Jenna Marie Cooper Q: In the past few weeks, due to extreme weather, I’ve missed Mass a couple of times. My parish has a Facebook channel, so I watched the services there instead. I wasn’t able to receive Communion. In talking to the priest, though, he said that in such situations, a person can receive…
When I arrived on the Vatican beat more than 25 years ago, a bitter cross controversy at Auschwitz and tensions over the passion play in Oberammergau both were making global headlines. It was shortly before the release of John Cornwall’s Hitler’s Pope, reviving debates over Pius XII’s alleged “silence” on the Holocaust, as well as Pope…
A Late Finding, a novel by Lucy Beckett (Gracewing, £20.00 / €24.00) We seem to live in a time where Catholic culture has passed out of general public discourse, especially in fiction. The days of Fr Benson, Belloc, Chesterton, Waugh, Graham Greene and others are lost in the past. Yet there must be a readership…
It will be “very, very difficult” for the assisted dying committee to reach a unanimous position, the chair of the committee TD Michael Healy-Rae has said.
In an exclusive interview with The Synodal Times, Paolo Affatato spoke with Bishop Celso Ba Shwe of Myanmar who was driven out of his cathedral, which was attacked and then occupied by the Burmese army. Now living “as a refugee”, he is building a new ‘cathedral’ made out of bamboo in the forest. ‘A…
God behaves in the psalms in ways that God is not allowed to behave in theology. That quip comes from Sebastian Moore and should be highlighted at a time when fewer people want to use the psalms in prayer because they feel offended by what they sometimes find there. More and more, we see people…
Many readers who find many of today’s novels present them with a problem, will find many titles that they long to reread (which is the real pleasure of all reading), or have heard of, but which never come their way, which are hard to find in libraries, will be delighted by what they can find…
Bishop Alphonsus Cullinan, Bishop of Waterford and Lismore extended his support to the local community of Dunmore East in Co. Waterford after the tragic death of 6 year-old Matthew Purcell-Healy, whose body was found in a car in the early hours of last Thursday. Gardaí are currently probing if the schoolboy died by suffocation.
Women from Asia took centre stage at the Synod. For the first time they took part in the assembly, and they were a large group, as many as 12. A consecrated woman from Japan, Momoko Nishimura, was among the presidents delegated by the Pope. Then there were four lay women from Hong Kong, Myanmar, the…
In a sense, it was more than John Bruton who was being laid to rest last Saturday following his sad death. It was also the remains of Irish Christian Democracy because John Bruton was a proud Christian Democrat and the last properly Christian Democratic leader of Fine Gael, and our last Christian Democratic Taoiseach. I…
John L. Allen Jr.
Peter Costello
Ruadhán Jones
Fr Ronald Rolheiser
David Quinn