“A new type of Church – more lay-led – will have to emerge”, writes Michael Kelly Archbishop Eamon Martin recently said that priests and bishops need to get used to “letting go” of the central role in parish communities if faith is to be re-energised. In many ways, it’s not an issue of choice: declining…

“I hear certain sarky remarks about this being “a new definition of having it all”, writes Mary Kenny There was a young woman of my acquaintance who, a couple of years ago, disappeared from view, and then returned as a male, having had a sex change operation. She was always a boyish kind of girl,…

Congratulations to Katie Ascough on becoming president of UCD’s student union. It is a great victory, not least because she made no secret of her pro-life views or that she is a person of faith. It gives great hope to other students and young people in general, that Ireland does not always have to be…

The voice of faith or religion is not simply for the privacy of our homes and churches, writes Archbishop Eamon Martin We do not enter the public square simply to win arguments through the clever use of reasoning and debate. When we speak, we draw upon both reason and faith and upon an integral vision…

Greg Daly wonders why the ethics watchdog has sanctioned just one pro-abortion group That an organisation calling itself the Abortion Rights Campaign (ARC) should ever have denied that it was engaged in political activities seems, on the face of it, absurd, and it is hardly surprising that it was ultimately forced to face this reality.…

Niall Guinan Archbishop Charles Brown was an encouraging presence in Ireland, particularly for young people, writes Niall Guinan The 37th chapter of Ezekiel contains the famous description of the prophet placed in a “valley of dry bones,” a scene of total despair and desolation. There could hardly be a more fitting image for the environment…

In the classic film The Princess Bride, the Inigo Montoya character late in the movie is faced with the challenge of recounting the storyline up to that point. He says, “Let me ‘splain…No, there is too much. Let me sum up.” I’ve got a similar sensation in the wake of a March 22-25 summit of…

Blaise Pascal once wrote: “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction.” How true; this has been going on since the beginning of time and is showing few signs of disappearing any time soon. We still do violence and evil and justify them in God’s name.…

One of the country’s large general hospitals recently made a small but very significant change. It renamed all of its wards. Previously the wards had saints’ names: ‘St Michael’s Ward’, ‘St Brigid’s Ward’, etc. Such names were commonplace in many hospitals around Ireland and I suppose the practice of naming wards – and indeed whole…

What is meant when certain schools of psychology today warn us about our ‘shadow’? What’s our ‘shadow’? In essence, it’s this: we have within us powerful, fiery energies that, for multiple reasons, we cannot consciously face and so we handle them by denial and repression so as to not have to deal with them. Metaphorically…