The View Last Saturday, Brett Kavanaugh took up a lifetime appointment as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Under the US Constitution, the President gets to nominate federal judges, but the nominations are subject to approval by the Senate, in which the President’s Republican party has a narrow majority.…
Category: Comment & Analysis
Freeing our youth from the ‘freedom’ trap
Christianity offers an antidote to a harmful individualism, writes David Quinn A meeting of bishops from all around the world is currently taking place in Rome. Its purpose is to look at the relationship between the Church and young people. There is no one way to look at this question because a huge amount depends…
Not just for kids
If we’re honest, it will take years before Irish Catholics can look upon this year’s World Meeting of Families and papal visit and say whether or not they were successful. It’s the nature of these kind of things that their true value doesn’t become clear overnight. Few would have thought in 1979, for instance, that…
Pray against the devil and his works
Priests tell Chai Brady we deny the devil’s existence at our peril The Pope’s call to pray to Archangel Michael to protect the Church from the devil this month is a sign that the “evil one is strong at work” according to Irish priests. In a communiqué released by the Vatican at the end…
Suicide and the Soul
More than 50 years ago, James Hillman [pictured below] wrote a book entitled, Suicide and the Soul. The book was intended for therapists and he knew it wouldn’t receive an easy reception there or elsewhere. There were reasons. He frankly admitted that some of the things he proposed in the book would “go against all…
Priests must speak more about the joy of ministry
Fr Bernard Healy There is a chapel known as ‘Domine Quo Vadis’ on the Via Appia, the old road that leads southwards out of Rome and there is an unusual tale dating back to the 2nd Century about the site that it’s built on. It is said that during a time of persecution St…
The valuable art of being alone without experiencing loneliness
The View The BBC is making a series of programmes about loneliness as a result of a study involving 55,000 people that it conducted. The findings are somewhat counter-intuitive. Young people are lonelier than older people. Some 40% of respondents aged between 16 and 24 years old said they experience loneliness often or very…
Blasphemy and ‘you can’t say that!’
I sense that there is rather more interest in electing (or re-electing) the President of Ireland on October 26 than there is in voting to repeal the single line in the Constitution which deals with blasphemy. This article (40.6.1.i) states that: “The publication or utterance of blasphemous, seditious, or indecent matter is an offence which shall…
The Church that stayed home
According to the Office of Public Works, just under 152,000 people attended the papal Mass in Dublin’s Phoenix Park on August 26. While organisers’ claims that over 180,000 Communion hosts were distributed suggest a counter-estimate of about 200,000 people, a respectable figure for a miserable day where Mass attendances held up around the country, one…
Pretending that men and women are the same
It is increasingly becoming heretical to say that there are differences between the sexes, writes David Quinn Not that you would think it from reading our newspapers, but one of the things that Pope Francis frequently criticises is so-called ‘gender ideology’. This is the belief that men and women are the same and if…

Maria Steen
David Quinn
Greg Daly
Chai Brady
Fr Ronald Rolheiser

Breda O'Brien
Mary Kenny

