The St Mellitus Times

The outside of St Mellitus is church imperial, church triumphant: a monumental portico and vast brick walls stretching out behind. Inside it's painted in garish blue and red, a colour scheme far more authentic than the reverential Farrow & Ball recreations of the Past as packed with tasteful Period Features. The colours make the space feel welcoming and unexpected.

The lobby has the usual Tablets and Catholic Times, but there's also a lot about support for migrants and nothing that I could see against equal marriage or contraception.

Curious, I went online and found that St Mellitus' priest has an unofficial blog: www.davidawalter.blogspot.com

It's a rabbit hole well worth falling down, a funny, angry, despairing read that's left me more optimistic about the Church than I've been in years because if there are priests like this there's hope yet. Highlights reproduced below, but you really should read the whole thing. 

Someone give the man a column.

Full disclosure: I'm not a parishioner at St Mellitus or anywhere else. I can just about claim cultural Catholicism. I grew up in Italy where Church is the Catholic Church (a schoolfriend was seventeen when she first heard that Protestants were Christians and I don't think she believed it), I've been on a retreat to Pluscarden Abbey and I spent four blissful years getting paid to write about 14th century Franciscans (John of Montecorvino, the first archbishop of Beijing, was a great man), but I've never believed or practised.