CotN Community

The BBC reported on 17 July that Saint Mary's (Catholic) Church in Castleblayney, Northern Ireland, is banning pop music and poetry at funerals - putting an end to scratchy recordings of Candle in the Wind and Flying Without Wings . "Practices such as personal poems about the deceased, favourite...

The Vatican has just unveiled a new website - in LATIN. (By the way, did you know that Rome’s webmaster is actually a webnun, who leads quite a large team?) According to the BBC , Pope Benedict wants the Catholic Church to keep its ancient traditions, and is encouraging the use of Latin for sermons and...

Hot on the heels of my last post (the face of the Virgin Mary on your breakfast toast) comes news of the face of a hanged man on the cover of a book he wrote, purportedly bound in his own skin. The book's up for auction in Doncaster (!) on 2 Dec, should you wish to bid for it yourself. Jesuit priest...

The Vatican (and therefore, one assumes, Benedict XVI himself) is behind a startling new plan to accelerate the progression of dead ex-pope John Paul II to sainthood. As part of the campaign (already pre-accelerated, because Pope Benedict waived the normal five-year breathing space before a case for...

May I be serious for a moment? I may be a little late, but I'd still like to offer a small tribute in remembrance of Chad Varah, founder of the Samaritans, who died a week or so ago. And to all the cynics I ever worked with, who said, 'What has the Church ever done for anyone?', I offer up...

According to the Christian Post , Tammy Faye Messner (formerly Bakker), famed US TV evangelist of the 1980s, died on Friday 20 July of bowel cancer - just a day after giving a live interview on Larry King's show. "Messner has had a life full of ups-and-downs," says the report. "She...

Many churches give themselves some kind of tagline, but St Leonard's in Hythe, England, has one which is particularly appealing: 'The church with the bones'. Apparently, at some point between the 13th and 15th centuries, they started filling the crypt with bits of dead people - the bones...