Monday, July 18, 2011

London in light summer rain...

...and very enjoyable. A party to launch Fr Nicholas Schofield's new biography of Fr William Lockhart - an excellent book telling the story of a leading figure in the Catholicism of Queen Victoria's England, and a man who helped to shape the Church that English Catholics know today.

It was a wonderful evening: guest speaker was Lord St John of Fawsley, with glorious anecdotes and much name-dropping - the latter being his trade-mark so he engaged in some self-mockery especially when it came to his description of being about to say to a Pope "As Her Majesty the Queen was telling me.." but decided to forego it...

Fr Nicholas is a good writer and a fine historian, very much at home in English Catholicism. Tom Longford of Gracewing Books presided, and guests included Fr Marcus Nolan - whose Evangelium conference is coming up in August - Fr Richard Whinder, and Antony Tyler, a former Master of The Keys, the Catholic Writers' Guild, with whom I shared a cheery bus-ride back to Waterloo and a cup of coffee and a snack there, swapping news and views very enjoyably before catching the train home...

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