Having spent most of my adult life and career living in western Europe and covering Catholicism, I’ve developed three broad observations about the cultural landscape here vis-à-vis the Church. – First, the Church is undergoing a long-term transition from a culture-shaping majority to an optional subculture, sometimes in harmony with the broader majority and sometimes…
Twenty years ago this week, struggling to digest the events of September 11th, I wrote this column. Two decades later, my reaction is the same. Here’s the column. Iris Murdoch once said that the whole world can change in 15 seconds. She was talking about falling-in-love. Hatred can do the same thing: On September 11…
Notebook Mark Pattison The 20th anniversary remembrances of the 9/11 terror attacks in the United States is renewing a canonisation push for the first identified casualty: Franciscan Fr Mychal Judge. Fr Judge, a New York Fire Department chaplain, was at the World Trade Centre site praying with and ministering to attack victims when debris falling…
Cecilia Ahern always has interesting themes for her novels, and her new book Freckles is based on a lofty moral ideal. It was, she says, inspired by the expression that “you are the average of the five people you spend most time with”; so she decided to create a character, Allegra, whose ambition is “to…
The View One of the pleasures of an older family house is that occasionally one may go rummaging in drawers, boxes and old suitcases and find something interesting, unusual or exciting. Two weeks ago, I pulled a small painting on a wooden block out of a drawer. It depicted a winter scene in the Dutch…
Letter from America Mark Pattison The United States last declared war nearly 80 years ago in the conflict known as World War II. Afterward, there were several wars fought that weren’t declared as such. Some ended successfully from a military standpoint: the 1983 invasion of Grenada, a 135-square-mile island in the Caribbean that was set…
In the 2010’s, the term ‘woke’ became a popular word, implying political and social awareness, although critics say the term signals a sort of pretentiousness or elitism about one’s understanding of any given issue. In his new book, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents, Rod Dreher – author of the New York Times…
Recently at a workshop, a woman shared her anxiety about the death of her brother. Her older brother had died from the Covid virus before there were vaccines for it, and had died because he had dangerously exposed himself to catching the virus. However, he had exposed himself to that danger for a worthy reason.…
Some of the readers of this column might remember a band called Milli Vanilli which caused quite a music controversy. In 1990 the duo of Rob and Fab exploded on to pop music scene. They had five big hits, including three number one songs. Then it was discovered that they weren’t really singing on their…
And so Irish fertility figures continue to fall: statistics just announced from the Central Statistics Office (CSO) disclose that there were more deaths than births in the first quarter of 2021. Pattern of decline Births were down by 476, a fall of 3.3% from the first three months of 2020. This is all part of a…
John L. Allen Jr.
Fr Ronald Rolheiser
Mary Kenny