Dear Editor, The first Holy Communion season is upon us again, signalled for many people by the hordes of excited little girls in white dresses in shopping centres and restaurants; the equivalent little boys in new clothes and special haircuts. As an elderly person I was told by a younger ‘granny’ that her grand-daughter greeted…
Dr Kevin McCarroll Headache is one of the most common reasons for visiting your GP and accounts for about 25% of new referrals to neurologists. Nearly 50% of adults suffer from headaches in the last year and it is attributed as a reason for up to 20% of work absences. In Ireland, migraine attacks alone…
María Salto Galdón examines the impact of Pope Francis on young people’s attitude to the Church Pope Francis: a revolution in our Church nowadays but also in the vast width of our world. ‘The humble Pope’, ‘The Pope of the poor’ that is how the Pope is regarded by everyone. However, are young people today…
Truce: Murder, myth and the last days of the Irish war of independence by Padráig Óg Ó Ruairc (Mercier Press, Cork, €17.99) Ian D’Alton The Irish Revolution industry marches on. This book is somewhat ahead of the centenary of the events it chronicles, so it is almost a welcome diversion from the veritable tsunami of books about…
Young Eliot: From St Louis to The Waste Land by Robert Crawford (Jonathan Cape, €31.50 hb) John Wyse Jackson The two most important early works of modernist literature were published in the same year, 1922: Ulysses, by James Joyce, and The Waste Land, by T S Eliot. Both writers are still widely read and studied, and…
Bishops are obliged to report all suspected cases of abuse to the civil authorities, the head of the Church’s global advisory panel on tackling abuse has declared. On behalf of the entire Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, commission president Cardinal Seán O’Malley issued a statement in which he said that prelates are called…
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, the longest-serving justice on the United States Supreme Court, died of apparent natural causes at a Texas resort on February 13. Texas Governor Greg Abbott called the 79-year-old Catholic “a man of God, a patriot and an unwavering defender of the written Constitution and the rule of law”, praising him…
Leading South American prelates have rejected proposals by the UN Human Rights Commission that countries allow abortion in cases where mothers were infected with Zika virus. The Zika virus has been linked by the Brazilian government to a surge in microcephaly cases, but Brasilia’s Archbishop Sergio da Rocha has denied suggestions that abortion is an…
The Justice and Peace commission of Malawi’s bishops’ conference has called on the country’s government to “ensure that the right to food and essential healthcare services is guaranteed to all citizens of Malawi”. Maintaining that “life is sacred, and all efforts must be made so that people’s lives are not at risk”, the commission has…
Lent is a time to celebrate and experience God’s mercy, a prominent Kenyan bishop has proclaimed, donating food and clothing to more than 4,000 households in the Ngong slum district of Mathare, Eldoret’s Bishop Cornelius Arap Korir, chairman of the national Catholic justice and peace commission, called on Kenyans to move forward in forgiveness and…