The determined move to abolish the hereditary lords is part of a process of self-destruction. The lords are part of the mythical bulwark that sustains England. When the current session of the British Parliament ends this spring, the nation will abruptly bring to a close a 700-year institution. On March 10, the House of Commons [...]
In much the same way that Shakespeare’s Catholic sympathies are all too often overlooked or ignored, so too are Jane Austen’s religious sense and her sympathetic view of Catholicism. It was a quarter of a millennium ago today that the great Jane Austen was born in the Hampshire village of Steventon in the south of [...]
Like all genuine eccentrics, John Cyril Hawes was a blend of genius and madness. His fantastical, eclectic architecture captures the contradictions of the man: traditional, but modern; romantic but gritty and down-to-earth; artistic but tough; cantankerous but compassionate to the poor. He was a solitary hermit who became famous. Author Peter Anson—himself a convert to [...]
The shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham attracts 250,000 pilgrims every year. Truly it can be said, in the heavenly light of the shrine’s resurrection, that the Queen has returned. One of the most exciting fruits of the spirit of Walsingham is the new and dynamic Community of Our Lady of Walsingham. Bitter, bitter oh [...]
The poet’s career doesn’t end once he dies. The soldier’s career arguably does. The poet-soldier, then, has died physically, but what remains of him is his art. Both Edward Thomas and Francis Ledwidge managed to create something that transcended their persons and lasted long after being killed in war. When we think of English poetry, [...]
The classic comic novel, "The Diary of a Nobody," spawned a great many television series in Britain that looked satirically but lovingly at middle-class strivers like its protagonist, Mr. Pooter: hardworking underdogs trying to keep up with the bills, navigate complicated social codes in a time of cultural change, and deal with their young adults. [...]
In Welsh, “Capel-y-Ffin” means “chapel at the boundaries.” It is an apt name, not only because of its location in the border land between Wales and England, but also because it is a place where the boundaries between religion and reality, monasticism and morality, chastity and carnality, and (it must be said) sanity and insanity [...]
Seeing the works of the early decades of the twentieth century by Robert Hugh Benson and Hilaire Belloc as part of a living tradition of historical scholarship, we might hope that the revival of interest in their historical perspectives might prove inspirational to new generations of pioneering cultural figures in the twenty-first century. The reception [...]
A Victorian cleric named Joseph Leycester Lyne dreamed of establishing an Anglican monastery at Llanthony, Wales. Lyne took the name of Father Ignatius and has gone down in history as one of the most eccentric and and energetic of all Anglo-Catholic pretenders. Ignatius of Llanthony During the first years of my quarter of [...]
What do we know of Catherine of Aragon, the first to suffer the pains of the so-called Reformation? All Catholics know the Salve Regina, the “Hail, Holy Queen,” the Marian antiphon sung in praise of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Queen of Heaven, who is without doubt and without question the most sung of all the [...]
The reason for Walsingham’s importance is its association with the Marian apparitions to a pious English noblewoman in 1061. By the middle of the fourteenth century, people considered England to be “Our Lady’s dowry” and that she was, in some special sense, the protectress of the English people. Few people in today’s godless England have [...]
Starting just 30 years after the Crucifixion, Catholic England produced remarkable figures, including lesser-known luminaries like Bishop Robert Grosseteste, who pioneered the scientific method. In my book Faith of Our Fathers: A History of True England, I sought to present a panoramic overview of two thousand years of English history, from the first century to the [...]
Poetry, often called the thinking man's meme, has faded from popular culture. Still, Catholics could greatly benefit from exploring the works of poets who lived heroic, faith-filled lives. Were one to conduct a survey of modern-day Americans, taken at random, it is likely that not one in a hundred would have heard of the poet Richard [...]
Once Pope Pius V excommunicated Queen Elizabeth in 1570, there was a target on all Catholics, especially priests. The Catholic gentry of England put everything on the line to give shelter to the priests, particularly by the construction of hiding places in their large country houses. Here is the story of my trip to some [...]