Sometimes a small incident can provide a sudden insight into a big issue. Thus, I was struck by a personal dilemma recently published about having a baby. “My best friend told me recently that she’s trying for a baby with her boyfriend,” wrote a young woman to Katie Byrne, the ‘Modern Morals’ counsellor for the…
There is something poetic about Wendell Berry’s death at the age of 92, the day before the launch of the 2026 Season of Creation at a Mass celebrated in Castel Gandolfo by Pope Leo XIV. Wendell Berry, the legendary Kentucky farmer, poet, writer, and conservationist, spent his life preaching the themes that the Season of…
Our Church is more diverse than most people think I spent a week in Romania recently living with a Catholic priest, his wife and their two children. That sentence may cause some readers to pause. A Catholic priest with a wife and children? Yes. And before anyone jumps to conclusions, this was not a…
Sometimes you wonder if your senses are deceiving you. The eyes nearly fell out of my head a week ago when I saw a front-page headline on the Irish Daily Mail: ‘HSE Defends Forum with US Expert on Men Breastfeeding.’ I turned away. But when I looked back the headline was still there unfortunately, befuddling…
I’ve been watching a recent drama series on BBC Four, called Kabul – about the chaotic evacuation of that city when the Taliban resumed power in Afghanistan. In the opening sequence there’s a clip of a plane crashing into the Twin Towers in New York, 2001. After 25 years it hasn’t lost its impact. I’d…
In some ways, it seems like yesterday. Exactly a quarter of a century ago, I was rehearsing, organising costumes, making travel arrangements for actors and crew from three States and a ‘thousand’ boroughs!!! My Famine Trilogy, Irish Ghost Stories, did not receive any of the funds officially allocated to the commemoration of the Irish Famine,…
A horror that united the faithful worldwide in prayer Growing up in the 1990s, when other boys my age were buying Shoot! magazine and Smash Hits it was always religious magazines and books that brought me to the Carlisle Bookshop on Omagh’s High Street. The first time I ever bought Time magazine was in 1994 when St John Paul II was…
As you are reading this, President Donald Trump might well be at his golf resort in Doonbeg, Co. Clare, where is a guaranteed warm welcome from some of the locals, even if the same can’t be said for the rest of the country. The visit will make for a very uncomfortable couple of days for…
It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal A few weeks ago I wrote an article for The Irish Catholic urging the twenty-three (of twenty-seven) EU member states currently also members of the US-dominated North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to leave NATO, giving this the sobriquet NEXIT. My…
Who would have imagined that one of the biggest celebrities associated with Christian faith would be a country and western singer in an exaggerated blonde wig, glittering rhinestone costumes and teetering high heels? But yes, the late Dolly Parton always openly proclaimed her Christianity, said she started each day with a prayer, and asked God,…
Mary Kenny
Breda O'Brien
Senator Ronan Mullen
Brendan O’Regan
Michael Kelly
David Quinn