Aid to the Church in Need is one of the most important organisations working in the Church today because one of the needs it meets is particularly keen, namely saving the Christians of the Middle East from extinction. This is a forgotten story. Most times it is one that is never even told, not by…
Has Education Minister, Richard Bruton, yet said something that is friendly and supportive of the role and place of faith schools in Irish society? Much of the time Minister Bruton sounds like a spokesman for Equate, the pressure group that campaigns against the rights of faith schools in the name of ‘equality’. Minister Bruton gives…
Those of a liberal persuasion tend to congratulate themselves on the changes that have taken place in Irish society over the last few decades as we have become more ‘tolerant’, more ‘compassionate’, more ‘open-minded’ and more ‘mature’. They like to remind us of ‘how far we have come’ compared with the Ireland of say, the…
It’s fairly fashionable now for people to describe themselves as “spiritual not religious”, but what does it mean when they say that? It certainly signifies an aversion to being called ‘religious’. To be ‘religious’ has connotations of being a ‘Holy Joe’, or of being ‘dogmatic’, or being regimented and of being unwilling to think for…
A huge inquiry into child abuse at the hands of various institutions, both Church and secular, has been underway in Australia for some time now. It is taking place under the auspices of a body called the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Despite the fact that it is investigating a range…
We often like to flatter ourselves that if we lived under conditions of persecution for our faith we would have the resilience and courage to risk persecution in order to stand by what we believe. I wonder if this is true though? In much of the world, Christians are savagely persecuted for their faith, and…
Extremist politics is on the rise on both left and right in Europe and America. We have just witnessed a far-right rally take place in Charlottesville, Virginia, with members of the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis taking part. They clashed violently with members of Antifa, a far-left group. One of the far-right demonstrators ploughed his…
We’re in something of a Catch-22 situation here. If you draw attention to sacrilege you might end up playing into the hands of the sacrilegious. They’re looking for attention. If you pay no attention to it at all, you could give the impression that you don’t really care when the sacred objects of your religion…
Very few readers of The Irish Catholic will be watching season three of Twin Peaks, I suspect. It’s not on one of the main channels and it has only a cult following because its content is too surreal for most tastes. But in one recent episode we were taken back to the first test of…
Discussing the latest census data released last week, RTÉ’s George Lee said with a smile on his face that they show “people are still interested in each other but maybe in a more fluid way than the traditional way”. What did he mean? Simply this: the family based on marriage is not as strong as…