"à Parikia à Paros"

John Opie, 'The Calling of Samuel'

Mont Saint-Michel, Normandy

Janet and Anne Grahame Johnstone, 'Good King Wenceslas'

Frank Cottrell Boyce

On his children's novel Millions:

Was it always such a spiritual story?

No, I think it's become more spiritual. I mean, I am Catholic, but saints are not part of an official religion, although they are made by the Vatican. Saints come out of popular culture, because people admire somebody, or they come out of folklore or legend. They're sort of part of the magic of ordinary life; it's not dogma, you're not talking about evangelical religion in that way, you're talking about a popular way of thinking about the transcendence.

To me, having those images from El Greco and Michelangelo mainlined into housing estate in Widness, it's fantastically potent, though for people who are not from that background it might really seem odd and surreal. But if you've been bought up around there as a Catholic, you live on a council estate and then every Sunday morning you open that church door and there's incense, brass, weird music, saints, stained glass. You open this door to the infinite and then you close it again - that's just part of growing up to me.

[Time Out]

On the Pope's meeting with "cultural" figures:

Holding the symposium in the Sistine Chapel reminds us that Catholics have an astounding artistic heritage to draw on. We tend to idealise art and artists nowadays but the Sistine setting also underlines the fact that great art is parasitic on great power. The field of modern art in Britain, for instance, is sustained by money from banks and advertisers. And it expresses all the things they want to say - that the individual comes first and that life is meaningless (but you can give it meaning by buying stuff).

I think as a Catholic writer I feel my mission is to do what St Paul said and "think on what is good", to remind people that life, even in the worst circumstances, contains the possibility of joy. In a world which is dominated by governments and corporations that feed on fear and misery, this is a profoundly subversive message.

I used to feel anxious about pushing my Catholicism but in fact the two things I've done that have been most warmly received - Millions and God on Trial - are the things in which I was most upfront and honest about my faith.

Frank Cottrell Boyce is a novelist and screenwriter. Millions, directed by Danny Boyle, was released in 2004

[The Catholic Herald]

Antoine Le Moiturier, 'Flying Angel'

Henry de Montherlant, Roger Peyrefitte and Karel Egermeier

The Band of Thebes bloggers recently were predictably (sadly!) bitchy about a man who (by their own lights) they really ought to have hailed as a hero.

Hardcore old school aristocratic masculinist, misogynist, and fascist, Henry Marie Joseph Frédéric Expedite Millon de Montherlant decried the wimpy, feminized 20th-century male and is said to have celebrated strong Germany's triumph over his weakened native France in 1940. By then, at 45, he had enjoyed widespread literary success, especially with his shockingly prejudiced series The Girls, which sold millions of copies, was translated into more than a dozen other languages, and caused Simone de Beauvoir to attack it for an entire chapter of The Second Sex. Early in his career Montherlant published the gayish novel The Bachelors, [sic] his essays on vigorous sport and the pleasures of youth Les Olympiques [1924], and, in 1929, wrote the far more explicit all-male school romance The Boys which he did not release it [sic] until 1969. His play on a similar love triangle between an older male student, a younger male student, and their jealous male teacher, La Ville Dont Le Prince Est Un Enfant, was produced in 1952 and in 1997 finally became a movie known in English as The Fire That Burns. Expect the classic doomed, sadder but wiser ending: It is Montherlant, after all, who said, "Happiness writes in white ink on a white page." At 77, almost blind, he swallowed cyanide then fired a gun at his head.

In April 1938, whilst checking out the boy-candy at a fair in the Place de Clichy in Paris, de Montherlant met and befriended Roger Peyrefitte, a French civil servant some ten years his junior who was evidently there for the same reason. During the War, Peyrefitte would go on to work for the French Vichy Government, as their representative to the occupying German authorities. His reward for these "collaborationist" activities was to be removed from office in February 1945. This discharge was not revoked until 1960 and his diplomatic status was not finally restored until 1962. His only real claim to fame nowadays is his attempt to out Pope Paul VI.

Peyrefitte clearly read and enjoyed de Montherlant's play about schoolboy love, which de Montherlant had started writing as far back as 1912. Indeed, Peyrefitte even wrote his own version - a novel called Special Friendships, published in 1943, which was made into a film in 1964. This gave the author the opportunity quite literally to make some of his dreams come true when he befriended and seduced one of the young actors featuring in it (in the, er, minor role of a choirboy). This was the 12-year-old aristocrat Alain-Philippe Malagnac d'Argens de Villèle, with whom Peyrefitte was to embark on a long-lasting and tempestuous love affair.

There's a lovely article (in French, with photographs) about de Montherlant and Peyrefitte's friendship on the Diagonals of Time blog here. Peyrefitte apparently introduced de Montherlant to the accomplished youth photographer Karel Egermeier who, though he is now celebrated as one of the great boy-artists of modern times, was as yet a comparatively unknown Czech photographer living and working in Paris. In time though, his photographs of Scouts and other French boys would make him the inter-war equivalent of what Robert Manson would later become in the 1950s and '60s. De Montherland was clearly very taken with Egermeier's work, and secretly allowed him to use his house to take photographs of Peyrefitte and two of his "Platonic" young friends.

Peyrefitte and young Roland "Roro" Doudou, probably taken by Egermeier outside the Tuileries Palace in 1939

De Montherlant and Egermeier went on to work together, producing an updated, illustrated version of de Montherlant's Olympics book, entitled Paysage des Olympiques. (The French 'Gay Library' blog has some pictures here.) It was published in France in 1940, at about the same time as de Montherlant started writing for the racist, pro-Nazi Catholic periodical La Gerbe ('The Sheaf'). Like Peyrefitte, after the "liberation" de Montherlant would get into trouble with the new authorities for collaborationism.

The slightly creaky French TV-film version of his play of course came out much too late for de Montherlant to enjoy any authorial perks from it as Peyrefitte had done from his story. (On the other hand, it does at least have a sweet scene between Naël Marandin and Clément van der Bergh.) But in the meantime, oddly enough, the film Au Revoir Les Enfants ten years earlier had done its bit to reclaim the genre (of prepubescent gay French traditionalist Catholic boarding school coming-of-age period dramas!) for the Resistance. (Apparently those traddy frog priests weren't all penning Hitlerite screeds whilst wanking off to little boys' bottoms: they were really risking their lives to rescue Jewish kids from the Holocaust. Who knew?)

BoyWiki has articles on de Montherlant, Peyrefitte and Egermeier here, here and here respectively. It's a sobering but uplifting thought that whereas the traditionalist de Montherlant eventually committed suicide the arch "anti-clericalist" Peyrefitte was eventually reconciled to the Church and died in a state of grace, fortified by the last rites.

One of Egermeier's illustrations for de Montherlant's Olympics book

Milo has lost none of his charm...

The only reason homosexuals adopt babies is to rape them. https://t.co/tn63bDDCyV

— MILO (@Nero) September 17, 2026

Douglas Blanchard, Blood Atonement

The second reading of the narrative saw Zeus' abduction of Ganymede as a deeply spiritual one. Even in antiquity, there were those that saw Ganymede's flight into the sky as a metaphor for the soul's journey into heaven. This interpretation would give later Christian artists an excuse to paint Ganymede, and his rounded buttocks, with such tender brushstrokes.

Even as they emphasised the Christian message of this scene, homosexual artists of the Renaissance were not blind to the more obvious meaning of the Ganymede myth.

[Divine homosexuality: Ganymede and Antinous as queer icons in art | Art UK]

Ralph Nicholas Chubb (1892-1960)

La obra Caín (1885) es una de las pinturas más célebres y conmovedoras del artista checo (bohemio) Emanuel Krescenc Liška.

La pieza representa el peso psicológico de la culpa inmediatamente después del primer fratricidio de la historia bíblica.

En lugar de plasmar el acto… pic.twitter.com/sFvnLmFBUk

— El Club del Arte 🎨📷📚🖼🕍🎼 (@Arteymas_) September 3, 2026

EXCLUSIVE for @RealAdVaticanum

‘I hate to see them pained’: Cardinal Radcliffe on traditional Catholics.

Cardinal Radcliffe says he “deeply sympathise[s] with people whose love of the Tridentine Mass has led them into tension with the hierarchy.”

“Some of them are my friends… https://t.co/H9a7iRQPRS pic.twitter.com/S52dbojfR8

— Niwa Limbu (@NiwaLimbu1988) August 31, 2026

Arantzazu Martinez, 'The Fallen Angel' (2007)

El fotógrafo / la foto. pic.twitter.com/KOalsamV7W

— Dan ★ (@DanGamboaB) August 29, 2026

Vlaho Bukovac, 'John the Baptist' (1897)

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Museum of Modern Art, New York (1964)

 

Frants Henningsen, The Good Samaritan (1881)

Genuinely, deeply haunting

Let's be honest, most of what the Children's Film Foundation (CFF) produced was (probably) not very good. I say this with no great malice or cynicism. The truth is that, as per Sturgeon's law, most of everything isn't very good, never was and never will be. Here and there though there were some gold nuggets, and they withstand scrutiny even now for more than just nostalgia's sake. Haunters of the Deep (available to watch on line for free here) is definitely one.*

It's not about submarines. It doesn't have any baddies. And the adult characters are just as important to the plot as the children are. In fact Haunters of the Deep is really an unusually mature film for children. For the early 1980s, at a time when every American on British telly was a moron or an evil capitalist villain (or, worse, a Cold Warrior), it's also unusually subtle. In fact the two American characters, a young girl and her father, are played as likable right from the outset - albeit (literally) in over their heads, lost in deepest darkest Cornwall, and then subsequently in the deepest darkest depths thereof.

The setting of Haunters of the Deep is also an unusually gritty "real world" one for a children's anthology series that's usually given to wholesome prepubescent whimsy rather than to modern "cultural relevance". Yes, it's set in Cornwall, land of second homes and public school surfers. And yes, it's beautifully shot. But it makes no bones about the lifestyle of a hardworking family on the edge struggling to make ends meet. So in a sense it's even more impressive that at a time when the CFF itself was in the doldrums the producers seem to have positively fought off any inclination to go "political". Even as the Thatcher government was closing down mines in the north of England, the economic atmosphere here in Cornwall is a seemingly quite wholesome one of reform, retraining, and reopening with American investment. There are the Yankee yuppies and there's a BMX and there's the usual idiot older brother, who listens to pop music on a walkman (and likes to do stunts on his younger brother's bike). Mixed in are not a few melancholy references to the decline of both mining and the Cornish fishing industry, though without any punches being pulled about the need for change or about how the mining itself was horrifically dangerous in the bad old good old days. 

From a modern point of view the film's beautiful sunlit vistas are a painful reminder that back in the day there were still filmmakers who knew how ghost stories work. Contrast rubbish like The Woman in Black (or most of Hammer's back-catalogue, for that matter). Kubrick knew that a brightly lit hotel lobby is scarier than a "spooky" dark cellar, and to his credit so does Ari Aster in Midsommar. And the stand out performance of the piece is Cardinal Newman's 'Lead Kindly Light', whose historical cultural connexion with mining is well thought of. The fact that the ghosts are trying to help the characters makes them paradoxically more scary, because it makes the audience actually focus on their ghostliness - their being dead, lost before their time in terrible circumstances - rather than distracting with some feebly conceived malevolent motivations. And the idea of a ghost boy who is trapped in his childhood is a beautifully disturbing and memorable notion, especially for children themselves.

All-in-all, Haunters of the Deep is almost certainly an unwitting gem that has survived the test of time remarkably well. And if CFF had been able to keep on making children's films as good as this - rather than proto-woke drivel like Terry on the Fence - then maybe there might have been some call to preserve it.

*Friend or Foe (available for a small fee from BFI here) is probably another.

Jacopo Vignali, 'The Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence'

"Butt music" from The Garden of Earthly Delights

Caravaggio, Madonna and Child with St. Anne (Dei Palafrenieri) (1606)

Fiorenzo di Lorenzo, 'Virgin and Child Enthroned with Saint Christopher and Saint Sebastian'

Julius Kronberg, 'David and Saul' (1885)

Daniel F. Gerhartz, Daniel jouant de la harpe 2009

Daniel F. Gerhartz, 'Daniel jouant de la harpe' (2009)

Naruki, Patrick Church

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A post shared by Abtei Maria Laach (@benediktinerabteimarialaach)

En, ipse stat post paríetem nostrum, respíciens per fenéstras, prospíciens per cancéllos.

dovegraveyard, 'To pretend'

Even by Spanish standards, this is a fairly modern "look" for your kid's First Holy Communion.

Dear writers, we need your imagination, your narrative creativity and your lively thinking. We need these to create spaces of freedom and authenticity, within which divine grace can make the promise of consolation and peace resound. https://t.co/FEmCrdQ392

— Pope Leo XIV (@Pontifex) June 24, 2026

Sir Joshua Reynolds, 'St. John the Baptist in the Wilderness'

William Holman Hunt, A Converted British Family Sheltering a Christian Missionary from the Persecution of the Druids

Rockwell Kent, To God! (1918-19, reworked through 1963)

forgive me father for i have sinned pic.twitter.com/X6DX7Ulosi

— ⚪️ (@dudeszone) June 11, 2026

St Vitus

Talon Abraxas, 'The Sacred Heart'

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dom.aelred

I think this little 33 knot prayer-rope is my best yet.

If you might be interested in one, do get in touch.

[Instagram]