A Perfect Peace: Newman Saint for Our Time by Bishop Fintan Monahan (Veritas, €7.99) Newman: A short Biography by Michael Collins(Messenger Publications, €9.95) The canonisation of John Henry Newman last Sunday had brought his life and spirituality before a great many people who were perhaps only vaguely aware of their true complexity. Many of these…
Three Irish nuns who stopped receiving pension payments from Portugal for six months after returning home were assisted by the Ombudsman who sorted the payment issue. The nuns had returned to Ireland after spending decades in Portugal providing education and care to disadvantaged people when the payments stopped. The religious congregation in Ireland explained to…
Questions of Faith Catholics believe that at the end of her life, Mary, the mother of Jesus, was assumed both body and soul into heaven. Preserved free from all stain of original sin, she was taken up by God to share in his heavenly glory. This doctrine was dogmatically defined by Pope Pius XII in…
The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila: A Biography by Carlos Eire (Princeton University Press, £21.00) The Autobiography of Teresa of Avila is a rightly famous book, and remains widely read. But the title is slightly misleading, for the text was composed not at the free volition of the saint herself, but at the insistence…
Bishop Francis Duffy has called for public submissions on the future of the Church in the Diocese of Ardagh & Clonmacnois. Following a meeting last month, Bishop Duffy has begun a consultation to learn people’s views on the future of the local Church. “For the listening process to be robust I am now inviting views…
Mission Sunday Supplement Missionaries succeed when they make missionary disciples, Greg Daly is told It won’t have escaped the notice of regular readers of The Irish Catholic that time and again, whenever there’s a crisis somewhere around the world – Venezuela, Sudan, Hong Kong, wherever – Irish missionaries on the ground are able to describe…
Glenstal Abbey offers a road map to living the Faith well in modern Ireland, writes Garry O’Sullivan I was speaking to a prominent Catholic public figure recently who lamented the dramatic disappearance of Catholic life from the public sphere. A bit like predictions around melting glaciers, the decline has evidently become more an avalanche than the…
Saints are people who recognised their need for God’s help, who took risks to discover God’s will and to help others and who nurtured a habit of thanksgiving, according to Pope Francis. “The culmination of the journey of faith is to live a life of continual thanksgiving. Let us ask ourselves: Do we, as people…
The Cockroach by Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape, £7.99/€11.00) Felix M. Larkin Since the Brexit referendum in 2016, it often seems that events have overtaken satire – indeed, have made satire redundant. However, the distinguished author of such contemporary masterpieces as Atonement and Amsterdam, Ian McEwan has produced a novella which will stand as the definitive…
In a remarkable book, The Inner Voice of Love, written while he was in a deep emotional depression, Henri Nouwen shares these words: “The great challenge is living your wounds through instead of thinking them through. It is better to cry than to worry, better to feel your wounds deeply than to try to understand…
Peter Costello
Colm Fitzpatrick
Greg Daly
Fr Ronald Rolheiser