Many years ago, I remember seeing a programme about the life of the comedian Les Dawson. He was a northern comedian who was famous for...

From Monday to Friday I was up in Leeds for a priests’ retreat led by Sr Briege McKenna. On the Monday evening she put to us a series of...

“Who can this be? Even the wind and the sea obey him.” The sea is one of the most difficult and powerful forces of nature. When the...

I’m not much of a gardener. I have a perhaps superficial interest, but there are lots of things that I don’t know. In my last parish...

Last Sunday, two people had been to visit the presbytery, and after they had gone I sat down to eat. I was about half-way through one...

When I was a child, if you had asked me what an altar was, I might have struggled a bit. I could explain a table, but I didn’t know...

Why do we need the Bible? Why do we need the Church? Surely we can just work things out for ourselves? Maybe if we do away with the...

Sometimes, for us as Catholics, the Holy Spirit is the one person of the Most Holy Trinity that we seem to understand the least. Maybe,...

Now that we have celebrated the Ascension, our focus shifts towards the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. I mentioned during the...

We've been celebrating for the past six weeks the Resurrection of the Lord, mirroring the forty days Jesus was with the apostles. Now,...

How do we respond when people come round to visit? Some people excel: they may sure everyone is at ease and has a great time, they make...

In another five months, I will have been in this parish for a whole year, and once again the grape harvest will (I presume) be taking...