Two and a half years ago, Safa Al Alqoshy shared a heart-warming embrace with Pope Francis while in Rome to attend a Synod of Bishops on youth, before leaving the gathering early to care for his ailing mother. During their brief conversation, Al Alqoshy told Crux, the Pope “told me to have faith and he…
In 1986, Czechoslovakian novelist Ivan Klima published a series of autobiographical essays entitled, My First Loves. These essays describe some of his moral struggles as a young agnostic seeking for answers without any explicit moral framework within which to frame those struggles. He’s a young man, full of sexual passion, but hesitant to act out…
Notebook Bernard is a beautiful name (think of St Bernard of Clairvaux, patron of beekeepers and Gibraltar and all that). But I am not called after him. Bernard is also a surname in these parts, and my mother was born Maeve Bernard – hence my Christian name. My mother had a grand-uncle who was a…
Susie Orbach is a well-known London psychotherapist who was Princess Diana’s emotional counsellor back in the 1980s. She has recently been speaking about the wave of ‘social depression’ that has arisen from prolonged lockdown. The severe restrictions on our everyday lives make us ‘solace-deprived’ and emotionally ‘squeezed-out’. Social isolation, she notes, is a form of…
The View Some 150 years ago, on January 18, 1871 at Versailles, a united Germany came into being as an empire in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. Reminders of it are low-key, confined to German newspapers and magazines. A thousand-year Reich had existed in the past, the Holy Roman Empire, that existed…
A bill that would ban abortion of people with disabilities has split the pro-life camp, writes Ruadhán Jones Early last week, the DUP announced that it would propose a bill seeking to outlaw abortions on children with disabilities such as Down Syndrome, cleft palate and club foot in the North. The Severe Foetal Impairment Abortion (Amendment)…
Few people in Ireland seem aware that we are one of the only countries in Europe that has put a total halt to public worship, writes David Quinn The four Catholic archbishops have met online with Taoiseach, Micheál Martin, once again to express their wish that Catholics be allowed to gather in churches for Mass and…
Letter from Rome During the St John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI years, the Vatican had a council of cardinals from around the world who allegedly oversaw its financial affairs. Members of that body routinely complained that the information they received was incomplete, that it lacked credibility and was fundamentally untrustworthy. Two of the…
A priest from Qaraqosh helping to prepare the city’s youth for Pope Francis’s visit next month has said the fact that a Pope is traveling to the country for the first time has shown young people that the Church, which can often seem far away, is close to them. “Here in Qaraqosh, we are so…
In his autobiography, Nikos Kazantzakis shares how in his youth he was driven by a restlessness that had him searching for something he could never quite define. However, he made peace with his lack of peace because he accepted that, given the nature of the soul, he was supposed to feel that restlessness and that…
Fr Ronald Rolheiser
Mary Kenny
Ruadhán Jones
David Quinn
John L. Allen Jr.