Editor’s Letter: Let’s remember we are dust, and to dust we shall return

As the March issue of the Catholic Herald went to press it was not clear when Pope Francis would be leaving the Gemelli Hospital in Rome, or indeed in what condition; it was a sobering lesson for anyone who has relied on his robustness over the last few years, and his tendency to bounce back from the ailments with which he has been beset.

The Pope remains very poorly indeed, and the bizarre updates detailing papal breakfasts and intimate medical procedures have been unsettling, to say the least. It is twenty years since a pope died in office, and the Church is out of practice.

With Ash Wednesday now upon us, it does us good to remember that the traditional prayers and rites that accompany a Christian from life to death and burial are the way in which we express hope and experience comfort without having to rely on our own personal initiative. The same is as true for paupers as it is of pontiffs.

Lent makes its presence felt in the print edition, and especially in a Year of Jubilee. Some of our friends, including Dom Henry Wansbrough and Dr Rowan Williams, reflect on how they’ll be keeping the season. From New Zealand Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy reminds us to keep a close eye on Satan as we head into the wilderness with the Lord, and from Australia Robert Clark, a former Attorney-General of Victoria, picks apart some of his countrymen’s shaky contributions to the UK’s ongoing assisted-suicide debate.

At Westminster and in Washington there is much of which to repent – but it is not all sackcloth and ashes. We just had time to keep St David on March 1; Camilla Harrison writes in the travel pages about her pilgrimage to West Wales and to the shrine of St Non, St David’s mother. For me it is a doubly evocative piece; my own family hails from nearby and I know the clifftops and buildings that she describes from my own childhood. It is, as she says, “a thin place” where earth and heaven meet.

From Douai Abbey Fr Hugh Somerville-Knapman OSB takes in the latest – and what must be now definitive – biography of the late George Pell, while Donal Foley, author of The Glaston Chronicles, argues for better Catholic fiction for children. Benjamin Ivry considers the under-recognised Catholicism of Paul Cézanne, and Melanie McDonagh previews the glimmering Siena exhibition at the National Gallery in London: gold as far as the eye can see.

Fr Dominic White OP joins the ranks of “our” Dominicans, as I like to think of them, with a reflection on That They May Face The Rising Sun, Pat Collins’s film version of John McGahern’s novel about faith in rural Ireland; on a similar theme Fr John Feighery SVDtakes in veteran Irish journalist Patsy McGarry’s work on the Emerald Isle’s much-shaken relationship with the Church. “Well, Holy God”, he calls it. Well, indeed.

A wise priest friend of mine used to advise people never to give up anything for Lent which they relied upon for their sanity, and to think about taking up something edifying instead. Quite apart from that, as someone who loves fish and seafood, abstention from flesh meat is no real sacrifice for me. Instead I am going to try and do my best to do more spiritual reading, returning after several years to CS Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, which I commend to you.  

The experienced demon Screwtape, writing to his young nephew Wormwood – who is at work in the world, trying his best to corrupt the human to whom he has been assigned – reminds him of the all-important passage of time. “Nearly all vices are rooted in the future,” he says. “Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust and ambition look ahead.” Now there’s a salutary thought, as both the Church and the world ponder the future.

(Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

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