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…
Courtney McGrail
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…
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…
World News in Brief
Ex-MP to head Britain’s Jesuit Refugee Service Former Liberal Democrat MP Sarah Teather has been appointed as Director of the Jesuit Refugee Service in the UK (JRS UK). Ms Teather joined the International Advocacy team of JRS in June 2015, and has visited JRS projects all over the world as an advocacy adviser. While an MP, Ms Teather chaired the…
Britain should stop claiming to be a Christian country, inquiry finds
A major inquiry has concluded that Britain is no longer a Christian country and should recognise this. The two-year inquiry by the Commission on Religion and Belief in British Public Life, chaired by the former senior judge Baroness Butler-Sloss and involving religious leaders from all faiths, found that the decline of churchgoing and the rise…
Three minutes for God but who gets to decide?
On bbc.co.uk, the Telegraph’s Tim Stanley was a refreshingly new addition to the roster of those who would speak up on Radio 4’s Thought for the Day. Tim describes how Pope Francis, while flying back from Africa, was asked about the role of contraceptives in tackling HIV-AIDS. “His Holiness appeared to dodge the question –…
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…
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…
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…
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…