ANOTHER sign of changing times came on Kate McCann and Stig Abell with Times Radio Breakfast (Thursday), when they discussed Esther Walker’s piece in that day’s paper about starting to go to church, not because she believed in God, but because she believed in a “God-shaped hole”.
The journalist Muriel Zagha had been on a similar journey: raised in Paris by a secular Jewish father and by a lapsed Roman Catholic mother who had been put off by the nuns who educated her, she was now “coming out” as a Church of England churchgoer. It had felt “counter-cultural” during Covid, Ms Zagha said, and the beauty of the buildings, music, and the Book of Common Prayer had drawn her in, as had a couple of hours’ “freedom from the slavery of phones”. Making new friends had also appealed. True faith? As Pope Francis might have said, “Who am I to judge?”
There is no doubt about the faith of St Francis of Assisi. To mark the 800th anniversary of his death, Front Row (Radio 4, Wednesday) caught up with Dr Joost Joustra, of King’s College, London, and with one of the Church of England’s most recognisable characters, Brother Samuel SSF, on the legacy of a punk-rock saint whose appeal goes “well beyond Catholicism”.
Brother Samuel explained St Francis’s continuing appeal in terms of the captivating story of his life: a rich young man who disinherited himself and followed Lady Poverty, preached to the birds, respected Muslims, and, by force of personality, gathered a band of Brothers.
Dr Joustra noted that, within decades of Francis’s death, his story was being depicted in churches by some of the finest artists of the day. Some scholars have even argued that his emphasis on God’s creation sparked the Renaissance.
For Brother Samuel, embracing a leper was the key moment in the saint’s life. He had once found the condition repulsive, until a chance encounter with a beggar transfigured his understanding.
Was St Francis the first punk? The rock legend Patti Smith, who wrote a ballad for him, said that, when she thought of St Francis, “I don’t think of religion. I don’t think of rules and regulations [but] his absolute love of life.”
The voices of Iranian Christians have largely been absent from the coverage of the continuing war. A rare exception was the interview on Sunday (Radio 4) with a priest in the diocese of Coventry, the Revd Mohammad Eghtedarian, and his wife, Maryam. Mr Eghtedarian had mixed feelings: there was a need for change, but war was probably not the answer.
From limited communications with family at home, Mrs Eghtedarian had gleaned mixed feelings, too — “a glimpse of hope” for a better Iran, but also terrible difficulties in surviving chaotic war conditions, with a collapsed economy and food shortages.