Junno Arocho Esteves Adam Piekarski, a homeless man from Lódz, Poland, never imagined that the sketches he would draw in his free time while waiting for the public showers near Bernini’s Colonnade would lead to the opportunity of a lifetime. In November, the Vatican Philatelic and Numismatic Office announced that its 2021 set of commemorative…
Notebook Recently I went to the United States to visit some people and to spend a bit of time with my aunt who lives in Richmond, Virginia. She was turning 98, and I was happy to be able to see her in the lead up to that day. A mighty woman, but that’s another story!…
We can expect the literary focus of 2022 to be the centenary of the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses: but an equally important milestone, especially for Christians, was the appearance of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in 1922. This long poem burst upon the world with considerable fanfare, as Eliot’s biographer Richard Ellmann put it,…
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…
Mary Kenny
Breda O'Brien
David Quinn
Fr Ronald Rolheiser