The Pope and I have a shared favourite spiritual teacher. Sadly, the resemblance ends there, because Pope Leo lives by the teachings. While I would love to, I just don’t. The spiritual teacher is Bro. Lawrence, a seventeenth-century Carmelite lay brother. He served as a foot soldier in the Thirty Years’ War. An injury left…
When Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo’s wide-ranging encyclical on human dignity, was launched, Anthropic was represented by a co-founder, Christopher Olah. Personally, I thought it was a mistake to have any AI industry representatives there at all. I was intrigued, therefore, by a recent New York Times article by Elizabeth Dias. It revealed that Mr Olah…
Every time I visit Holycross Abbey, Ballycahill, Co. Tipperary, it lifts my heart. The parish priest, Fr Celsus Tierney, is a wonderful host. Founded as a Cistercian Abbey in 1182 AD by Dónal Mór Ó Briain, King of Thomond, it became an important medieval pilgrimage site because it housed a relic of the True Cross.…
There is something poetic about Wendell Berry’s death at the age of 92, the day before the launch of the 2026 Season of Creation at a Mass celebrated in Castel Gandolfo by Pope Leo XIV. Wendell Berry, the legendary Kentucky farmer, poet, writer, and conservationist, spent his life preaching the themes that the Season of…
At the prayer service held in Carlow for those seriously injured by young teenagers who lost their own lives driving the wrong way on the M9 motorway, Bishop Denis Nulty said something challenging. He described the sense of shock felt right around the country, which was almost akin to that felt after September 11, 2001.…
Glen Hansard’s recent untimely death left fans reeling. When someone dies in their fifties, particularly if they leave a widow and young child behind, the shock is enormous. And yet, given our human fragility, the surprising thing is not early death but how many of us manage to live well into our eighties and sometimes…
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…
As attitudes to immigration harden in Ireland, it is instructive to study what Pope Leo said about migration during his recent visit to Spain, particularly in Gran Canaria, and during his visit to Lampedusa in Italy. Catholic social teaching on migration is nuanced. Pope Leo is continuing the tradition of all the recent popes. Even…
Pope Leo’s style differs from that of his predecessor, Pope Francis, although they are concerned about many of the same issues. Pope Leo has called two extraordinary consistories in his short pontificate. It is well-known that Pope Francis preferred to rely on his kitchen cabinet of nine cardinals, dubbed the C9. Pope Leo has employed…
As schools close for the summer, I wonder how many teachers in Catholic schools realise that Pope Leo has high praise for the role of teachers in his encyclical on AI, Magnifica Humanitas? He insists that the dignity of the human person must remain central in this “change of era” brought about by AI. He…