The View Pope Francis, meditating recently on the problematic history of Latin America including his own country of Argentina in its evolution over the past 500 years, and especially the treatment of native peoples, ran into criticism from Spanish conservatives. They hold that Spain gave Latin America (except Brazil) its language and Catholic religion, and…

The View A friend, who has long been involved  with the ecumenical outreach of Clonard Monastery in Belfast, wrote to me recently about the concerns that many of his Indian friends had about the direction of their country under Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his attempts to establish for it a dominant Hindu ethos and…

The View One of the pleasures of an older family house is that occasionally one may go rummaging in drawers, boxes and old suitcases and find something interesting, unusual or exciting. Two weeks ago, I pulled a small painting on a wooden block out of a drawer. It depicted a winter scene in the Dutch…

The View Paradise is depicted at the beginning of the Bible as a heavenly garden. Given that the origin of the Jewish religion was in a mainly dry, hot and arid region of the Middle East, not surprisingly a fertile and fruitful garden represented an ideal habitation for humanity. The story inspired great works of…

The View The late Fr Denis Faul acknowledged that the one luxury he permitted himself was a television subscription that permitted him to access French and German channels. As a country, we can afford even less today to rely exclusively on the Anglo-sphere for our information. Happily, it was possible to order from a French…

The View Hearing the news on Sunday morning June 6 that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his fiancée Carrie Symonds had been married privately in Westminster Cathedral, I wrongly assumed, for which apologies, that the RTÉ newsroom must have confused Westminster Cathedral with Westminster Abbey, which is Anglican. Given the strong stance of the…

The View It is often overlooked that a major contributor to the opening up of Irish society from the early 1960s was the Vatican, when Pope John XXIII soon after his election summoned the Second Vatican Council. It had many outcomes and effects, but one of them, the ecumenical movement, was warmly received by many…

The View Many interesting books are being published around the centenary of partition and the border. The Irish civil war of 1922-23 – however painful at the time and long after – is now history. In his detailed, critical but also sympathetic book, A Difficult Birth: The Early Years of Northern Ireland 1920-25, Alan Parkinson…

The View Many problems in life arise from the habitual gap between ideals and realities. The Church knows this well, as it works at the coalface trying to bring into some harmony the ideal of a Christian life and a Christian society with the realities of personal sinfulness and sometimes dire societal failings. Churches are…