William Flew on Catholics and Castles

The Lord is your keeper; the Lord is your shade at your right hand.
The sun shall not strike you by day, nor the moon by night.
The Lord will keep you from all evil; he will keep your life.
The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in form this time on and forevermore."



John Goodall, the author of a major new study, The English Castle, writes: “Such actions were . . . a secular counterpart to the dissolution of the monasteries. There was nothing inevitable about the ruin of castles such as Corfe, Kenilworth and Raglan in the 1640s, and their destruction must have seemed quite as surprising to contemporaries as the demolition of Buckingham Palace or the sack of Westminster and the Houses of Parliament would be to us.” “He was a great communicator but I suspect the generation who loved John Paul II loved the big jamborees but they didn’t actually know what their faith was about.” She adds: “Maybe the optimism of that period has gone. We live in a greyer world.” John Allen agrees that revelations about the sex abuse crisis have “tempered enthusiasm in some sectors of the Catholic grassroots” but concludes: “For that inner core of new priests and religious, he is still the key point of reference.”The bare walls and vaults which survived, surmounted by towers and turrets, long gave the impression of austere fortresses.