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Recently we welcomed the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Cardinal Pizzaballa, to London on a visit of several days. He has what must be one of the most difficult jobs in the world, caring for Latin-rite Christians and their neighbours in Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Cyprus, and I think possibly the Sinai as well.

We first met in Jerusalem in 2023, so catching up with him for a second (and then third!) time to hear about the situation in the Holy Land was illuminating, if a bit depressing.

At First Things, Cole Aronson meets the Patriarch and explores his unique and demanding role.

■ The Pantheon in Paris, where secular heroes are entombed either physically or symbolically, presents one of the most intriguing aspects of France’s civil religion.

On the eightieth anniversary of the liberation of Strasbourg, President Macron announced that the academic, army officer, and father of the Annales school of historians Marc Bloch would be elevated to the Pantheon.

In the American Conservative, Luke Nicastro explores France’s newest hero.

■ Along with Frankfurt and Potsdam, Budapest has undergone one of the most comprehensive programmes of urban repair in recent years.

The Financial Times’s architecture critic Edwin Heathcote reports informatively, despite his simplistic conceptual error of slagging off rebuilding as reaction.

I’ll say it again: it’s not turning the clock back — it’s choosing a better future.

■ Candlemas is fast approaching but there’s still a few days left before the Christmas season ends properly.

The old-school Irish Protestant ‘Laudable Practice’ provides an excellent critique of a First Things piece: Old High Christmas Cheer, or Why the Oxford Movement Did Not Save Christmas.

Much good came from the Oxford Movement, but there is a tendency today to underestimate the levels and layers of cultural continuity in England across the centuries.

Laudable gets this right, pointing to how the Georgians celebrated Christmas. Nicholas Orme has written on how the feast of the Incarnation was kept in mediaeval England.

■ Finally, Lord Sumption peeks into the world of espionage in the Middle Ages.

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