Initial negotiations have begun between the Catholic Church’s Order of the Holy Sepulchre and Bill Gates’s Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts chain about the potential opening of a luxury hotel near St Peter’s Basilica, catering to the wealthier tourists and pilgrims visiting the Eternal City. The property in question is the Palazzo di Domenico della…
Not everything can be fixed or cured, but it should be named properly. Richard Rohr said that. James Hillman suggests something similar when he wrote that a symptom suffers most when it doesn’t know where it belongs. Some of these seemingly contradict each other, but all of them merit some thought. I leave them for…
Notebook The 24 April edition of Chicago Catholic (the Church paper in Chicago) carried news of clergy appointments that were to come into force this summer. Fourteen priests were appointed to new parishes with strange names, places like ‘St Pius X and St Leonard’, ‘St Agatha and St Martin de Porres’, ‘Ascension and St Edmund’.…
Hopefully, all parties involved will do their best, and in good faith, to fix the Northern Ireland Protocol problem, and the vexatious bureaucracy involved in transporting a Marks & Spencer comestible from Cheshire to Belfast. Bertie Ahern – who brought so much to the peace process – says that with enough patient negotiation, it can…
The Vatican response to the arrest of Cardinal Joseph Zen should concern us all, writes David Quinn In February 1949, the head of the Catholic Church in Hungary, Cardinal József Mindszenty, was sentenced to life in prison by the country’s communist government, one that had been put into power by Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Union’s communist dictator.…
The excusable doesn’t need to be excused and the inexcusable cannot be excused. Michael Buckley wrote those words commenting on St Peter’s triple betrayal of Jesus. Here’s the context. Peter had betrayed Jesus in his most needy hour, not out of malice, simply out of weakness. Now, facing Jesus for the first time since that…
Notebook I have lived and worked in a predominantly rural parish in the midlands for the last ten years. In that time, we have had national debates about many issues including same-sex marriage, abortion, Brexit and the demise – and possible resuscitation – of the Celtic Tiger. All of those issues and many more have…
I wouldn’t have voted for Sinn Féin in the Stormont elections and in general I am not an admirer of the party as it is presently constituted. It has changed a lot since my Galwegian maternal grandmother, Mary Conroy, joined it in the early days, soon after 1905 – supportive of its agenda of Irish…
The View Things are changing in Northern Ireland. Saturday’s election results, in which Sinn Féin retained its 27 seats to become the largest party in the Assembly, and the Alliance Party more than doubled their seats from eight to 17, mark a significant moment in our history. However, it remains to be seen how significant…
The current deal between the State and St Vincent’s for the National Maternity Hospital pleases no-one, writes Ruadhán Jones The Religious Sisters of Charity acted with the best of intentions when they offered a site worth €200 million for free to facilitate a new maternity hospital. However, from the word go this deal proved controversial,…
Fr Ronald Rolheiser
Mary Kenny
David Quinn
Nuala O’Loan
Ruadhán Jones