The complexity of adulthood inevitably puts to death the naiveté of childhood. And this is true too of our faith. Not that faith is a naiveté. It isn’t. But our faith needs to be constantly reintegrated into our persons and matched up anew against our life’s experience; otherwise we will find it at odds with…
“Romantic England’s dead and gone,” says Steven Patrick Morrissey, deliberately misquoting Yeats in this engrossing biopic, “it’s with Jane Austen in the grave”. Elsewhere his mother makes a wallpaper joke about his hero Oscar Wilde. Wilde’s reputed last words, remember, were: “Either that wallpaper goes or I do.” These are just two of the (unexplained)…
What I like about Sunday Sequence (BBC Radio Ulster) is the wide variety of topics and contributors. Last Sunday’s edition had several worthwhile topics covered even in the first half hour. There was an analysis of the current political troubles in resource-rich Venezuela, outlining the Church’s mediation attempts and its difficulty in avoiding manipulation by…
One of the strangest sights in social media in recent times has seen Cambridge classicist Prof. Mary Beard being mocked by the US-based essayist and risk analyst Nassim Nicholas Taleb over her supposed inability to handle evidence relating to the ethnic diversity of Roman Britain. The minutiae of the argument go a bit beyond this…
Ireland’s nuns have not been getting much respect of late, for reason that painful headlines make only too clear. But in all this controversy some things are lost sight of. Critics seem to think that the Church took over institutions that ought to have been run by the state; but the truth is that if…
Joe Carroll When World War II broke out in September 1939, it left many hundreds, possibly more than a thousand Irish men and women living in France with a dilemma; whether to seek refuge in neutral Éire or hold on to see what would happen. For those who were still there following the fall of…
Christopher Altieri Of all the areas that constitute proper objects of the Church’s magisterium – her official teaching office – Catholic social teaching is the one that has, without doubt, received the greatest attention and development over the past century and a half. Why is it, then, that so few Catholics seem to have heard…
Ireland’s first Jesuit bishop made a touching speech in which he commemorated his late sister, after he was ordained bishop of the Diocese of Raphoe on Sunday. Worshippers came in their droves to the ordination of Bishop Alan McGuckian SJ, filling the Cathedral of Saints Eunan and Columba in Letterkenny, Donegal. Dr McGuckian, whose two…
Terrorism has horrific consequences. Among these consequences, and frequently not adverted to, are lack of respect for the truth, the undermining of the rule of law and the obstruction of justice. In this remarkable study the author, who has specialised in criminal law in England, Wales and Ireland since 1966, details how consequences such as…
Raphoe’s Bishop Alan McGuckian first spent time in what would eventually become his diocese almost 50 years ago, when his love for the Irish language brought him to Rann na Feirste as a 15-year-old. Although he’s been a regular visitor to Donegal’s Gaeltacht since his teenage years, he only moved to the diocese on Wednesday…
Fr Ronald Rolheiser
Aubrey Malone
Brendan O’Regan
Greg Daly
Peter Costello
Chai Brady