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…
Category: Feature
Leaders willing to sacrifice themselves ‘make Faith stronger’
To see somebody give their life out of love for their people is inspiring not just for Christians, but for people of all Faiths, one Dubliner who attended the canonisations on Sunday said of St Oscar Romero. An eclectic mix of energised people streamed out of St Peter’s Square after the canonisations of seven new…
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…
Paul VI, Oscar Romero but who are the five other saints?
Francesco Spinelli St Francesco Spinelli was born in Milan on April 14, 1853. After completing his priestly formation, he was ordained a priest in 1875. He started a community of young women in Rome who consecrated their lives to Eucharistic adoration. After meeting St Catherine Comensoli, he founded the Institute of the Adorers of the…
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…
Music star sings praise for fans’ prayers
Michael Bublé has said in an interview ahead of the release of his new album next month that he made it to thank fans globally for praying for his family when his son Noah, who is now in remission, was battling liver cancer. “…I felt a debt of gratitude, deeper than I can explain, to…
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…

Chai Brady



Greg Daly

Colm Fitzpatrick


