Resistance among priests to synodality is leaving Irish parishes with “virtually no leadership” for reform, Fr Michael A. Conway has warned ahead of Ireland’s National Synodal Assembly on October 17. Writing in the September issue of The Furrow, the Galway priest and Professor of Faith and Culture at St Patrick’s Pontifical University, Maynooth, said many…
Our Church is more diverse than most people think I spent a week in Romania recently living with a Catholic priest, his wife and their two children. That sentence may cause some readers to pause. A Catholic priest with a wife and children? Yes. And before anyone jumps to conclusions, this was not a…
Sometimes you wonder if your senses are deceiving you. The eyes nearly fell out of my head a week ago when I saw a front-page headline on the Irish Daily Mail: ‘HSE Defends Forum with US Expert on Men Breastfeeding.’ I turned away. But when I looked back the headline was still there unfortunately, befuddling…
Boxing legend Katie Taylor, who stepped into the ring in Croke Park on Saturday September 5 with the words ‘Psalm 18’ embellished on her gear, has said she would not be able to fight without God in her life. Taylor is a born-again Christian and, before moving to the US, where she currently resides with…
Head of Social Justice and Policy for the Society of St Vincent de Paul Ireland (SVP) said to The Irish Catholic that SVP are “very concerned” about the impact of energy costs on struggling households, after SSE Airtricity’s recent decision to increase electricity and gas prices by 9.4% and 11.6%, respectively. Ms Bayliss reported that…
In a homily delivered at a RTÉ One televised Mass on September 6, Bishop of Kilmore Martin Hayes called on his audience to “be alert to the wrong of global warming caused by human activity as being among the wrongs that are anti-life and increasingly evident in our world.” Speaking at the Cathedral of Sts…
I’ve been watching a recent drama series on BBC Four, called Kabul – about the chaotic evacuation of that city when the Taliban resumed power in Afghanistan. In the opening sequence there’s a clip of a plane crashing into the Twin Towers in New York, 2001. After 25 years it hasn’t lost its impact. I’d…
In some ways, it seems like yesterday. Exactly a quarter of a century ago, I was rehearsing, organising costumes, making travel arrangements for actors and crew from three States and a ‘thousand’ boroughs!!! My Famine Trilogy, Irish Ghost Stories, did not receive any of the funds officially allocated to the commemoration of the Irish Famine,…
A horror that united the faithful worldwide in prayer Growing up in the 1990s, when other boys my age were buying Shoot! magazine and Smash Hits it was always religious magazines and books that brought me to the Carlisle Bookshop on Omagh’s High Street. The first time I ever bought Time magazine was in 1994 when St John Paul II was…
As you are reading this, President Donald Trump might well be at his golf resort in Doonbeg, Co. Clare, where is a guaranteed warm welcome from some of the locals, even if the same can’t be said for the rest of the country. The visit will make for a very uncomfortable couple of days for…
Senator Ronan Mullen
Brendan O’Regan
Michael Kelly
David Quinn