Seeing everything through the lens of winners and losers makes losers of everyone, writes Michael Kelly “Them ‘uns have everything and we have nothin’” was the rather colloquial summary of a local Protestant woman when asked by BBC Radio Ulster why her young co-religionists were setting fire to their own communities. The ‘them and us’…

Letter from Rome When I was a precocious sophomore in high school, I once barged into the office of the Capuchin priest who was in charge of our religion curriculum to inform him that I had serious intellectual reservations about the Catholic Faith, and I found the answers being supplied in class unsatisfying. Fr Mike…

Scotland’s bishops are urging voters to consider ongoing efforts to legalise assisted suicide when the vote in elections for the Scottish parliament on May 6. They also pointed to the current efforts to introduce assisted suicide in Scotland” In a pastoral letter issued April 9, the bishops urged voters to put “human life and the…

Notebook During the Easter Octave we friars here in St Saviour’s in Dublin sang lauds each day in our little oratory. It’s a quiet spot, certainly quieter than our church, whose doors open to a busy street. One morning as we sang I noticed a bright, delicate voice combining with our own chant: a bird…

Recently, two young women in Cork were pictured happily with new-born twins. Geraldine Rea and Niamh O’Sullivan were delighted with the babies and although Geraldine actually gave birth to the twins, both women will be registered as parents, under the Children and Family Relationships Act of 2015. They said it was a great step forward…

The View Predicting the future is a mug’s game. For example, anyone who predicted in December 2019 that the world would be battling a global pandemic for the following two years would have been encouraged to go and have a little lie-down. The folly of predictions notwithstanding, in the year 2000, I agreed to take…

Moving from maintenance to mission means reacting to accelerated decline due to the pandemic, writes Chai Brady The Government’s announcement of a raft of plans to rejuvenate rural Ireland have come at a time when rural Church communities face hard future decisions wrought by the pandemic. It may be too little too late. There is…

Sooner or later the hyper-individualism that exists in the West will burn itself out and the Church has to be ready to meet the disaffected, writes David Quinn A major new study published earlier this year showed a huge increase in the number of Irish people who say they never go to church. The study, called…