Last year, Ireland held two referendums which our political leaders, aided and abetted by most of our media, have been very keen to forget about. One was on so-called ‘durable relationships’. No-one could quite say what these were, but ‘durable relationships’ were to be given marriage-like status. Voters worried they were being asked to buy…
The bishops have just released a pastoral letter urging people, especially those who stopped going during the Covid pandemic, to start coming to Mass again. Introducing the pastoral on Sunday, Bishop Denis Nulty of Kildare & Leighlin diocese, said: “Today’s Pastoral was born out of the experience of the Covid Pandemic” during which “Sunday worship…
The Association of Catholic Priests (ACP) has raised a very important issue, namely, should the Catholic Church sever its links with the insurance company, Allianz, because of business and investment links the company has with Israel? Allianz is a giant German company that took over Church & General Insurance in the 1990s. It is one…
By the time you read this, Heather Humphries or Sean Kelly MEP might well be the Fine Gael candidate for the presidency, but so far it has been a very strange presidential race, such as it has been one at all. There is only one candidate at the time of writing who actually has the…
Each summer, newspapers like to suggest books people can read during your holiday time, so I am going to come up with a suggestion that you might think is daunting at first, and that is to pick up and read something by Leo Tolstoy, rated by many as possibly the greatest writer of all time.…
What is it like to grow up in the age of the internet, social media, and smartphones? Think of your children and grandchildren and how often they have their heads stuck in their devices. You might even do the same thing yourself. I know I do. Sometimes, I have to consciously put my phone out…
And so the long-awaited dig at the site of the former Tuam Children’s Home, to use its proper name, has begun. It is estimated that the dig will take around two years. The purpose is to find how many bodies are buried there, to give them a more appropriate burial and where possible to match…
Almost in the dead of night, the Government published the latest abortion figures late last week. There was no press release. Nothing was done to draw attention to the grim new total. It is as if the Government doesn’t want the figure discussed at all. Instead, the annual abortion figures were simply published on the…
A comment from the great Italian writer, Umberto Eco, has always stayed with me. Eco is most famous as the author of The Name of the Rose, a sort of intellectual murder-mystery set in a monastery during the Middle Ages and made into a movie starring Sean Connery as a sort of monk-detective. I don’t…
Unless you were hiding under a rock recently, you will at least have seen some of the images from the wedding of former TV presenter, Lauren Sanchez, to Jeff Bezos, the founder and head of Amazon and the world’s richest, or second richest man, depending on how these things are calculated. The wedding took over…