Judith Sudilovsky The Stella Maris Carmelite monastery has seen destruction and banishment over its centuries’-old history, dating back to the mid-13th Century. The recent attempts by a group of Jewish religious extremists to declare the monastery a Jewish holy site has however, for the first time, led to the monks installing metal fencing around its…

Fr John Harris OP   Over the summer many of us will visit Knock. Visiting Knock is unlike visiting any other Marian shrine. For example, during the apparitions of Fatima and Lourdes, nobody saw or heard anything except Bernadette at Lourdes, and the children at Fatima. Whereas the story of Knock is completely different. The…

Everywhere I went last weekend I heard the late Sinéad O’Connor spoken about with admiration, and sympathy for the mental health turmoil she had been through during her lifetime. The praise we saw and heard over the media genuinely reflected, it seems to me, the widespread feelings for the troubled star, who was such a…

Sinéad O’Connor’s life and artistic output speak to a soul who was truly searching for the divine, writes Jason Osborne No doubt everyone is aware at this stage of the death of one of Ireland’s most iconic daughters, a woman gifted with a voice that pierced many hearts over the decades she was producing music.…

Why is the Government funding IVF and not pro-life alternatives, writes David Quinn Health Minister Stephen Donnelly has announced that the State will pay couples for a full cycle of IVF under a new scheme to be introduced in September. This is a response to the growing problem of infertility in Ireland, a problem that…

When World Youth Day opened in Lisbon, Portugal, it marked the latest edition of the most massively successful version of a “politics of identity” in organised religion today, a clear and indisputable way of proclaiming that Catholicism isn’t sliding toward extinction but remains alive and well. To be clear, organisers of World Youth Day always…

From a dark past of once allowing and ordering the censoring, banning and burning of the Talmud and other Hebrew texts, the Vatican has deepened its decades of fruitful dialogue and cooperation with Jewish leaders with a new interfaith study programme. Some 20 Jewish and Christian scholars began a three-month hybrid course in mid-July at…

I just celebrated a wedding Mass. By any standards it was a ‘big wedding’ with around 250 people in attendance. It was heartening to look down the church and see so many people gathered to celebrate and share the day with the young couple and their families. I like days like these. At Holy Communion,…

A multi-coloured banner at Dublin’s Heuston Station – one of a number celebrating ‘Pride’ – urges us to feel “Proud to be Myself”. It prompted me to ask myself if I was ‘proud to be myself’. My answer to myself was that I couldn’t really see why I should take any special credit for being…

Recently, I got on a crowded Luas and sat down, delighted to find an empty seat. I then glanced at the other side of the carriage. My heart sank. I saw immediately why the seat had been free. There were two tough-looking individuals with their feet up on the seats. Both had that malnourished look…