I was staying with a friend in London last weekend – and so, on Sunday morning, I attended Mass at a parish church which wasn’t much known to me. It’s nearly always interesting to visit a church where one is a stranger, and I found the experience rewarding and even congenial. I wouldn’t want to…

The View Thousands of families across the country are frantic with worry as the end of March approaches and the eviction ban is lifted. Losing your home, or knowing that you may have to leave rental accommodation despite having nowhere to go must be a genuinely terrifying feeling. In this climate, with acute rental shortages and…

It seems to be a big stretch to claim that the treatment of Joanne Hayes was the result of the social power of the Church writes David Quinn The so-called ‘Kerry babies’ case has been very much back in the news again thanks of the arrest and subsequent release of two people  by gardaí investigating…

Letter from Rome Justin McLellan The people behind chatbots are asking questions of priests and ethicists rather than turning to their artificially intelligent creations. They want to know: What is consciousness? What is the nature of humanity? What is the purpose of life? According to Fr Phillip Larrey, dean of the philosophy department at the…

When the US bishops elected a centre-right prelate and protégé of an influential conservative Italian cardinal as their president last November, it was framed in much reporting and commentary as a protest vote against Pope Francis. ‘Bishops elect anti-Francis archbishop as president,’ was how the National Catholic Reporter headlined an editorial blasting the choice of Archbishop Timothy…

Notebook I learned a new word this week and it is ‘presentism’. Basically presentism is the use of present-day standards to impose judgements upon historical figures and practices in the sometimes-misguided belief that the standards of our contemporary world are morally superior. I realised that this new word names and describes a trend which I…

Is the departure of Ryan Tubridy from The Late Late Show the end of an era? Maybe the ‘end of an era’ with the LLS came some time ago. I sometimes ask people what they think of the broadcast nowadays, and the most frequent answer I get is “I hardly ever look at it these…

The View The rewriting of Ireland’s Constitution continues apace. We are now due to have as many as three constitutional referendums this November. These are being marketed as being about women’s rights and equality. However, they look set to change the definition of the family, while also inserting the concept of gender into the constitution.…

Politicians need to learn that it is voters not the Church leading resistance on schools, writes Ruadhán Jones Almost everyone seems to be in agreement that Ireland needs to have a more pluralist school system, giving parents a choice of multi-denominational and Catholic schools. Bishops are for it, politicians are for it and the general…

Healthy and well-adjusted societies do not see surges in the use of drugs, writes Jason Osborne According to a recent United Nations report, Irish people are the joint fourth-highest consumers of cocaine globally, relatively speaking. The report (based on data from 2019 – the most recently compiled) revealed that 2.4% of Irish people reported having…