to suggest that the Pope should not be meeting...
“On Friday”, I headlined my last piece, “the Pope will meet Archbishop Welby. So, why do we continue talking to the Anglicans after they have so wilfully made unity impossible?”. “Archbishop Welby is...
View ArticleThe bodies might be gone but the Tudor appetite for desecration still chills...
More than fourteen thousand men were killed at Flodden five hundred years ago this month. But archaeologists, excavating the battlefield in Northumberland have found no remains of the ordinary Scottish...
View ArticleLike Richard III, Henry VII’s reputation is sullied by the disappearance of...
That Richard III has passionate defenders is evident from the response to my suggestion on Tuesday that he had good reason to ‘disappear’ the Princes in the Tower. But what about the role of Henry VII...
View ArticleA sad reminder of the art lost in the years after the Reformation
The slashed and broken medieval images displayed in the new Art Under Attack exhibition at the Tate are a reminder of what we lost in the hundred and fifty years after the Reformation. Even now there...
View ArticleMorning Catholic must-reads: 25/11/13
Pope Francis held the relics of St Peter during the Creed at the closing Mass of the Year of Faith yesterday (full text, short video, full video). Francis also gave out copies of Evangelii Gaudium, the...
View ArticleIn the three-parent embryo debate, why is it assumed that scientists are...
When I sat down to listen to the BBC’s five o’clock news programme on the radio yesterday, for a fleeting minute, as the broadcaster introduced the item about the Commons vote on “three-parent babies”,...
View ArticleThe priestly ‘hit squad’ that uplifted England
I was invited recently to give a talk to the University of Cambridge Catholic Chaplaincy’s Graduate Society. On a typically East Anglian winter afternoon, with the light dying early and a cold, damp...
View ArticleCardinal Wolsey’s angels to be purchased by V&A
Four bronze statues of angels designed for the tomb of Cardinal Wolsey, Henry VIII’s personal adviser, are to be purchased by London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A). The museum has raised the £5...
View ArticleBook used by Henry VIII’s lawyers in break with Rome found in Cornwall library
An American scholar has discovered a book used by Henry VIII’s lawyers to justify the divorce that led to his break with Rome in a library in Cornwall. The book, on the theories of the medieval...
View ArticleWolf Hall reminds us that beheadings solve nothing
So that is the end of Wolf Hall. I watched the last episode on catch-up last night, and confess I had only been an intermittent viewer: but when it comes to the finale – the execution of Anne Boleyn –...
View ArticleWhat Catholic England would look like today
The 19-year-old King Henry VIII took to the field arrayed in cloth of gold and blue velvet, all spangled with golden hearts and K’s for his 25-year-old wife, Katherine of Aragon, whose honour he...
View ArticleBook review: Faith, family and a good skirmish
The Tapestry by Nancy Bilyeau Simon & Schuster, £17 London, 1537: Smithfield is awash with gawpers flocking to see a beautiful Yorkshire noblewoman burned alive for questioning King Henry VIII’s...
View ArticleThomas More and John Fisher: two saints who died for the integrity of the...
Today the Catholic Church celebrates two great English saints and martyrs. I am forever grateful to my history master at Ratcliffe College, back in the day, Fr Bill Curran, who explained this great...
View ArticleHenry VIII, stinking sadist
How would King Henry VIII react to the news that Cardinal Vincent Nichols will preside at Catholic Vespers in the Chapel Royal of Hampton Court Palace on February 9? Not just by turning in his grave...
View ArticleThe best way for Catholics to mark the Reformation is to celebrate the papacy
The reminder from the ever excellent Cardinal Müller that the Reformation is nothing to celebrate, while a statement of the obvious – after all, how can one celebrate disunity? – still leaves us with a...
View ArticleNationalism is a form of heresy when taken to extremes
The Guardian, ever the first with religious commentary, recently carried a piece by Canon Giles Fraser, in which he drew an interesting historical parallel between the Brexit movement and the...
View ArticleThe great Tudor Bible myth
When it comes to state violence, official justifications have always been paramount. Throughout history, savvy administrations have paid close attention to their messaging around the use of force and...
View ArticleA brilliant novel helps make sense of the dissolution of the monasteries
Pope Francis’s meeting with Lutheran leaders raises many questions for Catholics: How do we view the Reformation? What should we think of Luther? Lucy Beckett’s fine historical novel The Time Before...
View ArticleTudor mansion offers audio experience of Mass as Henry VIII would have heard it
Visitors to a Tudor mansion are being given the chance to listen to a reconstruction of a 16th-century Mass. The Vyne, a country house near Basingstoke where Henry VIII attended Mass, has worked with...
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