Dear Editor, The Paris atrocities have been widely covered on media reports and rightly so since nobody wants to see innocent people being murdered. However, I hope that in future we will see more balanced coverage of the air strikes now taking place against ISIS. In the TV reports covering the French response we were…
Courtney McGrail
Merciful like the Father
The Pope is challenging Catholics to transform a cynical and vindictive world, writes Fr Martin Browne OSB
Can you provide a present for the future?
Fr Brendan Collins of Long Tower Parish in Derry shares his experience of a trip to Tanzania with Children in Crossfire
Mother Teresa has a close link with Ireland
Dear Editor, I was fascinated to read ‘Mother Teresa’s dark night of the soul’ (IC 26/11/15). Of course, there is a close link with Ireland in that Blessed Mother Teresa came to the Loreto convent (now an Irish school) in Grange Road, Rathfarnham, as a novice in the late 1920s. As religious affairs correspondent of…
Same-sex couples can’t be ‘married’
Dear Editor, The Catholic sacrament of matrimony comes to us from the non-Christian Latin word ‘matrimonium’, meaning the state or position of being a mother. The problem is that the word ‘marriage’ also comes from the Latin and, in my view, means much the same. I am not a lawyer and for all I know…
We all have the potential to be saints
Dear Editor, Fr Rolheiser (IC 19/11/2015) praises certain saints for their “stunning self-confidence” and “very robust self-image” in comparison to the rest of us, “simply lack[ing] sufficient self-image and self-confidence to do what they did”. In doing so he, to my mind, creates too sharp a contrast between the “spiritual giants” and us non-giants. He…
Catholics partly to blame for impression created about the Church
Dear Editor, In your November 26 edition the question is asked, is there evidence that Irish people “punch above their weight” in paedophilia? There is no such evidence. But the impression has been successfully given that paedophilia is a specially Irish or Catholic or clerical problem. It is not. Catholics are partly to blame that such an impression…
Papal visit matters for all Africans, Cardinal says
Pope Francis’ visit to Kenya, Uganda, and the Central African Republic is relevant to all of Africa, Durban’s Cardinal Wilfrid Napier has said. “I am deeply convinced that the Pope’s visit to Kenya, Uganda and the Central African Republic will impact the whole of Africa,” the cardinal said in an interview, adding, “What the Holy…
US women’s works ‘lives on in El Salvador’
North Americans and Salvadorans have gathered at the precise spot where four churchwomen were killed 35 years ago to emphasise that the women’s work for El Salvador’s poor remains alive. “It is important for us to remember that her work for justice and peace lives on,” said Terri Keogh of her late sister, Maryknoll Sister…
Vatican News
Vatileaks II suspect linked with property scam The home of Francesca Chaouqui and her husband Corrado Lanino has been raided by police because of suspected access to computers linked to a probe into suspected irregularities in the sale of a 14th-Century castle. Mrs Chaouqui, a former member of a Vatican advisory council, is already facing a Vatican court with two others…