Category: Feature

Canonisations ‘realisation of dream’ for many

About 70,000 pilgrims from around the world swarmed down Via della Conciliazione towards Vatican city, filling St Peter’s Square in a flurry of colour, waving caps and flags associated mainly with one of the seven people about to be recognised as saints. Safe to say, with a huge turn-out from El Salvador, St Oscar Romero…

Fighting fire with fire

100 Years On… The First World War induced a kind of intellectual schizophrenia in Irish Catholic thinking, writes Gabriel Doherty The pages of The Irish Catholic for the week ended Saturday, October 19 1918, continued to make reference to, indeed were dominated by, the sinking nine days earlier of the MV Leinster by a German…

Nurturing seeds sown in distant lands

Fr Patrick Flynn may not have known what a Capuchin even was when, aged 12, he and his classmates were asked in 1955 if they’d like to sing in the choir at St Mary of the Angels Church on Dublin’s Church Street, but nowadays his knowledge of the order and of the Irish province’s missionary…

Sisters’ mission to help those in need

If the success or otherwise of missionary activity can be judged by whether missionaries are able to raise up people to take their place, Ireland’s Missionary Sisters of Our Lady of Apostles, generally known as the OLA Sisters, can be very proud of what they have done. Sr Janet Nutakor OLA, currently working with the…

A turbulent priest

100 Years On… Domestic disputes caught the eye of The Irish Catholic against the background of a U-boat atrocity, writes Gabriel Doherty   If in early October 1918 there was any doubt about the Great War’s capacity to visit unimaginable levels of pain on the people of Ireland and beyond, a glance at the front…

A global Church bound by chains

Christians are being persecuted at a worryingly unprecedented level, writes Colm Fitzpatrick   Since the emergence of Christianity, those who have spiritually identified with Jesus have been ostracised, jeered and persecuted. We learn in the New Testament that St Paul was imprisoned in Rome for preaching and according to Church tradition, the apostles all lay…

A people fit to rule themselves

100 Years On… Cardinal Michael Logue was proud of  Irish people’s gifts for administration, writes Gabriel Doherty   While, of course, this was not known at the time, the week ending Saturday, October 5, 1918, marked the beginning of the last whole month of the war, and The Irish Catholic, in keeping with its output…