Shannon Campbell The View Pope Francis captured headlines recently when, in his annual address to the diplomatic corps, he tackled head-on the growing phenomenon of ‘cancel culture.’ He was uncompromising in condemning it as a form of “ideological colonisation” which leads to “one track thinking”, ill-suited to addressing the challenges of our times. Cancel culture…
Commercial surrogacy is tantamount to baby-buying, writes David Quinn The Government has just announced the establishment of a special Oireachtas committee to examine the issue of international surrogacy. In practice, this means commercial surrogacy, that is, paying a woman to become pregnant with your baby. Originally, Ireland was planning to allow so-called ‘altruistic surrogacy’ only,…
Over the centuries, the Catholic Church often has led the pack in two distinct specialties: Breaking your heart, and then stitching it back together again with a fresh infusion of hope. This past week brought classic examples of both. Out of Munich, we got a report from a law firm commissioned by the archdiocese documenting…
As the threat of a Russian military incursion in Ukraine continues to loom, European bishops have urged peace, asking that both international law and the sovereignty of each nation involved in the conflict be respected while tensions escalate. In the statement, signed by Archbishop Gintaras Linas Grušas of Vilnius, Lithuania, President of the Council of…
Kabir, a 15th-century Hindu mystic, writes: “What you call ‘salvation’ belongs to the time before death. If you don’t break your ropes while you’re alive, do you think ghosts will do it after? …. What is found now is found then. If you find nothing now, you will simply end up with an apartment in…
Notebook Recently I drove across the border from Northern Ireland into the Republic. To be honest these days you have little sense that you are crossing from one jurisdiction to another but I was reminded of how different it was when I first travelled that route in the late 70s and 80s. It was a…
The murder of Ashling Murphy was so atrocious, so shocking, so extremely distressing in every way that it was understandable that, immediately, both politicians and people sought to apply blame. Some specific individual is to blame – the person who carried out this brutal and unspeakable crime – but in the immediate aftermath, since there…
The destructive nature of pornography is completely ignored in modern Ireland, writes Jason Osborne The recent atrocious murder of Ashling Murphy has sparked intense national debate about the treatment of women in Ireland, and a concurrent discussion about the perceived flawed state of modern masculinity. Leaving aside the merits or deficiencies of this argument, one…
The View It can be hard to remember a time when there was no social media, when communication was verbal, or written on pieces of paper which were then dispatched to places far and near. With such means of interaction a responsibility normally attached to how we interacted with others. Any untruth, any calumny or…
We are now being asked to reject the whole of our histories for not matching the standards of the present, writes David Quinn If you ran an opinion poll and asked people if they understand what is meant by ‘cancel culture’, how many would say ‘yes’, and of those who did, how many would mean…
David Quinn
John L. Allen Jr.
Fr Ronald Rolheiser
Mary Kenny
Nuala O’Loan