Dear All, You will certainly have figured out by now, that these last few columns have been about the history of the Church's practice of reconciliation of sinners has been heading for the celebration of the Sacrament of Penance here at Manchester on Sunday 24 March.

Dear All, Well before there was any such thing as Lent, there was Easter; in fact there was Easter even before there was Holy Week. It was a particular understanding of Easter that led to the custom of celebrating Baptism at the end of a night-long Easter Vigil.

Dear All, Let us talk about temptation.  After all, this is the Sunday of the Lord’s temptations in the desert. Commentators on this event in Jesus’ life have turned his temptations into a kind of catalog of ‘sources of temptation’: the world, the flesh and the devil.