The year is 1630, and a Dominican friar is writing home. Fr Dominic Ibáñez de Erquicia has been preaching the Christian mission in Japan for the last seven years or so. He arrived in Japan in answer to the call for more missionaries, after Tokugawa’s persecution had depleted their numbers: our brother Dominic was thirty-three. Now forty, Fr Dominic sees that the persecution is reaching a new level. Whereas before, he was able to disguise himself as a merchant to visit Cat

The Lord's feeling for the crowds and the action he takes speak to what health and holiness is. We believe health and holiness are when everything works as it is designed to do. Sickness and sin are inhibitors of the Creator’s design. We should just recognise that sickness and sin are used by God to make himself known to us: a sudden cure or a quick turn reveal the hand of God. But apart from that, there remain those times when we must contend with sickness and sin. Then

In order to realise the importance of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist one could appeal to the rather in depth theology of the Church. However the full power of what we celebrate at the altars in our Churches comes from the experience of the saints and those holy men and women who realised the true mystery and power of Christ’s abiding presence in his Body and Blood. One of these holy ones was Cardinal Francis-Xavier Nguyen Van Thuan, the heroic former archbish