Wed Sept 14th
THE ADOREMUS BULLETIN - very readable publication produced by the Society for the Renewal of the Sacred Liturgy, based in the USA, has published my feature on "Why we need holy days". There are a number of useful features in the magazine: if anyone wants a copy, send a message to this blog, giving a postal address and I'll put one in the post. In return, please tell people about this blog! I don't like writing things that people are not likely to read. The point about creating a blog was the assumption that this is the new way of communicating with people. So I want to communicate with people - pass the word along that if people simply tap "auntie joanna writes" into google, they'll get to this blog, and it's worth reading.....

Fascinating chat today with Halina Kent, who is working with people in Poland promoting the cause for beatification of Sue Ryder:I'm doing a feature about this for one of the Catholic papers. There is a good case for the suggestion that Leonard Cheshire and Sue Ryder, as husband and wife, could be honoured together by the Church. Anyone interested in finding out more should write to: Sue Ryder Beatification, Reading Room, Green Rd Wivelsfield Green, Haywards Heath RH17 7QL. In the extraordinarily difficult years in Poland just after World War 11, Sue Ryder went to help people living there in poverty and squalor - she helped create some semblance of order in the ruins of Warsaw, took care of the desperately poor and needy, and then went back year after year, fighting with Communist bureaucratic officials to drive in truckloads of food and clothes donated by people in Britain. Many many years later, and with a string of homes for the elderly and handicapped across Britain plus a vast range of other useful work, she was honoured here and became Baroness Ryder of Warsaw - and she still went on taking aid to Poland and elsewhere, driving vast trucks in bitter weather, wearing clothes from her own charity-shops, sorting out complicated problems and overcoming immense difficulties to give help who people who needed it....this was a life given generously and worth honouring.

Meanwhile the Daily Telegraph (today's edition) is launching a commendable campaign to "save childhood", citing all sorts of child-care experts, children's authors, etc, who lament the computer-obsessed , TV-based, highly pressurised, lives of modern British children and want to awaken us all to the need to offer again a vision of carefree childhood days. Absolutely. But how? What actual practical ideas are being presented? My list would include: restore marriage as the basis for family life in Britain by encouraging it through the tax and welfare systems; ban the distribution of contraceptives to anyone under the age of 16; impose penalties on the publishers and promoters of any publication aimed at under-18s which in any way condones extra-marital teenage sexual activity; postively encourage the use at every official level of the words "husband and wife" "father and mother". And that's just for starters. Other ideas?