When Vincent Browne appeared last Sunday at the end of the Listowel Writers’ Week festival he was greeted like a rock star. The very spacious ballroom of the Listowel Arms Hotel was crammed to bursting point with his fans, and cheers greeted almost his every pronunciamento. Vincent was chairing a meeting called ‘The Absurdity of…

A double standard lies at the heart of reaction to the adoption scandal, writes David Quinn   In November 2016, ITV aired a programme called Breaking the Silence: Britain’s Adoption Scandal. It interviewed seven women who became pregnant decades ago while unmarried and were forced by the state, the churches, their families and their GPs…

There are some grains of hope for the Irish Church in a new survey, writes Greg Daly   Perhaps one of the great ironies of the huge donations from the New York-based Open Society Foundation (OSF) to help three groups push for a referendum in Ireland on repealing our constitutional protections for the unborn is…

The sacraments cannot be treated as mere rituals that can be approached regardless of one’s beliefs or morality, writes Fr John McKeever   Many have described the landslide in the abortion referendum result as ‘a wake-up call for ‘the Church’, presumably meaning ‘the hierarchy’. However, the Church in reality is all the baptised, including those…

The Gospel of John presents us with a very powerful and rather earthy mystical image: as John describes the Last Supper scene he tells us that as they were at table the beloved disciple was reclining with his head against Jesus’ breast. The power of that image has, I believe, been better captured by artists…

The Notebook Fr Vincent Sherlock   I remember as a child, having a small plastic wallet with a religious medal inside and a printed card which read: “I am a Catholic, in case of accident, please notify a priest”. I don’t know where I got it but I remember having it. The message was clear.…

There were many who found the street celebrations after the abortion referendum somewhat distasteful, and this extended to the British media, even among those who endorsed Repeal. In the Daily Mail, Richard Littlejohn wrote that “while the Irish referendum result is welcome, I found the near hysterical reaction to it pretty nauseating”. A correspondent to…

The View   As the dust settles on the repeal of the Eighth Amendment to the Irish Constitution, I watched the joy, the rapture, the excitement, the delight of those who voted ‘Yes’ in the referendum with disbelief. They argue that what they were celebrating was the recognition of a woman’s right to choose what…

True compassion helps someone carry their burden until the time hopefully comes when it doesn’t feel like a burden anymore, writes David Quinn   A friend who is good at number-crunching tells me that 37% of weekly Mass-goers voted for abortion on May 25. He gleaned that figure from exit poll data. It is a horrifying…

Letter from America   It was an interesting moment – a disturbing as well as inspiring one. I was listening to an early morning National Public Radio programme – the award-wining public affairs All Things Considered – and the interviewer was speaking to the survivor of prolonged and horrific clerical sex abuse. It had the…