Dear Editor, I was heartened by Bishop Kevin Doran’s recent remarks in the article about the changing cultural landscape and its impact on our Faith [The Irish Catholic – April 4, 2024]. His call to focus on the fundamentals of our beliefs and the support offered by the Church is more important than ever as…
A proclamation from the nation’s second Catholic president on a transgender-themed occasion is causing consternation among some faithful, as the date coincides this year with Easter – and as the annual White House Easter egg art contest bans, among other things, religious symbolism. On March 29, President Joe Biden issued his annual message for the…
Anto Akkara A watchdog group that monitors violence committed against Christians in India has released a study documenting 161 such crimes in the first 75 days of 2024. These numbers may underestimate the number of crimes and acts of persecution committed against Christians in India, according to AC Michael, a Catholic and coordinator of…
Carl E. Olson The Norwegian bishop and Trappist monk Erik Varden, still shy of 50, has established himself as a spiritual writer, retreat leader and prelate of the highest order. Raised in a non-practicing Lutheran home in a village in Norway, he was a teenage “agnostic” who was “hostile” to Christianity. His conversion to the…
Greg Erlandson This year, I’m glad to see Lent come to an end, and not just because of Easter Alleluias and Cadbury dark chocolate eggs. It was a tough Lent. Part of it, of course, had nothing explicitly to do with Lent. The news has generally been dreadful, a reminder, I suppose of why…
Dear Editor, As I followed Holy Mass from St Mel’s Cathedral in Longford recently, I thought of the fire that destroyed so much there a few years ago and of the tapestry of the holy family that was intact in spite of all the surrounding flames and destruction of all else. I ask myself, what…
After the Year of Mercy, it’s time to pray, writes Elizabeth Scalia St Philip Neri once had a penitent confess to indulging in gossip. He advised the contrite soul to bring him a chicken, and to pluck its feathers as he walked the streets of Rome. When the man showed up with the chicken,…
Dr Toni Pyke Gerard Gallagher On Saturday March 2, a coalition of national and local organisations that form ‘Le Chéile’, organised a ‘Stand Together’ march in Dublin city centre. This was their second such march, seeking solidarity, unity and acceptance of diversity in an increasingly divided Ireland. The march that Saturday wasn’t about any one…
Thomas McCarthy Few poets have written with the intensity and seriousness of Aidan Mathews; and fewer still have sustained that intensity over a career of five collections, six books of prose and six plays. This heroic, wide ranging and always engaged achievement belies the poet’s character which has seemed at all times evasive, ironic…
Sr Anne Marie Walsh It is hard to fathom that today’s world does not want God. It mirrors the fundamental struggle of our individual souls, the battle between being self-centred and being centred in God and his presence in our lives and the life of the world. Scott Barry Hoffman reported in the Scientific American…