The clerical church is dying, says Fr Brian D’Arcy, now marking 50 years as an ordained priest, “and it’s not such a tragedy.” The celibate priesthood is over: the male priesthood is over. This is “a gift of the Holy Spirit” and out of such a transformation can come new seeds of life. Well, he’s…
The View There has been much discussion of misogyny in the Church following Mary McAleese’s most recent assertion that the Church has become a “primary global carrier of the toxic virus of misogyny”, and “a male bastion of patronising platitudes to which Pope Francis has added his own quota”. She had previously described the Catholic…
The establishment never misses opportunity to demonise the nuns and to blacken their reputations, writes David Quinn Dr Peter Boylan, one of the chief campaigners in favour of repealing the Eighth Amendment, has been on the warpath again over the relocation of the National Maternity Hospital from Holles Street to the Blackrock Campus of St…
The SDLP, who saw themselves as the moral voice of many Northern Catholics, now inhabit the same political space as their erstwhile competitors, writes Pól Ó Muirí By the standards of Catholic bishops in the North, the statement was robust. Issued at the end of October in response to the introduction of new laws…
We should save money and just let Micheál Martin vote 44 times on each Dáil vote, writes John McGuirk Watching the House of Commons in recent weeks, at the height of Brexitmania, probably the most unfamiliar part of it to those of us who observe Irish politics was the way in which the result…
Letter from Rome After Tuesday’s deadline for South Sudan to implement a peace agreement was again postponed, the South Sudan Council of Churches (SSCC), which unites representatives from all major Christian denominations in the country, including the Catholic Church, urged people not to lose hope. One global figure obviously cheering for a happy outcome is…
Nick Mayrand While US Catholics currently claim 13 official American saints, experts at Marquette University’s Raynor Memorial Libraries are doing their part to aid efforts to determine whether that number may soon grow to include Dorothy Day. Day co-founded the Catholic Worker movement in New York city in the 1930s following her conversion to Catholicism.…
What does it mean to have a vocation? The term gets batted around both in religious and secular circles and everyone assumes its meaning is clear. Is it? What’s a vocation? Karl Jung defined it this way: “A vocation is an irrational factor that destines a man to emancipate himself from the herd and from…
Notebook I ran into a resident of this parish recently, who asked me to sign a Mass card for him. A pen was procured, the signature added and details of the Mass intention noted. He explained who the person who had died was – the grandmother of a lady who is on one of our…
Last week a 23-year-old female teacher from a Dublin school was jailed for having sexual relations with one of her male pupils, an offence which occurred on his 16th birthday. The teacher, who has not been named, pleaded that she thought 16 was the age of consent. It is, in the UK: but in Ireland,…
Mary Kenny
Nuala O’Loan
David Quinn
Fr Ronald Rolheiser