It is “ridiculous” for the State’s Minister for Children to be in favour of permitting the abortion of unborn children, according to the member of the Audit Committee of the Department of Children and Youth Affairs who resigned last week. Speaking to The Irish Catholic, former Deloitte Ireland chairman John Pittock said when Minister Katherine Zappone…
The most striking thing about Pope Francis’ meeting with the Vatican’s child protection commission last week was that he admitted that priests accused of abuse were moved about by their bishops, child protection campaigner and former commission member Marie Collins has said. At one point in his first ever meeting with the entire Pontifical Commission…
This week sees the third diocesan pilgrimage to Knock led by an American bishop in as many years, but if Wisconsin’s Diocese of Green Bay is less familiar to Irish Catholics than Cardinal Timothy Dolan’s New York or Cardinal Sean O’Malley’s Boston, it’s hardly one without a spiritual kinship to Ireland’s national shrine. The National…
Leading legal and historical scholars of Bunreacht na hÉireann have rejected claims by an independent TD that the Irish Constitution was written by a priest. Speaking in the Dáil, Dublin South-Central TD Joan Collins said: “The Constitution is not fit for purpose and needs replacement. It was written by a Catholic priest in the 1930s…
Ever since Pope Leo XIII issued Rerum Novarum in 1891, the Church’s social teaching has commonly been seen as favouring a carefully qualified form of capitalism, of sorts perhaps best expressed in the Rhenish capitalisms of Christian democrat Germany and Holland, or even in social democrat societies. Catholic advocates of less restrained capitalist models, however, have long…
A call for mourners to attend the funeral of an Irish man who died in Manchester last month could be the first of many such appeals, the head of the Irish Chaplaincy in Britain has warned. John Joseph O’Brien, 73, died in the Hulme area of the city on August 9, and has no known…
Technology-savvy priests are unlikely to put away their smartphones any time soon, despite advice from the Vatican’s liturgy chief. Speaking in Rome’s Angelicum University last week, Guinea’s Cardinal Robert Sarah warned that while it may be practical and convenient to pray the daily prayer of the Church on mobile phones or other electronic devices, doing…
Online debate over converts in the Church, addressed in The Irish Catholic in the August 3 article ‘Late labourers can do vital work’, shows no sign of going away. Joseph Shaw, who blogs at lmschairman.org, posted on Twitter an interesting passage from Joseph Pearce’s book Literary Converts, detailing how the converts Arnold Lunn and Frank…
With the national seminary at Maynooth due to re-open for this year’s formation programme this weekend, a key conference organised for the autumn is being seen by observers as a way of helping to show a proactive approach to reform. This summer saw the appointment of Fr Michael Mullaney for a shortened three-year term as…
This Sunday sees the seminary at Maynooth open up for another academic year. When the men who have been chosen to discern a vocation in the seminary take up residence on the historic campus this weekend it will be after a turbulent period. “I wasn’t happy with Maynooth,” Archbishop Diarmuid Martin said last summer, explaining…