Petra Conroy The word is beginning to spread in the town lands and parishes around the country: the World Meeting of Families (WMOF2018) is coming to Ireland next year, and there are high hopes that Pope Francis is coming too. Naturally, news of a possible visit from the Holy Father captures a lot of…
This week sees the third diocesan pilgrimage to Knock led by an American bishop in as many years, but if Wisconsin’s Diocese of Green Bay is less familiar to Irish Catholics than Cardinal Timothy Dolan’s New York or Cardinal Sean O’Malley’s Boston, it’s hardly one without a spiritual kinship to Ireland’s national shrine. The National…
Four years ago, I was asked to accompany a group of sixth-year girls to Lourdes as part of the Dublin Diocesan Pilgrimage. A whole world unfolded for me, and every year since, I have discovered different aspects. This year, there were 130 sixth-year volunteers, known as blueshirts, including two new schools – Coláiste Chill Mhantáin…
I’m sometimes asked by dioceses and religious congregations for advice on vocations strategies. I don’t have anything close to all the answers, but I’m happy to share my experiences of what I have seen work elsewhere in terms of fostering a culture of vocations and how one might go about communicating a life-encompassing commitment…
Has Education Minister, Richard Bruton, yet said something that is friendly and supportive of the role and place of faith schools in Irish society? Much of the time Minister Bruton sounds like a spokesman for Equate, the pressure group that campaigns against the rights of faith schools in the name of ‘equality’. Minister Bruton gives…
Should sport be politicised? It’s surely a pity when it is. The spat between President Trump and the American National Football League probably has some merit on both sides: the footballers, mostly young black men, are entitled to demonstrate their antipathy towards the President’s alleged race attitudes, by kneeling on one knee, rather…
David Mullins Charles Dickens famously opened his novel A Tale of Two Cities with the immortal line: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness.” Anyone who was paying close attention to recent proceedings in Leinster House would have observed…
Leading legal and historical scholars of Bunreacht na hÉireann have rejected claims by an independent TD that the Irish Constitution was written by a priest. Speaking in the Dáil, Dublin South-Central TD Joan Collins said: “The Constitution is not fit for purpose and needs replacement. It was written by a Catholic priest in the 1930s…
Ever since Pope Leo XIII issued Rerum Novarum in 1891, the Church’s social teaching has commonly been seen as favouring a carefully qualified form of capitalism, of sorts perhaps best expressed in the Rhenish capitalisms of Christian democrat Germany and Holland, or even in social democrat societies. Catholic advocates of less restrained capitalist models, however, have long…
The Dublin Lockout 1913: New perspectives on Class War and its Legacy Conor McNamara and Padraig Yeates (Irish Academic Press, €24.99 pb/ €44.99hb) Tom Morrissey The Lockout centenary commemoration was a triumph of careful organisation, hard work and trade union support. In the process, James Larkin was glorified, his failings largely ignored. The Great Strike / Lockout…
Greg Daly
Breda O'Brien
Michael Kelly
David Quinn
Mary Kenny