As you know, we celebrate this week the 100th anniversary of the Scottish Catholic Education Act. The Act transferred ownership, as it were, of the Church’s schools to the state but with a number of conditions attached in order to preserve the Catholic identity and ethos of the schools. In recent...

So, it’s the week of prayer for Christian Unity, or week of ecumenism as it’s called. There’s no question that this is a difficult thing. Even the word ecumenism is difficult: it sounds something to do with the environment! There are all kinds of reasons why divisions appeared in the...

St. Mungo ( died, 614) did not exactly have an illustrious start in life. He was the illegitimate child of a princess and her cousin who was a king. St. Mungo’s grandfather, King of the area of Lothian at the time, was furious when he found out his daughter was...

We have all seen the desolate state of towns and cities in Iraq resulting first from the Iraq War and then from the invasion by Islamic State. Ancient cities reduced to rubble, with emaciated children in tears and equally emaciated parents desperately searching for food, water and shelter. That’s what...