Moral outrage is the antithesis of morality. Yet it’s everywhere present in our world today and is everywhere rationalised on the basis of God and truth. We live in a world awash in moral outrage. Everywhere individuals and groups are indignant and morally outraged, sometimes violently so, by opposing individuals, groups, ideologies, moral positions, ecclesiologies,…
Fr Bernard Healy The Notebook I was lucky enough to spend a few days in Jerusalem this spring. Whilst there, I was able to visit a site sacred to our Jewish brethren, namely the Western (or Wailing) Wall. The Wall stands as a visible reminder of the destruction of the Jewish Temple by the…
It’s six months now since I was obliged to leave the lovely old flat in central Dublin which I had rented for 21 years. It was on the second floor of an old Georgian building and I loved it. It was full of books and old things, nooks and crannies, memorabilia and memories and I…
Martin Mansergh The View The political history of 20th-Century Ireland is book-ended between the 1916 Easter Rising and the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. These descriptions are very evidently linked symbolically to key events in the Christian calendar. Pearse’s writings leading up to the Rising are suffused with religious metaphor, for which he was notably…
Lots of small, kind gestures make saints, writes David Quinn A few weeks ago during a chat with a renowned Italian journalist, the Pope seemed to call the existence of Hell into doubt, or so it was reported. The journalist, Eugenio Scalfari (94), is founder of the traditionally anti-clerical newspaper, La Repubblica. Pope Francis…
When an apparently innocuous teaching document comes out of Rome – and a Pope calling us to holiness fits that description better than most – it’s always important on the Vatican beat to ask: why this, and why now? When you apply the context lens, two recent events help answer that question. One was yesterday: Amoris…
Belief in God today is often seen as a naiveté. For many, believing in God is like believing in Santa and the Easter Bunny – nice, something for the kids, a warm nostalgia or a bitter memory but not something that’s real, that stands up to hard scrutiny and indeed stands up to the dark…
The Notebook Fr Conor McDonough Some three weeks ago a supermarket in the small town of Trèbes in the southwest of France, became a scene of terror. An armed man, Redouane Lakdim, claiming to act in the name of Islam, entered the shop, shot a worker and a customer, and took a hostage,…
The View The view that an unborn child has the right to life is a view which is shared by millions across the world. You would not think so, listening to some of the media in Ireland at the moment. As long ago as 1924, the Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child…
Growing up in Dublin in the 1950s and 60s, I never heard the word ‘rape’. That is not to deny the reality of sexual assault – we know that it can occur in all societies. But the older women in my family, and the various teachers, neighbours and friends with whom I came in contact…
Fr Ronald Rolheiser
Mary Kenny
David Quinn
Austen Ivereigh
Nuala O’Loan