This morning, in a hotel in Indianapolis, I endeavoured to access an article from today’s Crisis about the English Martyr, St. Robert Southwell. To my surprise, it was blocked by the hotel’s filter as possibly being pornographic! The reason for the cyber-suspicion was the appearance of the juxtaposed words “naked babe” in the article. Unable to access the article because of suspected obscene content, I was amused at the thought that Crisiswas being blocked for gross obscenity and pleased that the hotel had placed such a filter on those legion of websites who should rightly be blocked. (On a related note, I’m also pleased that the major hotel chains seem to have ceased being the purveyers of pornography through the offering of pay-per-view “adult” (sic) movies.) I suspected that the offensive juxtaposition of “naked” and “babe” had something to do with Southwell’s famous Christmas poem, “The Burning Babe”, but I had to wait until I got home to see if my suspicions were justified. Having now read the article, I can confirm that “naked babe” in the article refers to the Christ Child though it is also connected to Macbeth. In any event, and this long preamble notwithstanding, the article about the great Jesuit Martyr, who was also a source of inspiration for Shakespeare, is well worth reading: