Christians have Mary Magdalene and the other women to thank for the news of the Resurrection. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John recount the same happenings. Some details are different, but it is quite clear that Mary Magdalene and others found Jesus’s tomb empty and that they told the apostles. Peter and John believed them and…

Between Christmas and Easter, I attended a humanist funeral. It was not by design. I had assumed the deceased was of another Christian denomination, and there would at least be a religious element to the service at the crematorium. “Oh my God,” I thought as the humanist ‘minister’ rose to speak about John (not his…

Some years ago, while on a diplomatic posting at the Irish Embassy in Lisbon, I attended a ceremony at which the then Ambassador of Ireland to Portugal, John Campbell, gave an address to graduating students at St Dominic’s International School. The key sentence of Ambassador Campbell’s speech that day has always remained with me. He…

It is right, as many have already so done, to acknowledge and welcome the release of the first tranche of data from last year’s survey of parents and school communities on issues relating to patronage, language of instruction and single sex/mixed school settings. This is an important milestone marking that perhaps for the first time,…

Recently, I had the privilege of leading a retreat for English-speaking priests in Assisi during a particularly significant Jubilee year for followers of St Francis. This year marks the 800th anniversary of his death at the Portiuncula, the small chapel at the heart of the first Franciscan community. St Francis died there on the evening…

St John writes that before he was arrested Jesus, speaking to his disciples, told them: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” Jesus then went on to lay down his life…

Each year, I have the privilege of teaching cohorts of Catholic student teachers about liturgy and the liturgical year. It is a part of my work I value deeply, not only because of the content itself, but because of what it reveals about the changing landscape of faith among young adults. Twenty-five years ago, many…

We used to call them ‘holy pictures’ back in the long-ago days of my convent education – cheap little copies of paintings by Raphael and Botticelli, on which we schoolgirls would write messages to each other on the obverse side. And now I realise how influential these images were in illuminating the epic events of…

The Central Statistics Office (CSO) is the official State body responsible for collecting and publishing statistics about the country. The CSO must count things carefully as it runs the census, produces data on population, employment, health, crime, education and the economy, sets standards for how data is defined and collected, and supplies the data used…

What would you do to protect a child from harm? For most people, the answer is simple: anything, at least anything lawful. It is therefore unsurprising that when asked whether they would support banning under-16s from accessing social media, 76% of respondents in a recent Irish Times survey said yes. The instinct is understandable. However,…