Petroc Trelawny, Author at Catholic Herald

Petroc Trelawny

Diary: Transylvania awaits the Pope – and one million pilgrims

May 02, 2019

I’m back in Transylvania. At Csíksomlyó they are replanting the gardens and extending the car parks ready for Pope Francis’s visit on June 1. The Jakab Antal hostel is already advertising a special pilgrim’s menu – green pea soup and paprika pork for 18 lei (£3.25, $4.20). The village’s Neo-Baroque church is home to a

Diary: by Petroc Trelawny

August 09, 2018

It’s 50 years this month since the Soviet Union abruptly ended the Prague Spring. On August 21, 1968 Alexander Dubček’s newly introduced liberal regime with a free press, no travel restrictions and a partially decentralised economy was brought crashing down. By coincidence, just hours after Russian tanks rolled into the then Czechoslovak capital, the USSR

Petroc Trelawny: The prodigy who turned to the psalms

May 02, 2018

The near disappearance of railway dining cars is something to be sorry about. Save for a few departures to the south-west and a daily service between Cardiff and Holyhead, the days of consuming a meal while speeding along the permanent way are pretty much gone in this country. The restaurant car evoked the great days

Where religion is 75 per cent politics

February 08, 2018

Cluj is a city of churches. The writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, visiting in the 1930s, described being “woken by the discord of reciprocally schismatic bells”. Those bells peal loudly today, with the sound of Sunday singing emerging through assorted west doors. Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, Pentecostals, Baptists, Unitarians and Szekler Sabbatarians are all represented in Transylvania’s

Petroc Trelawny: Change you can’t believe in

December 07, 2017

I got an email this week inviting me to a recital by a pianist called Genaro Pereira. At the Zimbabwe Academy of Music in Bulawayo. Given the battered, troubled state of the country, it seems almost unbelievable that such events still take place. The people who go will not be particularly wealthy; the $5 or

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