The View The internet can be dark, distracting place but sometimes those clicks can lead us to a place of grace. Recently, I stumbled across the online columns of Warren Harbeck, who writes for the Cochrane Eagle weekly newspaper in Alberta, Canada. His mood chimed with mine. Harbeck was troubled by the war in Ukraine,…

The View It’s the media’s job to report bad news about the Church. For decades, they were too deferential. They should continue to highlight the truth about the Church, particularly the unpleasant truths. Yet it is not unreasonable to wish for some balance. It would be pleasant to occasionally see a good news story about people…

The View The diocese of Kildare and Leighlin recently announced a timeline for the introduction of lay-led liturgies and the introduction of what is called a “sustainable Mass schedule” by the first Sunday in Lent in February 2023. It is far from the first Irish diocese to announce such measures. Bishop Denis Nulty of Kildare…

The View Funeral after funeral. That is how this summer has been for me — sudden deaths, accidents, and deaths that were a long time in coming but shocking, nonetheless. There were funerals of young people or young at heart people, interspersed with anniversary masses. Oddly, perhaps the most difficult funeral was the one I…

The overturn of Roe vs Wade is a great victory for the pro-life movement but it is also the start of a bigger battle. The considerable resources of the pro-choice movement, celebrities and influencers will all be marshalled. The singer Lizzo has pledged half a million to Planned Parenthood already and performers at Glastonbury have…

The View Long ago in a different century, I was a member of a college drama society. One of the plays we put on was a Thornton Wilder piece called Our Town. In the course of that play (spoiler alert) there is an unashamed tear-jerker moment. Emily, a 26-year-old who has died, is allowed to…

The View Pope Francis hates it. Thomas Aquinas dedicated a section of the Summa Theologica to it, analysing all the different ways we can indulge in it. Robin Dunbar, the primatologist and anthropologist, judged it to be “the core of human social relationships, indeed of society itself. Without [it], there would be no society”. We…

The View At Mass on Sunday, the priest mentioned that we should be praying for Ukrainians but also for the Russian people. A young boy reacted immediately, asking his mother and grandmother in a loud whisper, “why should we pray for the Russians?” What a great question. Given the ongoing murderous assault on Ukraine, which…

The View Times are hard for many people and particularly so for people of faith, who see their cherished values being undermined in so many different ways. That’s why I found a recent event that both my adult daughters were involved in so cheering. Along with seven other leaders, they took a group of almost…