A Brazilian artist painted a portrait of Pope Francis on Grafton Street on April 22, the day after the Holy Father died. João ‘Brutto’ Adnet is a painter from Rio based in Dublin and painted the Pope before. “I am not even Catholic, but Pope Francis was like Jesus. He was a revolutionary,” the artist…
Cardinal Fridolin Ambongo, Archbishop of Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is undoubtedly one of the most outstanding personalities on the African ecclesiastical scene. Since October 2020 a member of the C9 – the Council of Cardinals set up by Pope Francis in September 2013 with the task of helping him in the governance of…
Evangelium Ireland, the annual Catholic apologetics conference took place on Easter Saturday April 26 in Maynooth College for the second year in a row and was attended by approximately 165 people. Fr Chris Hayden (Ferns Diocese), the spiritual director of St Patrick’s National Seminary gave a talk entitled “What are you looking for? Discipleship in…
He campaigned for peace in Myanmar, the former Burma, the troubled Southeast Asian country that has always been torn by conflict in its 70-year history. All the more so now, as the country – much loved and often cited by Pope Francis – is torn by civil war after the military coup of 2021, and…
A recent release from the Central Statistics Office (CSO) shows that the number of marriages post-Covid have been on the decline. In 2024, Ireland saw 20,348 marriages registered, including 668 same-sex unions, marking a 3.8% drop from 2023 and a 7.7% decline since 2014. Overall the marriage rate was 3.8 per 1000 people, down from…
Brazil celebrated 525 years of the first Catholic Mass in the country on April 26. Fr Severino Pinheiro da Silva Neto OFMCap, Chaplain for the Brazilian Community in Dublin said it is important to remember the day as it “reminds us of our identity, shows us who we are as it points at our origins.”…
Pietro Parolin is a diplomat of great caliber. His star in the diplomatic service of the church and in the development of realpolitik and pragmatic strategies has been shining for many years. Just to give an example, in 2006, Inside the Vatican magazine named Parolin one of the ‘Top Ten’ of the year, citing his…
In Gaza ‘the situation is shameful, catastrophic, we have to say it… the dignity of those 2.3 million people, is not taken into the slightest consideration. We cannot think that they are all colluding with terrorism and crime’. This sentence, is just the latest in a long series of sharp accusations that the Latin Patriarch…
The Philippines madehistory on April 27, Divine Mercy Sunday, by becoming the first nation in the world to consecrate itself entirely to Jesus through divine mercy. While African bishops consecrated their continent to divine mercy in 2016, the Philippines is the first individual country to take this step. Fr James Cervantes of the Marians of…
There’s a very catchy jingle that was repeated over and over again on radio commercials and ringtones during the recent Islamic holy month: “Ramadan fi masr haga tanya,” meaning something like “Ramadan in Egypt is something else.” It was certainly true, and the same might be said for the celebration of Easter which is about…
Renata Steffens