The View Pól Ó Muirí In the trench warfare that passes for Northern politics, the news that Fianna Fáil and the SDLP were talking of getting spliced caused some interest. Some change, any change, is enough to get people talking. Then it emerged that, no, the parties were not going to marry; they…
Today’s young people follow the crowd as much as their predecessors did, writes David Quinn We should beware of romanticising any particular generation of people. At the end of the day, people are simply people, a mixture of good and bad, no matter how old or young they are. Nonetheless, people are shaped by…
Elise Harris At Sunday’s closing Mass for World Youth Day (WYD) in Panama, it was announced that the next edition of the international festival dubbed the ‘Catholic Woodstock’ will take place in Lisbon, Portugal. While there are undoubtedly multiple reasons, it’s hard not to start with the fact Lisbon is less than an hour’s…
What is spirituality and what makes for different spiritualities? The word spirituality is relatively new within the English-speaking world, at least in terms of how it is being used today. Prior to the 1960s you would have found very few books in English with the word “spirituality” in their title, though that wasn’t true for…
The Notebook Fr Conor McDonough World Youth Day, the massive, global gathering of young Catholics, took place in Panama this year, finishing with a papal Mass last Sunday. As always, this colourful gathering yielded all kinds of beautiful moments and images, but the one that spoke most powerfully to me was taken by a…
Ireland is to have a referendum in the near future on liberalising the divorce law, and if other countries are an example of how that usually pans out, easier and quicker divorce will very probably follow. The arguments for more liberal divorce are simple: why force a couple to stay together when they are unhappy?…
Muslim religious objections may pose an unforeseen difficulty for Government abortion plans, writes Greg Daly “The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience,” Alabama lawyer Atticus Finch tells his daughter in Harper Lee’s 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird. It’s a powerful statement, and one worth bearing in mind…
The View Catholic education in this country is not working. Last Summer’s abortion referendum was a wake-up call in this regard: how could so many people, educated in Catholic schools for the most part, have voted to strip the most vulnerable among us of all rights? How could an educated Catholic have voted for…
The Church may need a serious theology of masculinity, writes David Quinn Men have been receiving a very bad press lately, and not just specific men, but men in general. The words ‘toxic’ and ‘masculinity’ are commonly and routinely joined together in a way ‘toxic’ and ‘femininity’ rarely are. The current round of attacks…
Everything is of one piece. Whenever we don’t take that seriously, we pay a price. The renowned theologian, Hans Urs Von Balthasar gives an example of this. Beauty, he submits, is not some little “extra” that we can value or denigrate according to personal taste and temperament, like some luxury that we say we cannot…
David Quinn
Fr Ronald Rolheiser
Mary Kenny
Greg Daly
Maria Steen