A new series on BBC2, beginning on Friday 22 October, explores the journey of five people from very different backgrounds who decided to step back from their hectic lives and experience silence. In an extract from a book to supplement The Big Silence, Brendan Callaghan SJ, who accompanied the volunteers during their eight-day retreat at St Beuno’s Spirituality Centre, describes how, through silence, we can grow in holiness and wholeness.

Fr Peter Griffiths SJ, parish priest of St Aloysius in Glasgow, was among the celebrants at the Bellahouston Papal Mass.  The event - and especially its organisation - made a deep impression on him.

John Henry Newman: Teaching teachers

by Roderick Strange

The beatification of Cardinal John Henry Newman will be one of the focal points of Pope Benedict XVI’s forthcoming visit to the United Kingdom. Newman was deeply committed to education, to the provision of spiritual and pastoral care as well as academic excellence. His interest in this field should come as no surprise to us, argues Newman scholar, Roderick Strange, as we learn more about the man whose thought and writings were inseparable from his person.

In his address on 8th February 2010 to the Pontifical Council for the Family, Benedict XVI commented on the decision of the council to dedicate their 19th Plenary Session to a discussion of "The Rights of Childhood." This theme was chosen to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, an international convention that sets out the social, economic, and cultural rights of children