Growing up in suburban Dublin, I had no experience of the ritual of the ‘Stations’. Learning about this sacred and domestic Irish practice in later life, I have come to think of it as a fascinating aspect of our heritage. As most people know, the Stations were a quarterly ritual involving the priest coming to…
The secret of freedom is courage. So wrote the Greek historian, Thucydides. Is that why so few of us are truly free? Trapped by fear, despite God’s command not to be afraid? How heartening then to see a pensioner and a retired Christian Pastor from Tyrone stand up against injustice – and challenge bad law,…
A story broke last week which ought to have received widespread coverage in the Irish media but instead got very little. The details are covered elsewhere in this paper, so I’ll just give you the bare bones of it here. Ireland currently holds the presidency of the European Union and therefore an international conference aimed…
The Pope and I have a shared favourite spiritual teacher. Sadly, the resemblance ends there, because Pope Leo lives by the teachings. While I would love to, I just don’t. The spiritual teacher is Bro. Lawrence, a seventeenth-century Carmelite lay brother. He served as a foot soldier in the Thirty Years’ War. An injury left…
Amoris Laetitia (The Joy of Love), Pope Francis’s 2016 exhortation on love, marriage and family life, emerged from extensive consultation and two Synods of Bishops. Ten years later, Pope Leo XIV called an Assembly of families, bishops and experts in Rome to take stock. What are the takeaways? The Synthesis Report has not yet been published,…
When it comes to keeping public discourse moderate in tone, measured in content and focused on persuasion rather than coercion, most of us would expect more from a politician than a pop star. Recently, PBP politician Richard Boyd Barrett and pop idol Ed Sheeran showed this can be completely the other way round. Ed Sheeran,…
I don’t know about you but I seem to keep bumping into the Antichrist recently. By that I mean when reading the news and other publications, not actually banging into the harbinger of the apocalypse on the street. This has struck me as a little unusual as it was not something that has been on…
Like those involved in overseeing the synodal process all along, the people who served on working groups producing proposals for this weekend’s National Assembly deserve appreciation for their efforts. Nevertheless, their proposals require close scrutiny, as the Synodal Pathway is not simply another venture in renewal, but makes the extraordinary claim of having determined the…
As many readers know, there will be a National Synodal Assembly of the Catholic Church in Ireland on October 17 in Gormanston, Co. Meath. This is the culmination of a five-year process of consultation, listening and discernment, which was launched by the Irish Bishops in 2021 with the question: ‘What does God want from the…
Was Jeffrey Archer a hugely successful author who gave harmless pleasure to millions – or an evil rogue who swindled and conned his way through life? On the death of the author on October 5, both claims have been made. Britain’s Queen Camilla expressed gratitude for the “pleasure Jeffrey brought to me and to so…
Mary Kenny
Martina Purdy
David Quinn
Breda O'Brien