Pope Leo XIV is just back from a trip to several African countries which is already best remembered for remarks he made on the way there, and on the way home. As has been the papal custom going back to the days of Pope John Paul II, Pope Leo took questions from journalists. Those questions…
We hear an awful lot about the ‘manosphere’, that is, online discussions that sometimes tell young men to treat women in sexist, exploitative ways. There was a huge public debate about ‘toxic masculinity’ last year when a series called Adolescence was aired. The central character was a 13-year-old boy who murdered a girl who went…
Last year, I wondered on social media whether Donald Trump was the most pagan president the United States has ever had. I can’t remember exactly what had prompted this, but I remember having the same thought when he said at a remembrance service for the murdered conservative commentator, Charlie Kirk, that, unlike Kirk’s wife, he…
As someone born in the 1960s, I grew up during the Cold War. One of my earliest, clearest current affairs memories was the fall of Saigon to North Vietnam in 1975 and the helicopters taking off from the roof of the American embassy. The whole country then became united under a communist government. In those…
We are simultaneously overfamiliar with Christianity and not familiar with it at all. We look at the ‘strangeness’ of the Christian story, yet we are rarely struck by it as we should be. We are taught that 2,000 years ago God became fully man, while remaining fully God and was born to a woman in…
When I saw a new ‘National Conversation on Education’ was being launched, my first reaction was, ‘here we go, they’re coming after denominational schools again’. This might yet happen as the ‘conversation’ progresses, but in the very early stages they have not been a big topic. The conversation began with a survey from the Department…
The institutions that were a very common feature of Irish life for such a long time, and in which many abuses took place, are indelibly associated in the public mind with the Catholic Church. This is understandable to a certain degree because they ran so many of them, chiefly the industrial schools, the mother and…
In a few days, Taoiseach Micheal Martin is due to meet President Donald Trump in the White House. It will almost certainly take place on St Patrick’s Day itself, although last year that was not the case. Maybe the current global tumult will derail things. I managed to get into the White House myself years…
As Ireland becomes some kind of strange hybrid Catholic/post-Catholic/secular/New Age society which none of us fully understands, the Church finds itself affected in all sorts of ways, not least what happens at big events like baptisms, First Holy Communion, Confirmation, weddings, and funerals. It is at these events that lots of post-Catholics, cultural Catholics, ‘bouncy…
Ireland’s long-held policy of neutrality is under huge pressure. The Government pretends it is maintaining our neutrality, but this simply isn’t true. Instead, it is subjecting it to the death of a thousand cuts, although a very big cut is on its way that could effectively finish it off, namely the abolition of the Triple…