In business as in life, one of the killer phrases is “we’ve never done it that way before”. In the Church context we might well add: “We tried that before and it didn’t work.” Those who seek to calibrate our lives and actions by the light of the Gospel would do well to be wary…
The View With one election over, we await another: the Seanad election. Of the 60 seats in the senate, six are allocated to the university panel. The other 54 are filled by the Taoiseach’s nominees and those nominated by the Vocational Panels. The university panel electorate is small, at only 175,000 between Trinity and NUI.…
Christopher White Speaking to young people on the beaches of Rio de Janeiro at the 2013 World Youth Day, Pope Francis encouraged those present to go home and shake things up. Perhaps one result of that was in the US where an experiment took place last month in an attempt to bridge the divide between…
Fr Eugene O’Neill Few things are calculated to raise the hackles of hardworking priests in parishes more than being told how it should be done by fellow clerics with fewer years in the Lord’s Vineyard under their belt. I once turned to an older colleague – a man of depth, wisdom and vast experience –…
Notebook We are still in the early days of Lent so maybe there’s space here for a thought or two around the journey to and through repentance. There is a call to repentance that is central to the Lenten season. I recall sitting in the church one morning, a while before Mass. This is something…
Larry Donnelly At a recent town hall forum sponsored by Fox News, likely Democratic primary voters had a chance to interact with the 38-year-old Mayor of South Bend, Indiana and then a candidate for his party’s presidential nomination, Pete Buttigieg. One possibly unexpected and trying question came from Kristen Day, head of the Democrats for…
My inclinations are to regard the hullaballoo about the coronavirus – Covid19 – with a pinch of salt. Yes, it’s upsetting that more than 3,000 people world-wide have died from the epidemic: but (at the time of writing) that’s out of 90,933 who have caught it. To put it in perspective, the World Health Organisation…
How should the Catholic Church respond when a pandemic breaks out? What is the correct pastoral response? What kind of pastoral response best fits with medical best practice? Are priests generally good at a time like this? What should we as individual Christians do? It’s hard to know at this stage whether ordinary people have…
Like many others, I was deeply distressed to learn of the recent revelations concerning Jean Vanier. He was a person whom I much admired and about whom on numerous occasions I have written glowingly, so the news about him shook me deeply. What’s to be said about Jean Vanier in the light of these revelations?…
The ‘free movement of peoples’ is one of the most strongly-held tenets of the European Union. It would not be too much to say that the EU’s absolute adherence to this principle was one of the triggers of Brexit. David Cameron, as British Prime Minister, begged the EU to allow the UK some leeway on…
Michael Kelly
Maria Steen
Mary Kenny
David Quinn
Fr Ronald Rolheiser