Home is more than a house or a place on a map. It’s a place in the heart, the place where you most want to be at the end of the day. The metaphorical idea of home can help us sort out many things, not least how sex connects to love. The soul, as we…
Notebook A few years ago I found myself in a pub – remember them? – for a friend’s engagement party. There I got chatting to a young doctor. We got chatting about our studies, and he was astonished to find out that I had studied science as an undergraduate yet somehow ended up a priest.…
“Will you watch the new film, The 8th, about the 2018 referendum?” I asked a friend who had canvassed for the pro-life cause in that plebiscite. “Through gritted teeth,” she replied. The film was, as the film critic Donald Clarke put it, “ecstatic” for its’ natural constituency – that is, the pro-choice side. (It is…
The View Even three years on, many of us are still grieving the repeal of the Eighth Amendment. The grief is not as raw as it once was but it will probably never go away. It is so tempting to give up and to decide that the gulf is unbridgeable. Thankfully, most pro-life activists have settled…
Baptism is the key that unlocked the door to a valid Catholic marriage for Boris Johnson, writes Jason Osborne Social media is a rarely a home to calm, quiet discussion, and the conversation than emerged following the news of Boris Johnson and Carrie Symonds’ wedding was no different. Many expressed outrage at the Church’s seemingly…
A strict religious life that is highly regimented does not fit well with modern tastes, writes David Quinn ‘Was Mother Teresa a cult leader?’, ran the headline in The New York Times last week, and with that began yet another attack on the Catholic saint. St Teresa of Kolkata, as she is now known within…
Letter from Rome Whenever there’s a vacancy in the papacy, a few old saws about the process of choosing a Pope shoot back into circulation. “He who enters a conclave a Pope, exits a cardinal,” is a perennial, as is, “Those who talk don’t know, and those who know don’t talk”. (Both are actually half…
Dennis Sadowski After receiving an unprecedented letter from 67 bishops appealing for a delay in a discussion during the bishops’ upcoming spring general assembly on whether to prepare a teaching document on the reception of Communion, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ president explained in a memo the procedure followed in bringing the question to…
Often when listening to someone singing live or on television, I close my eyes to try to hear the song so as not to let the singer’s performance get in the way of the song. A song can be lost in its performance; indeed, the performance can take over so that the song is replaced…
Notebook Dear Notebookers! I am not exactly sure who you are. Well, that is not altogether accurate, since I spoke with a priest friend in Raphoe last week with whom I had not been in contact for a while. “The only place I see you”, he told me “is on the back page of The…
Fr Ronald Rolheiser
Mary Kenny
Breda O'Brien
David Quinn
John L. Allen Jr.