Fr Alan McGuckian SJ is to succeed Bishop Philip Boyce Fr Alan McGuckian SJ is to succeed Bishop Philip Boyce as Bishop of Raphoe, the Vatican has announced. He will be Ireland’s first Jesuit bishop in over 200 years. Bishop-elect McGuckian was born in Cloughmills, Co. Antrim in 1953, and after studying Irish and Philosophy…
Nostalgia is a false path to the future, former New Zealand PM Jim Bolger tells Greg Daly Courage, for former New Zealand Prime Minister Jim Bolger, is crucial if people of faith want to bring their distinct outlooks and gifts to politics. Currently Chancellor of the University of Waikato just outside Auckland on New Zealand’s…
Record numbers of pilgrims visited St Patrick’s Purgatory in Lough Derg for the opening weekend of the island shrine’s 2017 Three-Day Pilgrimage season. With numbers up 10% on last year’s opening weekend, Fr Owen McEneaney, Prior of Lough Derg, told The Irish Catholic that it was even more heartening to compare today’s numbers – which…
A Rome-based moral theologian has said the Vatican has an obligation to block plans by the Sisters of Charity to facilitate the building of a new National Maternity Hospital where it is expected that abortions will take place. Fr Kevin O’Reilly OP, who lectures in Rome’s Pontifical University of St Thomas Aquinas, better known as…
Bríd Smith is urged to visit Catholic charities Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin has described as “unacceptable” a Dáil speech by People Before Profit TD Bríd Smith where she called for the Catholic Church to be put “in the dustbin where it belongs”. Ms Smith has also been urged by Church charity activists to come…
Plans to give away the St Vincent’s Healthcare Group may need Vatican approval, writes Greg Daly According to the Religious Sisters of Charity, their planned cessation of involvement in the St Vincent’s Healthcare Group has been in the works for two years. For all that their plan has been widely praised as a noble, elegant…
Debate about the role of religion in school admissions processes continues to take place in the absence of data, heedless of how oversubscription and a lack of resources are the real problems on the ground, according to the body that represents Ireland’s Catholic primary schools. Speaking to The Irish Catholic following a forum in Croke…
Ireland’s 2013 children’s rights referendum looks in hindsight like an exercise in “making ourselves feel good”, a leading priest has said. Commenting on Dr Geoffrey Shannon’s audit of child protection procedures in An Garda Síochána, which revealed grave shortcomings in child protection across State agencies, Redemptorist Fr Gerry O’Connor, a member of the Association of…
The proposed transfer of the St Vincent’s Healthcare Group to a new company independent of the Religious Sisters of Charity is subject to Vatican approval, The Irish Catholic understands. The sisters announced this week that they intend to end an involvement in healthcare that dates back to 1834. Although the now mostly elderly sisters no…
Greg Daly explores one of the Portuguese appartions’ most intriguing aspects In the decades following the apparitions, Fatima was mainly known, like Lourdes and other Marian sites, as a place of healing. However, in her 1941 memoirs, Sr Lucia wrote about how during Our Lady’s third apparition, she gave the children a message in three…