A comment from the great Italian writer, Umberto Eco, has always stayed with me. Eco is most famous as the author of The Name of the Rose, a sort of intellectual murder-mystery set in a monastery during the Middle Ages and made into a movie starring Sean Connery as a sort of monk-detective. I don’t…
The past is a different country Dear Editor, L.P. Hartley wrote “The past is another country. They do things differently there.” When we look at the past through the eyes of the present we end up taking the high moral ground from societies abandonment of unmarried pregnant women to mother and baby homes to the…
I had the wedding from hell this month — or maybe more correctly the bridal couple who seemed to have been spawned there. It is probably my fault, my misunderstanding: I thought that in giving the couple oodles of time to share their story with me, I was building rapport with them, but in fact…
By Fr Eamonn Conway Christian hope is all around us. It is most readily visible in the lives of what Pope Francis called “the saints next door”, our neighbours and friends. Among them are even those who do not overtly consider themselves religious, who respond to the circumstances of everyday life as best they…
In 1996, the towering figure of 37-year-old George O’Connor stood tall on the hallowed turf of Croke Park, the Liam McCarthy Cup finally in Wexford hands after a 28-year drought. He had been beaten in thirteen finals before that. A deep inner resilience forged in the furnace that was the straight knockout All-Ireland hurling championship.…
Thinking about the end has helped me prioritise and actually do what’s truly meaningful, , writes Jason Conroy A 2018 letter, available online, the straight-talking Cardinal Eijk from Holland indirectly ‘dropped the A-bomb’ – that is, he brought up the dreaded word ‘Apocalypse’– and, worse ‘Antichrist’! He did this by referencing Catechism of the Catholic…
Q: There’s a really beautiful Eastern Orthodox church in my neighbourhood. Every time I pass by it, I always wonder, is this one of the churches that Catholics can attend? (Ohio) A: I think you might be confusing the Orthodox with Eastern Catholics. While the Orthodox have valid sacraments and very similar doctrinal teachings as…
This year marks the 150th anniversary of Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen, which premiered in Paris in 1875. A scandal at the time, Carmen revolutionised opera—no kings or noble heroines, but instead soldiers, smugglers and bullfighters. Bizet’s heroine, Carmen, is bold, unpredictable, and free-spirited, living by her own rules. She captivates Don José; whose obsessive love…
Who still reads poetry? In a digital age and in a time when the empirical has for the most part replaced the spiritual, what’s the value of poetry? What does it bring to the table? One of the intellectual giants of our generation, Charles Taylor, in a recent book Cosmic Connections, Poetry in the Age…
An ‘invitation-to-parish-groupings’ approach to outreach, might distract us from the essential place of faith in outreach, writes Fr Chris Hayden A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a piece on the nature of membership of Church and parish. I made the point that the most fundamental ‘thing’ about membership is not belonging to parish groups…
David Quinn
Fr Barry White
Fr Ronald Rolheiser