Presences

Andrew Thornton-Norris

At the shrine of the Blessed Virgin I
Confessed my sins. When I came home again
I found three presences waiting there.
I looked straight into their faces and saw
Their long tails and fur and fleet feet.
They told me that my sins were animal,
And that the cure was to get them out.

In his new book, The Spiritual History of English, Andrew Thornton-Norris argues that today’s social and cultural decay comes from the death of Protestantism in the 1960’s. He believes that only the Catholic Church is able to provide once protestant countries such as Britain and America with the underlying sense of values that they have lost. Andrew Thornton-Norris is the author of The Ghost of Identity, a novel, and a graduate of the Universities of Oxford and London.