The View Advent and Christmas are meant to be seasons of hope and joy. Nonetheless, many people have found 2021 much more distressing than 2020, as our resilience has been tested by the ongoing strain of the pandemic and the restrictions that accompany it. We have seen our church-going friends give up going to Mass,…
The vast network of monasteries helped to lay the foundations of the welfare state we are now so familiar with by helping the poor in organised ways writes David Quinn Back in 1986 a movie called The Name of the Rose went on release internationally. It was based on the book of the same name…
Pope tells young people to dream big Spending a bit of time with young people before leaving at the end of his apostolic trip to Cyprus and Greece, Pope Francis encouraged them to have the courage to hope, to dream and even to question their faith. He met with Catholic teenagers and young adults from…
I could never be a literary critic, not because I can’t tell good literature from bad, but because I lack the hard edge. If I dislike a book, I hesitate to say so. Conversely, if I like a book, I tend to be more its cheerleader than its critical assessor. Be that as it may,…
Have you ever noticed how faulty your memories can be? Think of the summers you enjoyed growing up: did the sun always shine for long days of fun? That’s how I remember my growing-up days too, though meteorological reports for those years show just as much rain then as now. But I only remember the good…
Sometimes it takes a long arc of history for a remarkable person and his work to be fully acknowledged and recognised. A hundred years after he founded the Legion of Mary in Dublin, Frank Duff is now seen as not merely a devout and altruistic man, but enlightened and well before his time in his…
Chinese newspapers across the country declared the Legion to be an anti-revolutionary, subversive organisation in 1951, writes David Quinn In 1956, Ignatius Kung, the Catholic bishop of Shanghai, was brought before a crowd of thousands in the local dog racing stadium, bound and dressed by his captors in a pajama suit. He had been arrested…
Notebook Some weeks ago I watched a short American documentary about a remote part of the West of Ireland, filmed some time in the 80s. A packed church was shown, and an interview with the priest followed. The interviewer asked him some questions about his spiritual role, but he strikingly downplayed that aspect of his…
I had a conversation with an old rake the other day about past times and past sins, and their inclination to surface in the present. It occurred after a rather public accusation made by the Tory MP, Caroline Noakes, that she had been “groped” by Stanley Johnson – father of British prime minister Boris –…
The View As stated here before, there is an imbalance in public discourse between civil rights and civic responsibility, with not enough emphasis on the latter. Not just religion but community is about coming together and showing mutual support and consideration. St Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews (10: 24-5) speaks about spurring one another to…
Breda O'Brien
David Quinn
Fr Ronald Rolheiser
Mary Kenny