Dear Editor, We sat watching Meryl Streep’s tearful reproof at the Golden Globe Awards: “Violence begets violence.” This was followed, on television, by the trailers of two forthcoming films from Hollywood, depicting the most brutal violence on screen. Perhaps her speech could have profitably been directed towards some of her own colleagues or towards some…
Month: January 2017
Make something to fill bare spaces!
Erin Fox
With the Christmas decorations long gone and packed away until next December, the home can feel a little bare without some festive spark. And it’s a long wait before you can start making Easter decorations. January can be a miserably long month, especially when Spring is yet to arrive. But you can welcome Spring into…
A failed quest for a Catholic Ireland
Michael McDowell SC The Ireland of Edward Cahill SJ 1864-1941: A Secular or a Christian State? by Dr Thomas J Morrissey SJ (Messenger Publications, €19.99) Dr Thomas Morrissey, himself a Jesuit priest, has chosen for his latest work of historical biography one of the foremost Jesuit proponents of the Catholic Action Movement in Ireland between…
Faith in the Family
Bairbre Cahill
There are times in the Sunday liturgy when the priest has the option to read a shorter version of the Gospel. This Sunday is one of those times but I find myself hoping that priests around the country will opt for the longer version. Why? This Sunday we find ourselves in the early chapters of…
Slaughter and mayhem in 1920s America gang wars
Aubrey Malone
Live By Night (15A) The ‘myth kitty’ – if I may borrow Philip Larkin’s famous phrase – of this atmospheric crime flick ranges from The Godfather and Goodfellas through Scarface, The Road to Perdition and Chris Cooper’s Black Mass. A more immediate reference point might be Ben Affleck’s The Town, which mirrors it in its…
Up from the underground and into the light
Brendan O’Regan
Last Sunday Netflix launched a new documentary, Hostage to the Devil, about the legendary exorcist and former Jesuit Malachi Martin. My appetite had been whetted by an interview with one of the producers, Sharon Lysaght, on The Ryan Tubridy Show, Wednesday morning of last week. As documentaries go it was excellent, a fascinating story well…
The magnum opus of Olaus Magnus
Peter Costello
World of Books These days we have little expectation of astonishing works of literature or scholarship from a bishop. They are all too busy with mere administration to have the mental energy to expend on scholarship or literature. It was not always thus. Look for instance at the writings of 19th-Century Irish bishops, such as…
Taking our wounds to the Eucharist
Fr Ronald Rolheiser
Recently a man came to me, asking for help. He carried some deep wounds, not physical wounds, but emotional wounds to his soul. What surprised me initially was that, while he was deeply wounded, he had not been severely traumatised either in childhood or adulthood. He seemed to have just had to absorb the normal…
No half measures, please
Dear Editor, While I can appreciate our bishops’ reluctance to make a martyr out of the supposedly silenced priest Fr Tony Flannery, it is still depressing to read that they are unwilling to take any action to prevent him from saying Mass publicly within their dioceses. Fr Flannery is out of ministry for good reason,…
Listening to those who’ve earned the right to be heard
Greg Daly
When Cardinal Raymond Burke wrote in April that Pope Francis’ post-synodal exhortation on the family did not change Church teaching, he was predictably condemned by those who had been casting aspersions on the document released just three days earlier. “This is nothing less than a betrayal from one who should have offered hope,” tweeted one…