Is stealing wrong? I think most of us have been taught that it is, deriving from the Ten Commandments. Theft hurts not only the victim, but the common good, since it diminishes trust in society. But in Britain, Andy Cooke, chief inspector of Her Majesty’s Constabulary, has instructed his officers to ‘go easy’ on those…
The View The Supreme Court of the United States looks set to overturn the ruling in Roe v Wade which legalised abortion on demand across the country. Although this will likely mean that some states will keep abortion legal while others will ban or restrict it, the decision has enormous symbolic significance in the US…
Religious sisters feel they can’t even be listened to respectfully, writes Garry O’Sullivan “The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones,” William Shakespeare writes in Julius Caesar. “You would think we were evil” a source close to the Religious Sisters of Charity told The Irish Catholic…
If Irish bishops believe in a strong pro-life witness they should look to the US for leadership, writes David Quinn The Archbishop of San Francisco, Salvatore Cordileone, has written a letter telling one of America’s most powerful politicians, Nancy Pelosi, that she cannot receive Holy Communion in his archdiocese. Ms Pelosi, a Democratic Congresswoman, is…
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…
Mary Kenny
David Quinn
Fr Ronald Rolheiser