The Notebook   June is Jubilee month for many priests. In communities all over Ireland, people in sacred ministry are being honoured this month, especially for Silver, Ruby, Golden and Diamond jubilees (25, 40, 50 and 60 years of priesthood). I went to one such celebration earlier in June. A special once-off Mass had been…

A retired nurse died last month in a small hospital in Deal, Kent and many local people paid tribute to her. She was Mrs Maureen Bane, aged 76, and she had been the team leader coping with the victims of the IRA attack on the Deal bandsman in September 1989. On the morning of September 22,…

If the Church tries to be too accommodating of cultural Catholicism, it starts to lack coherence, writes David Quinn   In Ireland, most people still seem content to call themselves ‘Catholic’. Census data for 2016 put the figure at 78%. The RTÉ exit poll on the day of the abortion referendum came up with a…

Anyone who has ever watched a fire knows that at a point the flames subside and disappear into smouldering coals which themselves eventually cool and turn into cold, grey ash. But there’s a moment in that process, before they cool off, that the coals can be stirred so as to make them burst into flame…

The Notebook   I was watching the Late Late Show in the company of two of my colleagues when the exit poll results were announced. To be honest we were shell-shocked. I woke up on Saturday morning totally depressed and wondering do I really have a place in this country, this Church, this community any…

When Vincent Browne appeared last Sunday at the end of the Listowel Writers’ Week festival he was greeted like a rock star. The very spacious ballroom of the Listowel Arms Hotel was crammed to bursting point with his fans, and cheers greeted almost his every pronunciamento. Vincent was chairing a meeting called ‘The Absurdity of…

A double standard lies at the heart of reaction to the adoption scandal, writes David Quinn   In November 2016, ITV aired a programme called Breaking the Silence: Britain’s Adoption Scandal. It interviewed seven women who became pregnant decades ago while unmarried and were forced by the state, the churches, their families and their GPs…

There are some grains of hope for the Irish Church in a new survey, writes Greg Daly   Perhaps one of the great ironies of the huge donations from the New York-based Open Society Foundation (OSF) to help three groups push for a referendum in Ireland on repealing our constitutional protections for the unborn is…

The sacraments cannot be treated as mere rituals that can be approached regardless of one’s beliefs or morality, writes Fr John McKeever   Many have described the landslide in the abortion referendum result as ‘a wake-up call for ‘the Church’, presumably meaning ‘the hierarchy’. However, the Church in reality is all the baptised, including those…