I was very blessed during my theological formation to have had the privilege of taking classes from two very renowned Catholic scholars, Avery Dulles and Raymond E. Brown. The former was an ecclesiologist whose books often became textbooks which were prescribed reading in seminaries and theology schools. The latter was a Scripture scholar whose scholarship stands…
The Notebook Fr Vincent Sherlock Some time ago I received a text from a parishioner, telling me that there was no need to visit her mother on my First Friday calls since her mother was in hospital for a few days. The level of devotion this daughter showed in caring for her mother…
You can change your mind about a subject not just once, but several times. The subject over which I have vacillated in the course of my lifetime is that of censorship. As a young person, I was vehemently against censorship, largely because both movies and books were subject to sometimes quite draconian censorship: either the…
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…
Fr Ronald Rolheiser
Mary Kenny
David Quinn
Greg Daly