One of the most common things I hear in the confessional is people confessing impatience and anger. But are impatience and anger a sin? We often confess things that make us feel unhappy about ourselves--things that mar our self image. Some of these failures are sins, but not all of them. For it to be a [...]
On Sunday, as always on the Second Sunday in Lent, we were given the gospel account of the Transfiguration of the Lord, and in Matthew's version it is clear that the disciples experienced a mystical vision. So what exactly happened? What did they see, how did they see it and by what process did they see [...]
The fourth in my series on the Deadly Sins for Lent 2026 Four of the seven deadly sins are sins of the flesh: Greed, Gluttony, Sloth and Lust. Three are sins of the mind and heart: Envy, Pride and Wrath. We feel most guilty and ashamed of the sins of the flesh because they involve a [...]
The third in my Lent 2026 series on the Seven Deadly Sins. Of all the seven deadly sins Gluttony is at once the grossest and the(apparently) least serious. It's so easy to both be disgusted by gluttony and amused by it. On the one hand we think of the typical glutton as the obese pig with [...]
The second in my Lent 2026 series on the seven deadly sins. Greed is right up there with Sloth, Lust and Gluttony as one of the gross sins of the flesh. Like the other three, Greed seems obvious. Greed is the fat cat banker, the shyster, the conman, the slumlord. The greedy person is not only [...]
For Lent 2026: Here begins a series here on the seven deadly sins. First one is the one most forgotten or dismissed as unimportant: Sloth. The common understanding of sloth is probably extreme laziness: the equivalent of couch potato. Sloth is the teenaged slob of any age slouched out with a bowl of junk food to [...]
President Trump has indicated that he wants to release classified files on UFOs, UAPs and aliens. This is being branded by some commentators at "The Great Disclosure" which will upset everything. Some have called it an "ontological earthquake" meaning our whole frame of reference as human beings will need to adjusted. If there is extraterrestrial life [...]
Social media was full of it: pictures of crowded Catholic Churches from Scotland to South Carolina. Catholics rejoicing in "churches fuller than they have ever seen them" and so forth and so on. As usual in our parish the secretary was grumbling about the endless phone calls (obviously from non parishioners else they would have read [...]
Some time ago in an article for National Catholic Reporter, a prominent Jesuit priest, said he didn't believe in transubstantiation because it was an out of date concept which was impossible for anyone to understand who hadn't studied Aristotelian metaphysics. Now "Aristotelian metaphysics" is itself a nice juicy long word and one which is easily used [...]
The photo illustrating this blog post pictures Charlie Bączyk-Bell,--a minister in the Church of England who gave an impassioned speech at the Church of England's general synod denouncing their decision not to move forward with same sex blessings. I am unable to load a link to the full speech, but if you search online you [...]