How should the Catholic Church respond when a pandemic breaks out? What is the correct pastoral response? What kind of pastoral response best fits with medical best practice? Are priests generally good at a time like this? What should we as individual Christians do? It’s hard to know at this stage whether ordinary people have…
The world is better for their presence over the years, writes David Quinn The record of the nuns is under attack again. The latest accusation is one of racism against children of ‘mixed race’ who found themselves in Mother and Baby homes and other Church-run institutions. The last Mother and Baby home closed down several…
Amazonian exhortation points towards Pope’s real aim, writes David Quinn When Humanae Vitae was issued in 1968 by Pope Paul VI, it was greeted with dismay and anger by many people, including practicing Catholics, who expected the Church to relax its previous prohibition against the use of artificial means of birth control by Catholics.…
The concerns of Catholics were invisible in the election because Catholics made themselves invisible, writes David Quinn In the run up to the general election, there were a handful of statements from bishops such as Eamon Martin, Kevin Doran and Alan McGuckian but for the most part the Church kept as low a profile as…
Catholics must vote as Catholics on election day, writes David Quinn Election time again, and if you’re pro-life it’s a very strange one because it is the first since the May 2018 abortion referendum. In previous campaigns, the focus of the pro-life movement was to support candidates and parties who were pro-life, or at…
No-one can pretend that Ireland is not becoming a more dangerous place, writes David Quinn The growing savagery of violence that is taking place between drug gangs here in Ireland has shocked a public already exposed to seemingly endless murderous incidents between rival gangs fighting turf wars and ordering revenge killings. Ireland has a long…
At the heart of every institution there are frail and flawed human beings, writes David Quinn You’ve probably seen the Netflix series, The Crown, which is a semi-fictionalised drama about Britain’s royal family. It covers the reign of Elizabeth II and follows her from the time she is a young woman and will end…
It’s unfair to say that all deaths in World War I were futile, writes David Quinn The World War I drama 1917 took away two of the big prizes at the annual Global Globe awards at the weekend, namely Best Picture and Best Director. To judge from the reviews so far, it is a wholly…
We need to have an honest and open-minded debate about climate change, writes David Quinn I confess to being in two minds about the green agenda for reasons I’ll try and explain. Green issues have pushed to the forefront of public debate in the past year. Here in Ireland, the Green party did quite well…
You cannot keep pretending that the individual is the basic unit of society to the detriment of the family or communities, writes David Quinn Power always defeats itself in the end. This, to me, is almost a law of nature. Look through history and you see this ‘law’ play itself out again and again…