Gabriel Doherty The pages of The Irish Catholic for Saturday, October 26, 1918, contained an eclectic assortment of items. No one topic dominated, in comparison to the recent extensive coverage of the sinking of the Leinster, but two themes were common to nearly all stories: the growing belief that the end of the war was…

Dr Kevin Myers Hallowe’en is on the horizon and with it we find many of our friends and neighbours preparing to meet the macabre. In this mist of the seasonal jovial ghoul, however, we also take time to reflect on our lives and, rather importantly remember our dead. In many ways, Christianly is a religious…

Cindy Wooden Having some doubts is definitely better than having no doubts at all, Pope Francis told a group of seminarians. As the Synod of Bishops on ‘young people, the faith and vocational discernment’ was continuing at the Vatican, the Pope tackled some of the synod’s key questions when he met on October 13 with…

One year ago, the #MeToo movement erupted across much of the Western world, starting in the United States.  The Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein was accused by a number of women of sexually assaulting and even raping them (charges he denies), and then other women came forward to say that they had also experienced sexual assault…

Shusaku Endo, the Japanese author of the classic novel Silence (upon which Martin Scorsese based his movie) was a Catholic who didn’t always find his native land, Japan, sympathetic to his faith. He was misunderstood but kept his balance and good heart by placing a high value on levity. It was his way of integrating…

Everyone, it seemed, deplored Peter Casey’s rather unkind remarks about Travelling people being essentially a community which camps on other people’s land and has no genuine claim to a separate ‘ethnic identity’. Whether Travellers are a separate ethnic group is a matter of dispute. But it is certain that they are a disadvantaged group, and…

Fr vincent Sherlock In life we meet joy and sorrow. Recently I shared sorrow with a family whose baby died in his fourth day. I walked into the hospital and the father came to meet me. I was amazed at the strength of character displayed. He asked me if I’d baptise their son. “Have you…

Recent days have seen some bizarre reports in Irish media about a campaign group which shut down last year following complaints to the State’s ethics watchdog that it was being illegally bankrolled to the tune of over €400,000. Irish electoral law bars organisations engaged in political campaigning from receiving over €2,500 from any one donor…

If present trends continue, the name “Mary” could soon become almost extinct. We’re told that Ethel, Sheila, Garrett and Herbert are already “extinct” Christian  names because they are no longer recorded in the top 100 names given to babies. Just over 100 ago, according to Ancestry.ie, more than 11,000 girls in Ireland were baptised or…