Nov 12th, Remembrance Sunday
Our regular radio listening, CLASSIC FM, switched from its normal studio to go live to Whitehall for a few moments on Sunday morning, to cover the Queen at the Cenotaph, the Two Minutes' silence, and the haunting Last Post sounding out over London......

I cycled to Mass at St Joseph's.....scarlet poppies entwined around the candlesticks, and a small shrine with crosses around a Union Jack....

Met Mother this afternoon at Carshalton for a walk by the Ponds and through the park. There were so many children feeding the ducks and seagulls that there were slices of bread floating on the water, and the birds looked fat and glutted.

The newspapers are reporting the launch of a new campaign to tell children to carry contraceptives with them for social occasions. The revolting organisations that push this evil message are still pretending that it will help to "cut down the number of teenage pregnancies". As if all the evidence of the past 30 years hadn't pointed to exactly the opposite: the more children and teenagers are encouraged to be sexually active, the more the teenage pregnancy rate will rise.....and meanwhile childhood itself, its innocence, its inherent value, is being destroyed.....

Latest issue of FAITH magazine (look up their excellent website) has a fine editorial on Catholic education, pointing out that the religious education in most Catholic schools in Britain is dire, and noting that many priests ask whether it is worth spending so much time and energy on school-related matters (school governors' meetings, talks with parents on admission to school, arrangements for school Masses and other events) when there is little or no evidence that it helps to spread the Faith. What to do? No point in saying children should be taught at home by their parents - that way, most won't learn anything about the Faith at all, not even the few prayers and vague notions of Jesus that they get at a Catholic school. And, for many, school is the one place where they meet some sort of structure to the day, rules about behaviour, even some notion of obedience and fair play (though some teachers are in despair - children brought up on endless TV and computer games have very poor attention-span, and many have been taught that adults are there to serve them and attend to their whims, so they are automatically rude and offensive....) If we decide that Catholic schools, supported out of public funds, are no longer useful, what to do? Extended parish catechetics? Many children do enjoy their First Communion classes and there is now a good deal of excellent material available (especiually from the Catholic Truth Society for .... such instruction. But do we really want to assert, definitively, that religion has no place in the schools of our country? FAITH is being courageous in exploring all thisand admitting openly the BIG problems of Religious Education in nominally Catholic schools....