Dear Editor, As someone who takes an interest in American politics I was surprised at the cynical and dismissive tone adopted by Michael W Higgins towards any candidate who expresses faith in God in his latest article (IC 18/02/2016). The USA, like Ireland, has become a cold place for people of faith, in particular Catholics,…
T. J. Morrissey Big Jim Larkin: Hero or Wrecker? by Emmet O’Connor (UCD Press, €40.00) This is an important book by a historian who follows the evidence where it leads, ‘let the chips fall where they may’. The work is marked by extensive research. It benefits from fresh evidence: from the Russian State Archives, from police files on…
Ireland’s troubles in fact and fiction It is inevitable that the flood of books about 1916 should include some novels. But the precedents for such fictions are not good, as I know from reading many of them while writing my account of the literary revival and the Irish revolution, The Heart Grown Brutal (1977). There…
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…