Coffee Theology

Over the six episodes of Broken Father Michael meets several people going through terrible struggles. One of the saddest is the case of Roz, a lapsed Irish Catholic woman who comes to confession and tells Michael her secret. Roz is holding down a responsible job and living in a nice house with her three teenage children; she is an attractive woman and comes across as successful and capable. But Roz has stolen over £230,000 from her employer over the past eight years in order to fund her gambling addiction. She knows her days of keeping this quiet are numbered: soon her employer will find out and therefore she is planning to end her life. She won't be able to live with the shame, she explains. She can't stand the thought of all her neighbours and friends knowing what she's done and, as she puts it, "wetting themselves"  with glee. Michael tries hard to dissuade Roz from her terrible decision. He's done much worse things than she has, he confesses, and shar

A new drama series by Jimmy McGovern finished a couple of weeks ago on the BBC. Broken  tells the story of Roman Catholic priest Father Michael Kerrigan, a broken person ministering to other broken people in an unnamed northern city. It's still available on BBC iPlayer and I would encourage you to watch it - only be prepared for a few grim hours. I'll try to avoid spoilers here. Michael has a problem: whenever he celebrates Mass (which I think in the Roman Catholic Church is every day), he has flashbacks. At the moment of consecration - the point at which, Catholics believe, the bread and wine physically become for us the body and blood of Christ - he remembers every shameful thing he's ever done, and every shameful thing that has been done to him. We see his mother screaming at him that he's a dirty, filthy little boy; young women crying because he has treated them badly; mistakes he has made as a priest; people he has let down. His voice falters and he struggles