Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith, Author at Catholic Herald

Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith

It’s a moment for us priests to become contemplatives. Easier said than done

April 28, 2020

Even the monastic life is usually passed in community. But lockdown has made us all hermits

Management consultants could help the Church – up to a point

April 02, 2020

Accountability and Leadership in the Catholic Church By Brian Dive Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 220pp, £61.99/$78.95 Brian Dive is a management consultant, and his book is subtitled What Needs To Be Improved. We all know that there is a leadership crisis in the Catholic Church (though some may deny it) and Dive’s book is to be

The Bible’s women take centre stage

March 19, 2020

The Anointed By Michael Arditti Arcadia Books, 286pp, £16.99/$24.95 The Bible is said to be the world’s bestselling book, and it is also the world’s most teasing one. It tells us so much, yet it always leaves us wanting more. Perhaps because the biblical authors had a different set of priorities to ours, and their

Never mind the election, let’s celebrate Our Lady of Guadalupe

December 05, 2019

Thursday December 12 is general election day in Britain, but it is also, by coincidence (or perhaps providence), the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Our Blessed Lady appeared to St Juan Diego, an indigenous inhabitant of New Spain, as it then was, on the morning of December 9, 1531, at the Hill of Tepeyac,

Masked wrestlers and the padlock saint

December 05, 2019

Mexico City: Cradle of Empires By Nick Caistor Reaktion, 240pp, £14.99/$20 Mexico City has not had a very good press. One of the largest cities on earth, it is a byword for urban sprawl, pollution, traffic, poverty and crime. And yet, and yet … the huge urban area of the Federal District (as Mexicans usually

Confessional secrecy could be under threat. It must be defended

November 21, 2019

The Seal of Confession has long been a matter of public controversy. But Catholics, especially priests, have shown a remarkable solidarity in defending the seal – the obligation of a priest to never, under any circumstances, reveal the sins that are confessed to him. The subject is back in the news because the Independent Inquiry

A grown-up guide to the Classics

November 07, 2019

Of Gods and Men: 100 Stories from Ancient Greece and Rome Edited by Daisy Dunn Apollo, 640pp, £25/$35 The word “anthology” originally meant a collection of flowers; thus a literary anthology is a sort of greatest hits compilation, and springs from the surely eternal desire to reduce a world to a single book. In this

After the Apocalypse, an Anglican theocracy

October 17, 2019

The Second Sleep By Robert Harris Hutchinson, 320pp, £20/$26.95 A new book by Robert Harris is a joyful event, for he has repeatedly proven that he has the gift of finding “what oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed”, and building a novel on the results. What if Hitler had won the War? That

Inside the Vatican: a fascinating programme for anyone interested in cleaning

September 26, 2019

The BBC’s Inside the Vatican relies, we are told in its somewhat breathless publicity, on unprecedented access to the inner workings of the Vatican City State. But viewers hoping for a fly-on-the-wall documentary that would tell them something they did not already know, or which could not be gleaned from other readily available sources, would

What courageous Mexico can teach the Catholic world

September 12, 2019

Understanding World Christianity: Mexico By Todd Hartch Fortress, 268pp, £19.99/$29 The history of Christianity in Mexico is certainly eventful. The Constitution of 1917 placed severe restrictions on the practice of religion, under the guise of separating Church and state. As Todd Hartch makes clear in this lucid, well-researched and informative book, the Constitution (which has

Jerusalem’s archives: a tantalising glimpse of a lost world

August 29, 2019

Jerusalem: City of the Book By Merav Mack and Benjamin Balint Yale, 272pp, £20/$30 Is there anything new that can be said about Jerusalem, the most contested city on earth, where three religions coincide and, indeed, collide? And yet this book, by a pair of Israeli writers, does precisely that: it creates for the reader

The time is ripe for a revival in devotion to the Sacred Heart

June 25, 2019

God knows, better than anyone, what people are like, and the revelation of God is expressed in a way designed to help our frail human minds receive it. Long before we were people of the book, we were people of the image. Before I could read, my favourite book was the Children’s Bible, and how

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