None of us are served unless we have a debate that is rounded and looks at attitudes in other countries, writes David Quinn Much of the commentary down the years about the mother and baby home has focused on the role the Church played in creating harsh attitudes towards unmarried mothers and their children. The…
Currently, we are not allowed to go to Mass again in the Republic. All public worship is effectively banned. From the end of March last year until the end of June, public worship was called off, and again in places like Donegal and Dublin from September until early December, and in the rest of the…
What we now refer to as the patriarchy was only too well aware of the dangers of toxic masculinity, writes David Quinn A teacher was sacked recently from Eton College in England, the country’s poshest school. His error? To post his ruminations on the topic of the ‘patriarchy’ on the internet and to leave it up…
Some computers can think things through better than the cleverest of people, this has implications, writes David Quinn The big scientific story of the year has, of course, been the development of various vaccines designed to protect us from Covid-19. But longer term perhaps the even bigger one has been the development by a company…
The Church looks benignly at international organisations, but cannot do so uncritically writes David Quinn Is there a Catholic position on the European Union? By that I don’t mean does the Catholic Church believe in the EU or not. I mean is there a position all Catholics must adhere to like we must adhere to…
We should dream certainly but we should also be realistic, writes David Quinn Let Us Dream is the latest book by Pope Francis. More accurately, it is a distillation of conversations the Pontiff had with Catholic journalist and writer Austen Ivereigh, who will be familiar to many readers of this paper. Pope’s reflections Let Us…
The Polish Pontiff’s reluctance to believe abuse allegation is a black mark against him, but it does not take from the greatness of his papacy, writes David Quinn Pope St John Paul II does not emerge well from the recently published Vatican investigation into Theodore McCarrick, the former and now disgraced cardinal archbishop of Washington…
Church leaders should be realistic without constantly going for a downbeat assessment of the future of Faith, writes David Quinn In his latest thoughts on the future of the Catholic Church in Ireland, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin notes that ‘no religion’ is the second most ticked box in the religion section of the national census. This,…
We can already see that the new US administration will not be a friend of religious freedom, writes David Quinn The incoming US president calls to mind one of those Irish politicians who have ‘evolved’ on abortion. Once they were pro-life, but now they are firmly pro-choice, even some remain ‘personally opposed’. Back in the…
The authorities believe that Mass is less important than going to a gym or hairdresser and this has to be rejected, writes David Quinn In Derry, you can still go to Mass if you want, but across the border in Letterkenny you cannot. How can this be? The answer is that the North’s Executive and…