The US Vice-President J.D. Vance and his wife Usha have recently welcomed the birth of their fourth child. Yet American fertility as a whole continues to plummet. It’s down to an average of 1.6 infants per woman, with a marked trend, as elsewhere, towards the one-child family. Meanwhile, in China, society is coping with the…
My cousins in the Bordeaux region have been told to stay away from their home until these terrible wildfires – and the destruction and poisonous smoke they’ve caused – have receded. Appropriately, the scenes in south-western France, and Spain have been called ‘apocalyptic’. And in this summer of extreme heatwaves, climate change sceptics are being…
As some pilgrims commuted to Knock for the Annual Grandparents Pilgrimage, and others climbed Croagh Patrick on Reek Sunday, many travelled to Dublin to watch the GAA Football All-Ireland final in Croke Park, where Mayo was playing Kerry, and won the championship for the fourth time – the first in 75 years. Thousands of pilgrims…
There are not 800 bodies in a septic tank in the grounds of the old children’s home at Tuam. The nuns did not kill the babies or deliberately neglect them to death. In fact, the nuns ran the home about as well as they could under very difficult circumstances given the poverty of the time…
Almost a third of the participants were young at the recent excellent Logos Scripture Summer School organised by Petra Conroy and taught by Fr Terence Crotty OP in the Cistercian Abbey Guesthouse, Roscrea. Not only that, but the majority of participants in their twenties and thirties were male. This chimes with a recent trend of…
Senator Sarah O’Reilly’s journey to the Seanad was unexpected and accidental, she says. The first Aontú representative to be elected to the Seanad explained in an interview with The Irish Catholic that she doesn’t think of herself as a “career politician”. Recalling her life as a single mom with four kids on social welfare in…
The first Irishman to make pilgrimage to Bethlehem was St Cathal in the seventh century and, though the Church of the Nativity has not substantially changed since then, tourists and pilgrims are now rarer than white blackbirds. When I recently visited the church where Jesus was born for three days in a row, the only…
Rumour has it that young people are returning to the Church. Whether this claim is true is open to debate, but one thing remains clear: spirituality has by no means disappeared. People worldwide still desire to live a life with a power greater than themselves, however, its meaning has migrated from following a religion to…
Some musicians such as Bono (and Roy Orbison in the past) are never seen without sunglasses and have popularised wearing them. While from a medical point of view this popularising is great for eyecare, it may seem sunglasses are a fashion item and not an absolute necessity for the good of one’s eyes. It is…
The recent Dáil vote to advance the Sinn Féin Bill to eliminate the three-day wait between the first contact and follow up for proceeding to procure a miscarriage (an abortion) has once again catapulted this issue into the mainstream of political discussion. Sinn Féin has long considered this a matter of political expediency; one to…
Mary Kenny
Renata Steffens
David Quinn
Breda O'Brien