The recent rise in abortion figures has been sadly predictable but still shocking. In 1998, Prof. Patricia Casey and I organised a conference called ‘5,000 Too Many’. It brought together pro-choice and pro-life people to address the grave situation of 5,000 women having abortions in Britain, and to reduce those numbers by working together. In…
Pope Leo, Pope Francis never took holidays. It became a pet peeve of mine. I felt that he was giving bad example and reinforcing the kind of culture where people could never truly relax. He did reduce his number of work commitments and make time for meeting and corresponding with friends in the summer. However,…
In 2024, a grim little piece of research about reading prowess was published by Johns Hopkins Press. It was called, in a masterpiece of understatement, They Don’t Read Very Well: A Study of the Reading Comprehension Skills of English Majors at Two Midwestern Universities. The research was carried out in 2015, before the advent of…
In the last year or two, there has been a great deal of coverage of a political gender divide opening between younger men and women, with young men drifting more to the right and young women moving firmly to the left. John Burns-Murdoch of the Financial Times was one of the first to note that…
As people try to get the measure of Pope Leo XIV, it is natural to look to Leo XIII, who was pope from 1878 to 1903. Unsurprisingly, the focus has been primarily on Rerum Novarum, his groundbreaking encyclical on the rights of workers, the right to private property, and gospel values as opposed to the…
The ethics of artificial intelligence When friends were transcribing a mound of material recently, I shocked myself by asking. ‘Why aren’t you using AI?’ I have significant moral objections to the use of AI. The foremost one is that it is based on systemic theft of intellectual property. Large language models were trained on vast…
The role of women in the Church is contentious, even among Catholic women. Some believe that women will never be truly equal in the Church unless they are admitted to the ordained priesthood. Some emphasise women’s primary roles within family and parish settings. Others advocate for greater inclusion of women’s voices at all levels of…
A recent report in The Irish Catholic described a study by the Universities of Vienna and Sussex on spiritual boredom. When lead author, Thomas Gotz, and his team decided to investigate spiritual boredom, they discovered that there was a surprising lack of previous research. They chose five spiritual practices – yoga, meditation, pilgrimage, silent retreats…
Lent kind of crept up on me this year. I had barely adjusted to writing 2025 instead of 2024 and yet it was already Ash Wednesday. I was relieved when my nephew, Jason Conroy, asked if I wanted to be part of a WhatsApp group that would follow along with Cardinal Pell’s prison journals for…
In early February, newly appointed Minister for Education, Helen McEntee, announced the final phase of the free textbook scheme. The scheme now extends from primary schools to all post-primary students except those attending fee-charging institutions at a cost so far of €191 million. The Department of Social Protection has instituted free hot school lunches for…