Was the celebrity wedding of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, the Kansas football star player, a good thing for the common good? On the one hand, it advertises the significance and meaning of matrimony, in an era when marriage is so widely in decline. And Simon Harris would scarcely have greeted the Taylor-Travis nuptials with…
America has just celebrated its 250th birthday so it seems fitting to ask whether America, in net terms, has done more harm than good, or vice versa, over those years? For the average Irish person, the question will seem ridiculous. By the average Irish person, I mean those who don’t think primarily ideologically. These ‘normies’…
When we sit in the warmth of the sun, when we look on a cloudless blue sky, when we examine the intricacy of a tree in bloom, of a single flower, when we look on the face of a baby, we see the work of God and indeed it is good. We are much blessed…
Pender Island is part of the island chain that includes Vancouver Island off the city of the same name; Pender is a relatively small island of three thousand souls. These 3,000 doubles in summertime, when people return to their summer homes, made accessible by car ferry. This large population of people of all faiths and…
Dear Daddy and Mammy, Denis and Sadie to everyone else, but always Daddy and Mammy to me. As I write, I am days away from the fortieth anniversary of my ordination. On July 5, 1986, I stood before the Church and answered a call that had been forming in me for years. The older I…
The Irish Church does not do managed decline. It never has. It lets the clock run down, keeps the show on the road for one more season, and then eventually presents the result — a parish has to be merged or a college closed, the community and or staff quietly told the numbers have run…
As we mark the national semiquincentennial on July 4, we might well reflect on Benjamin Franklin’s answer to Elizabeth Willing Powel, when the elderly sage left the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and the Philadelphia matron demanded, “Well, Dr Franklin, what have we got, a republic, or a monarchy?” To which Franklin famously responded, “A republic,…
Do you remember the glorious summer of 1976 when we could hardly believe our luck as the sun shone in the sky for day after day? This was back when few of us went abroad on holidays and sunny weather was something that happened in Spain, not here. Well, for that summer, we enjoyed a…
Pope Leo’s style differs from that of his predecessor, Pope Francis, although they are concerned about many of the same issues. Pope Leo has called two extraordinary consistories in his short pontificate. It is well-known that Pope Francis preferred to rely on his kitchen cabinet of nine cardinals, dubbed the C9. Pope Leo has employed…
Whatever about Palestine being free from the river to the sea, the all-Christian town of Taybeh on the Palestinian West Bank is not even free from one end of the town to the other. At one end, Israeli volunteers shield Bedouin tribes from the worst excesses of the settlers, who are annexing the town’s olive…
Mary Kenny
David Quinn
Nuala O’Loan
George Weigel
Breda O'Brien