If you listened to Democratic campaigners in the US Presidential elections, late-term abortions do not happen in America, or they happen so rarely that they are not worth mentioning, or they only happen in cases of life-limiting conditions and threats to the life of the mother. Lyman Stone is a Lutheran demographer who works for…
Surrogacy in Ireland was legalised in June with virtually no critical media scrutiny. Even when the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission’s (IHREC) Third Annual Report on Human Trafficking strongly criticised part of the legislation, serious and concerning issues remain quietly buried. IHREC Commissioner, Ms Noeline Blackwell, explained on a recent Morning Ireland programme that the…
Vanity Fair recently published an article by Kathryn Joyce with a headline designed to stir controversy: ‘Behind the Catholic Right’s Celebrity Conversion Industrial Complex.’ A bit like Kamala Harris, the article is all about the vibes and is short on details. Or rather, it is drowning in details but it does not add up to…
Without wishing to re-hash the controversial tableau of the Last Supper at the Olympic Opening Ceremonies in Paris, at least we can be thankful that it has focused attention on how important the Eucharist is to Catholics. Knowledge of the Catholic faith is shallow indeed in Ireland. But perhaps one of the most striking illustrations…
I was sad to have upset Mary Stewart, who wrote a letter recently to this newspaper expressing disappointment that I said that there was not now a single reason to vote for Donald Trump. I admire how for many years, Mary Stewart kept the pro-life flag flying almost single-handedly in the letters column of The…
Way back in the early years of this century, God help us, Christians’ major worry was the four horsemen of the apocalypse, as the new atheists were dubbed. Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens all wrote influential books although they also gained traction through the smartphone revolution that allowed easy mass access…
The United States is in the midst of a three-year Eucharistic Revival from 2022 to 2025, with four pilgrimage routes from right across the country culminating in a National Eucharistic Congress in mid-July. One of the inspirations for the Eucharistic Revival was a dispiriting 2019 poll from the highly regarded Pew Research Centre, which found…
Pope Francis addressed engaged couples on St Valentine’s Day ten years ago. He gave his now-famous advice regarding the need to say, please, thank you and I’m sorry. He went on to say, “We all know that there is no such thing as a perfect family, nor even the perfect husband or the perfect wife. We…
The Irish Dominicans are celebrating 800 years in this country. They arrived a mere eight years after the founding of the Order and just three after the death of St Dominic. At the time of writing, the seventh most popular article on The Atlantic website is about wisdom to be gleaned from great Dominicans. (The…
Recently in The Irish Catholic, Fr Niall Leahy SJ mentioned the desire to focus on ministry to young people as one of the reasons that Gardiner Street would no longer function as a parish within the Archdiocese of Dublin. The Jesuits are to be commended for taking this step as young adults are so neglected…