Inés San Martín Nicaragua and Venezuela are continuing to experience turmoil due to popular opposition to their socialist leadership. Both regimes have been accused by prominent leaders of human rights violations, and international organisations ask their governments to be open to dialogue. Venezuela The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, released…
Cardinal Baltazar Enrique Porras Cardozo said last week that conditions in Venezuela continue to deteriorate under the country’s socialist government. “We are living in an exceptional and unheard-of situation, which is not the result of war, nor of any armed conflict, or any natural catastrophe, and yet which is having similar consequences. The political regime…
The Irish martyrs deserve to be household names, writes Greg Daly Last week The Irish Catholic revealed that the sainthood causes of 42 Catholics martyred in Ireland between 1572 and 1655 are at an advanced stage of preparation for being submitted to Rome for consideration by the Holy See. If all goes well, this…
Smyllie’s Ireland: Protestants, independence, and the man who ran the Irish Times by Caleb Wood Richardson (Indiana University Press, $85 hb / $35 Pb and e-book) Ian d’Alton This book is a new take on an old subject. Using as a peg the larger-than-life editor of the Irish Times in the 1930s, 40s and early…
The goal of legendary comedian Brendan Grace was to “lift the gloom of the nation” and the people who came to see him, Fr Brian D’Arcy said at the funeral of the national treasure. The Irish star who died aged 68 following a short illness was best known for his role as Fr Fintan Stack…
The Great Famine in Kinsale by Catherine Flanagan (Four Courts Press, €9.95) Catherine Flanagan gives us an account of the Great Famine in Kinsale and its hinterland. At the outset she describes the social and economic conditions in the area before the famine. The lower classes – cottiers and labourers – made up 80% of the…
A recently introduced bill in Ohio would add scientific information about the development of the unborn child to the state’s public and charter school curriculum. HB 90, known as the ‘Humanity of the Unborn Child’ bill, would direct the state board of education and department of health to create educational programming that “provides accurate, scientifically verifiable…
The Russian Orthodox Church is debating an end to the practice of blessing large scale weapons, including nuclear missiles. Last month, a committee on ecclesial law met in Moscow and recommended ending the practice of blessing missiles and warheads, and suggested that priests should instead bless only individual soldiers and their personal weapons. According to…
The problem in the world and in the Churches, Jim Wallis suggests, is that, perennially, conservatives get it wrong and liberals (over-reacting to conservatives) then don’t get it at all. Nowhere is this truer, I believe, than in how we discern the finger of God in the events of our lives. Jesus tells us to…
Mainly About Books by the books editor The other week in the course of a visit to Sligo, we spent part of a morning in Drumcliffe churchyard. We had been there before – what poetry lover in Ireland does not want to see the beautifully located grave of W.B. Yeats? The church – which…
Greg Daly
Colm Fitzpatrick
Fr Ronald Rolheiser
Peter Costello