He taught us how to pray while not knowing how to pray – that’s a comment sometimes made about Henri Nouwen. It seems almost contradictory to say that. How can someone teach us to pray when he himself doesn’t know how? Well, two complexities conspired together here. Henri Nouwen was a unique mixture of weakness,…
Notebook In recent days I have found myself awake quite a bit when ordinarily sleep would have overtaken me. Thanks be to God; I sleep easily and well as a rule. You might or might not wonder or care why my sleep has been broken but I need to fill this page, so I am…
Does the Pope vote for a Green party? He clearly is supportive of the Green cause. I was surprised to turn on BBC radio last Monday morning and hear, at the top of the news programme, not a politician talking about the state of the country, nor a reporter analysing the tragic killing in a…
The View With all the media attention focusing on climate change targets and pension age, a less-discussed aspect of the recently agreed programme for government between Fine Gael, Fianna Fail and the Green Party is the commitment to legislate for exclusion zones around hospitals where abortions are now being performed. This isn’t exactly a new…
We need to teach young people that there is more to sex than just consent, writes David Quinn A new survey was launched to plenty of publicity earlier this week. If it is at all accurate, no parent should let their children, especially their daughters, anywhere near university or any other third level institution because sexual…
2019 marked a banner year for the US Church in terms of race relations, or so I had thought. Washington, DC, the nation’s capital and a long-time bastion of African American heritage, received its first ever black archbishop through the appointment of Wilton Gregory, the long-time leader of Atlanta, Georgia. To punctuate the appointment, it was…
St Eugene de Mazenod, the founder of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, the Religious Congregation to which I belong, left us with these last words as he lay dying: “Among yourselves, charity, charity, charity.” I don’t always live that, though I wish I could, especially today. We are in a bitter time. Everywhere there…
Notebook I’ve always enjoyed reading John B. Keane’s Letters of an Irish Parish Priest (or I did until I became one, anyway). One of the letters frequently received by this fictional pastor came from an anonymous parishioner, who always signed herself ‘One Who Tries To Be A Good Catholic’. This anonymous scribe’s notes were usually…
The appalling behaviour of some of the American police which we’ve seen in recent times is, it seems, partly because of their very powerful trade unions. Derek Chauvin, the police officer who stands accused of the killing of George Floyd, had already faced at least 17 complaints of misconduct. Yet his career flourished because the…
The View The country’s most important and imposing statue, that of Daniel O’Connell, on the capital’s main thoroughfare, should be safe from attack (except by seagulls and pigeons), as he championed the anti-slavery cause. In 1845, he greeted the famous campaigner and at that point escaped slave Frederick Douglass, who was on a lecture tour…
Fr Ronald Rolheiser
Mary Kenny
Maria Steen
David Quinn