Sixty years on from the Cuban Missile Crisis, Pope’s plea for cool heads is timely, writes David Quinn It is 60 years ago this month since the Cuban missile crisis, which brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. Older readers will remember the events of those fateful few weeks well. When the Cold…

Missionaries and religious have launched a five-year plan to future proof religious life, writes Ruadhán Jones ‘A future with hope’ – this is the title of a new five-year plan launched last week that aims to chart the future for religious and missionary life in Ireland. It comes at a time when the majority of Irish…

Letter from Rome Life, as the famous John Lennon saying goes, is what happens while you’re making other plans. In a similar fashion, we might say that news is what happens while you’re paying attention to something else. This summer, Catholic chatter was dominated by ultimately baseless rumours that Pope Francis was about to resign.…

Notebook Next year in both parishes I now have responsibility for, we will celebrate the Sacrament of Confirmation. That means that eight different 5th and 6th classes in four schools are eligible to celebrate the Sacrament. In recent weeks I have been visiting those classes to begin a conversation around Confirmation. One thing that I…

It seems, according to the celebrity reports that are part of our lives these days, that Mrs Victoria Beckham, familiarly known as ‘Posh’ (from her days with The Spice Girls), is experiencing the strains of being a mother-in-law. Sumptuous wedding Her eldest son Brooklyn married a beautiful young American heiress, Nicola Peltz, and, at the…

The View Growing up can be very hard. Young people in their early teens and even younger have always faced serious questions of identity. Who am I? What am I here for? Who do I want to be? Why am I different from my friends? Why do I not fit in the way others do? Children can feel…

Too many young men who father children do not play a proper role in raising their children, writes David Quinn Here are words uttered some years back in an address to a Church gathering by a major American politician: “We know the statistics — that children who grow up without a father are five times…

In 1935, an aspiring painter and member of a prominent Jewish family in Turin by the name of Carlo Levi was sentenced to exile in Italy’s neglected southern region of Basilicata for his anti-fascist sentiments. Basilicata, at the time, was considered more or less Italy’s equivalent of Siberia, which is to say, a prison all…