Knock Novena The ‘post-modern’ or ‘post-religion’ era doesn’t exist, Chai Brady hears   Modern youth movements and shrines are becoming increasingly important in the ‘new evangelisation’ of the Western world as parish churches attract fewer and fewer people, according to a high-ranking Vatican prelate on a visit to Ireland. Archbishop Salvatore ‘Rino’ Fisichella, President of…

Knock Novena   Over 100,000 people flocked to Knock Shrine for their nine-day annual Novena, and with this year marking the 140th anniversary of the Apparition, some people voiced concerns about the loneliness prevalent in the lives of young people. Beginning on August 14, featuring a seminar given by former Taoiseach John Bruton, it ends…

Youth2000   Over the weekend Youth 2000 hosted its annual Summer Festival in Clongowes Wood College. The four-day festival was a celebration of faith, friendship and fun and was attended by 1000 young people from every county and diocese in Ireland and beyond! The four days included celebrations of Mass, Confession, a Praise and Worship…

Dom Mark Patrick Hederman OSB discusses the deafness of modern humanity to mythology   I suppose my appreciation of myth must come from not having been to school myself until I was nine years old. This allowed me time to experience the world as a child in the way a child naturally relates to it. Imagination…

Parishioners in Derry and Tyrone donned their hiking books this month as they faced a daunting ascent in the Donegal mountains. As a fund-raiser for Derry’s St Eugene’s Church, Glenock, the parish of Newtownstewart, Co. Tyrone, organised a sponsored climb of Mount Errigal.  The two groups of climbers rose to the challenge.  The “early birds”…

Tens of thousands of young faithful descended on Bosnia and Herzegovina last week to celebrate Medjugorje’s Youth Festival which is now in its 30th year. It comes after a ban on pilgrimages organised by Catholic dioceses and parishes was lifted under a papal decree on May 12. Earlier this year Pope Francis gave the Vatican…

A group of about 50 young people took to the streets of Germany this summer on a pilgrimage said to be an “integral part” of youth ministry in their diocese. Living Youth, developed by the Diocese of Down and Connor, brought the young pilgrims to Bavaria from July 28 to August 3. According to the Director…

Among the pilgrims on Croagh Patrick last month was a Belgian who’d walked three months to get there, writes Greg Daly   Santiago de Compostela is a fashionable destination for Irish pilgrims year-in-year-out nowadays, with a record 7,548 Irish pilgrims collecting their ‘Compostela’ from the cathedral offices last year. In the Camino’s medieval heyday, however,…

Irish clergy in the Philippines served God’s people despite all manner of brutal threats, writes Jean Harrington   It was April 1973 and the island of Mindanao in the south of the Philippines was descending into a war between the Muslim population and their Christian neighbours. No one was safe, not even the priests who…

Little Nellie – Special Feature Chai Brady hears about a community’s intense 
desire 
for Little Nellie’s sainthood Even though she died over 100 years ago Ellen Organ, best known as Little Nellie of Holy God, continues to inspire devotion among a significant number of people in both Ireland and abroad, with a growing number calling…