{"id":2704,"date":"2005-09-06T20:37:38","date_gmt":"2005-09-06T20:37:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2005\/09\/no-one-does-obits-like-the-brits.html"},"modified":"2005-09-06T20:37:38","modified_gmt":"2005-09-06T20:37:38","slug":"no-one-does-obits-like-the-brits","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/09\/no-one-does-obits-like-the-brits.html","title":{"rendered":"No one does obits like the Brits"},"content":{"rendered":"

Actually, this one isn’t a stylistic classic like so many others I’ve read, but the reader who passed it one was impressed by the deceased’s humble, vibrant faith:<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

In the early 1950s he was a painstaking editor of the Catholic Who’s Who, who would telephone a potential subject’s parish priest to ensure that he was actually a practising Catholic before including an entry. Hood later went on to become assistant editor and managing editor of the Catholic Directory. From 1953 to 1960, he was circulation director of the Universe, until he found the Tablet editor Douglas Woodruff’s chairmanship too trying; he then did the same job for the Catholic Herald until 1988.<\/p>\n

Throughout this time Hood undertook good works by stealth, being involved with many charities and Christian organisations. He was president of the St Francis Leprosy Guild and a trustee of the Converts Aid Society. As vice-president of the Bourne Trust, concerned with Catholic prisoners, he regularly visited inmates of Wormwood Scrubs.<\/p>\n

He never sought the limelight. He once leaped fully-clothed into the Regent’s Canal to rescue a drowning nine-year-old boy and, when the child was in safe hands, slipped home quietly in his sodden clothes. The press eventually found out the name of the rescuer, and, much to his embarrassment, hailed Hood as "The Modest Hero".<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

They were brought up in some comfort at what later became the residence on Wimbledon Common of the Apostolic Delegate of the Holy See. At Downside, Harold was troubled by illness. He contracted a bad strain of measles, which developed into rheumatic fever and left him bedridden for some time; he also had a series of operations on his knee after jumping out of a window to reprimand a young man stealing pears.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That young man’s name wasn’t Augustine, was it?<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Actually, this one isn’t a stylistic classic like so many others I’ve read, but the reader who passed it one was impressed by the deceased’s humble, vibrant faith: In the early 1950s he was a painstaking editor of the Catholic Who’s Who, who would telephone a potential subject’s parish priest to ensure that he was…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2704","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nNo one does obits like the Brits - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/09\/no-one-does-obits-like-the-brits.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"No one does obits like the Brits - 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2704","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2704"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2704\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2704"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2704"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2704"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}