Way back in the early years of this century, God help us, Christians’ major worry was the four horsemen of the apocalypse, as the new atheists were dubbed. Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens all wrote influential books although they also gained traction through the smartphone revolution that allowed easy mass access…
A working document for the final gathering of Pope Francis’s controversial Synod of Bishops on synodality, presented Tuesday in a news conference, may strike most observers as more notable for what it didn’t say than what it did. The official working document, called an Instrumentum Laboris, for the second Rome-based session of the Synod of…
The Poor Clares of Galway hailed the support they have received from the community during their anniversary commemoration this week marking 375 years since they received the iconic Nuns’ Island site. The then-called Galway Corporation handed over the site on July 10, 1649. This historic grant, made under the mayoralty of William Blake, has been…
I grew up listening to Frankie Byrne. She was the star of the sponsored programme hosted by Jacobs on RTÉ Radio and had the title of Ireland’s agony aunt. The problems she was dealing with “might not be yours today”, she insisted — “but they could be some day”. That’s how I feel about the…
In the second book of his Dialogues, Pope Gregory the Great tells of the holiness of St Benedict, whose memorial is celebrated on the 11th day of July. We learn that Benedict lived for three years in Subiaco, some 40 miles outside of Rome. He fled the ancient city that was self-destructing in its moral…
The Best Loved Poems of Gabriel Fitzmaurice, with an introduction by Declan Kiberd (Mercier Press, €12.99) Those of us who remember Listowel Writers’ Week in its earliest days will never forget the singing and cajoling presence of a whipper-snapper young poet called Gabriel Fitzmaurice – there he would be in the foyer of the…
I’ve often wondered what it is like to experience a vocation as a cloistered nun, and now I think I understand what it’s all about. Catherine Coldstream is an Englishwoman who grew up in a somewhat Bohemian household, and after her father died, she felt adrift in the world. In her twenties, she became a…
It was a curious feature of the erstwhile British government that, despite the ruling party being officially named the ‘Conservative and Unionist Party’, the higher-ups in London showed very little interest in the part of the United Kingdom on the northeast of this island. The role of Secretary of State for the North has never…
The Catholic leader responsible for a world-famous and much beloved Marian healing shrine in France has ordered measures to lower the visibility of mosaic artwork by an accused serial rapist, but has stopped short – for the time being – of ordering the removal of the art. Fr Marko Rupnik is accused of abusing dozens…
There are more twists and turns in The Weekend Away than the road from Dublin to Ballyjamesduff. It’s about a young woman who goes missing after a night out with her best friend in Croatia. Who’s responsible? At one stage I suspected four different people. It was none of them! Okay so it’s popcorn entertainment…
Breda O'Brien
Chai Brady
Mary Kenny
Aubrey Malone