Category: Comment & Analysis

Making law to save as many lives as possible

The View   Although the battle to save the Eighth Amendment was lost, there is still work to do which could result in the saving of many babies’ lives. As I write this article, the draft legislation which will decriminalise abortion in some circumstances has not yet been published. When it is published, there will have…

The real cost of discipleship

An inauthentic Church peddles ‘cheap grace’, writes David Quinn   In any given society and cultural moment, Christianity faces certain temptations. In part of Eastern Europe, for example, Christianity is coming to be identified again with national identity. This happened in the run-up to World War I and World War II, with disastrous consequences. In…

Mapping out a lost ministry

Is a Vatican commission set to oblige Pope Francis to restore the female diaconate, asks Greg Daly   It seemed somehow appropriate that hardly had Minister Josepha Madigan sought to frame her impromptu leading of an ad hoc Communion service as a story about women being denied a role in the Church’s ministry that the…

Lay people can’t be laid back

Colm Fitzpatrick examines if lay-led services are the future of Irish Catholicism   In light of a prominent politician taking the lead at a Saturday night Eucharistic service after the parish priest failed to show up to offer Mass, questions have been raised as to what parishioners should do in such situations, and how they…

Pope backs bishops demanding democracy in Nicaragua

International Analysis Inés San Martín   If ever there’s doubt about where the Church stands on an issue, having the Pope and the majority of a local Catholic hierarchy speaking in unison pretty much resolves it. This is presently the case for Nicaragua, where, once again, Church-backed anti-government protests have ended in bloodshed. “Renewing my…

Real Miracles

Ralph Waldo Emerson calls the stars in the night sky “envoys of beauty, lighting the universe with their astonishing smile” and submits that if they appeared for a single night only every thousand years, we’d be on our knees in worship and would cherish the memory for the rest of our lives. But since they…