If we’re honest, it will take years before Irish Catholics can look upon this year’s World Meeting of Families and papal visit and say whether or not they were successful. It’s the nature of these kind of things that their true value doesn’t become clear overnight. Few would have thought in 1979, for instance, that…
Pope’s Capuchin Day Centre visit inspires plea Greg Daly and Colm Fitzpatrick Taking their lead from the Pope’s outreach to the most marginalised in our communities, Church leaders have urged the Government to make tackling Ireland’s homelessness crisis its top priority. According to ‘A Room at the Inn?’, a pastoral letter from the hierarchy on homelessness, housing…
According to the Office of Public Works, just under 152,000 people attended the papal Mass in Dublin’s Phoenix Park on August 26. While organisers’ claims that over 180,000 Communion hosts were distributed suggest a counter-estimate of about 200,000 people, a respectable figure for a miserable day where Mass attendances held up around the country, one…
A song from the first album in almost five years by 2000s Canadian pop star Avril Lavigne has entered the US Christian music charts at number five. Ms Lavigne’s new single, ‘Head Above Water’, addresses how she turned to God whilst battling Lyme disease, which she was diagnosed with in 2014. She has described the…
If ever there was a baffling headline in Ireland’s self-proclaimed ‘newspaper of reference’, it was last week’s ‘Primary teachers disproportionately white, Irish and Catholic’, with its equally perplexing sub-head ‘NUI Galway finds Irish-nationality teachers “significantly overrepresented”’. For those inclined to skimming headlines and moving on, confusion about the Irish Times article will mainly have been…
A diocesan website from the other side of the world may not seem the most obvious place for Irish Catholics to find relevant and fruitful reading but angelusnews.com, the news website of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles can be just that. While local and American news are obviously major points of concentration for the news…
‘Ireland needs bridges rather than borders’ Ireland’s border communities fear border structures and barriers becoming magnets for violence in the wake of a hard Brexit, the Primate of All-Ireland has said. Speaking to The Irish Catholic about his trip to Poland this month for the Council of the Bishops’ Conferences of Europe, Archbishop Eamon…
Investment to help vulnerable women would be the best way of commemorating the experiences of women who spent time in Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries, according to the author of an important study of two Dublin laundries. “Dare I say that the most fitting memorial to women and girls who found themselves in Magdalene laundries, for however…
The restoration of a statue of Ireland’s leading 19th-Century temperance campaigner to Dublin’s O’Connell Street last week has been welcomed by Ireland’s Capuchin community. The statue of the Tipperary-born Capuchin, Fr Theobald Mathew, who was instrumental in starting Ireland’s Pioneer movement, was removed from the capital’s main thoroughfare in 2016 to facilitate work on the…
With this year’s plenary gathering of the Council of the Bishops’ Conferences of Europe being held in Poland, solidarity seemed an obvious theme, alluding as it did to the trade union founded by Lech Walesa in 1980 that was crucial in bringing about the end of communist rule in Eastern Europe. “The theme of solidarity…