Almost a century ago, his great great grandfather donated the land for the national monument to St Patrick at Saul, Co. Down. And now, his namesake, Thomas John Hampton is set to become the first priest in four decades to be ordained in the parish of Saul, the place where St Patrick began his mission…
The monsignor, with a global mission linked to Blessed Carlo Acutis, had just departed County Down when the news was announced last Friday: the young Italian would be canonised in Rome on September 7. Monsignor Anthony Figueiredo – himself no stranger to headlines due to the saga of Cardinal Ted McCarrick – had been in…
I was covering the peace process, in the days before the Good Friday Agreement was forged, there was a lot of talk about a ‘Pan-Nationalist Front’. It was a unionist term for an alliance forged by the Taoiseach Albert Reynolds, SDLP leader John Hume, and Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams to pursue a peace settlement. It’s…
There’s glitter on the seats,” the woman in front of me observed, with a friendly smile. She was shuffling into the pew in front of me. “The first communion children!” We both smiled. The boys and girls of the parish had been at Mass for the sacrament the day before. It was not my parish.…
Celtic Christian blessings roll off his tongue with a gentle ease, as he recites an ancient prayer, capturing ‘the spirit of the Irish’. “I weave a silence on my lips,” prayed Fr Ephrem. “I weave a silence into my mind. I weave a silence within my heart…” With our eyes closed to distractions, the tumult…
Belfast’s youngest parish priest could not resist the road to Rome on May 8. Fr Conor McGrath had just marked his 38th birthday. There are only a handful of priests his age in Down and Connor where he also serves as vocations director. In the years to come, would he get another chance to see…
Singer-songwriter Simona Congi adores music, but it was not until she met a Catholic record producer that she changed her playlist. She realised she had been listening to many popular songs with dark, or demonic themes. “All my Taylor Swift songs had the word ‘devil’ in there somewhere,” she told The Irish Catholic. “I ended…
As the world is caught up in the death of Pope Francis, it is also being drawn into a great mystery: the life of the Church – and our faith in the Lord’s resurrection. Almost from the moment Christ rose and departed the tomb, the lies began. Indeed, the first conspiracy theory was concocted in…
Pope Francis was famous for his love of the Tango – and indeed hundreds of couples performed this Latin dance in St Peter’s Square to mark his 78th birthday in 2014. But Francis later confessed he had a preference for the Milonga – a faster, more intense version of this amazing dance, which is perhaps…
Throughout the Troubles, when buses were being burned or hijacked in Belfast, the Black taxi became a popular way of getting in and out of town. Men, women and children from the west of the city, often five or six at a time, would pile into the back seats, prams in the boot, and fly…