Your Christmass List

 You could do worse than to put this book onto your Christmass list ... whether of Things you wish to receive or Things you wish to give.

APOLOGIA a Memoir, by Fr Aidan nichols, is precisely what it says on the tin. And it is precisely the book to read if you have been wondering what has happened to Fr Aidan during these dark days in which the agents of a questionable regime have been trying to destroy Catholicism.

Here, for a taster, is Father's account of how he himself discovered God when

" ... on a day trip from Interlaken to Geneva, in my thirteenth year, I went into the Russian church (a triumph--I later learned--of the revived Muskovite style, built by the Grand Duchess Anna Feodorovna, the sister-in-law of Alexander I) and gazed at the iconostasis. With the speed of a moment I took in the implications of the icons of Christ and his Mother and their veneration by a member of the faithful, who made a profound bow, then planted a kiss and by way of continued homage lit a taper. This was the incarnate Lord, the personal God made human in the Blessed Virgin--a notion that no account of compulsory church attendance at school had managed to instill."

I think I recall Chesterton ... can any verify or find this? ... suggesting that religious education in schools should be taken off the curriculum and replaced by the presence in each classroom of a statue, 'the Virgin and Child', to which each pupil should be taught to make a profound bow.

Moi, I remember how moved I was, aged about eleven, by the little rococo village churches in the Austrian Tyrol .