The ferret, at it again

ADDENDUM 22 MARCH 2009

I have reluctantly taken out the RSS feed from Damian Thompson's Holy Smoke blog

because of offensive anti-Anglican rhetoric from a few zealots who regularly respond

to his postings.

If yours is a stronger stomach than mine, you can find the Holy Smoke blog here:

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/damian_thompson/blog/

Copy and paste the URL into your bookmarks.

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Assiduous readers of Choirstalls in its previous incarnation (within the parish mag) will know that I am not overfond of Graham Kendrick's sort of evangelism, which tends to be full of wrong notes and other typos, to say the least, not to mention ecstatic leaping.

So it was with Joy (yes, her again) that I read these words from the pen of Damian Thompson, religious blogger for the Daily Telegraph and editor of the Catholic Herald.

Damian - a feed from whose blog Holy Smoke graces these very pages (right at the bottom, above the clock) - has been described by our own ever-thoughtful and courteous Church Times as a "blood-crazed ferret", an epithet which actually I'd be proud of, if I were he.  He is certainly the scourge of the loony liberal wing of the Roman Catholic church, but he is moreover a fine writer, who aims his words with precision and deadly accuracy and scores hit after palpable hit.

But read the comments that inevitably and invariably follow his posts.  Some of them are scary stuff indeed, as well as being only partly literate.