Fr Éamonn Fitzgibbon It is just 12 months since the Government launched ‘Realising our Rural Potential: The Action Plan for Rural Development’. This Plan generated hope and optimism in many rural communities as it outlined 270 actions to support rural Ireland. However, much of this positivity has been dented by the recently launched National Planning Framework…
There is a growing concern that young people are just sliding into the sacrament, writes Susan Gately Wexford-based Fr Paddy Banville attracted publicity recently after calling a public meeting to address the issue of the forthcoming Confirmation ceremony in the parish. When the students enrolled for the Sacrament, Fr Banville, the administrator of the…
Letter from Rome As President John F. Kennedy famously said after the Bay of Pigs disaster in 1961, more or less paraphrasing Tacitus, “victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan”. The odd thing from a media point of view is that it’s often precisely the opposite way around – failure is…
The European Union has become too focused on narrow economic goals, writes Ben Ryan I’ve finally found common ground with British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson. I can finally come out in public as someone who also likes to think of the EU as a “teleological construction”. Of course, Johnson is learning, as I’ve long experienced,…
Writing in the first person is always a risk, but the subject matter of this column is best done, I feel, through personal testimony. In a world where chastity and celibacy are seen as naïve and to be pitied and where there’s a general scepticism that anyone is actually living them out, personal testimony is…
The Notebook It’s often noted that St John Paul II canonised more saints than all of his predecessors combined, but too often forgotten is that on the February day five years ago when he announced his resignation, Pope Benedict XVI authorised the canonisation of more saints than his Polish predecessor had ever done. The…
Nell McCafferty made an apt point when she participated in a discussion celebrating the centenary of the women’s vote on last weekend’s Sunday with Miriam. There was, Nell pointed out, a connection between pregnancy and housing – between mothers being able to celebrate a pregnancy and welcome a baby because they are in possession of…
The View Martin Mansergh Shortly, the people of the Irish State will be celebrating 100 years of independence, mostly with pride, despite the difficult circumstances of its birth. This will be done without trying to hide subsequent disappointments, failures and betrayals, or ignoring basic work that still has to be done. Commemoration will…
Could the Church consider blessings for some same-sex unions, asks Greg Daly “Cardinal Marx endorses blessing ceremonies for same-sex couples,” declared America’s Catholic News Agency (CNA) earlier this month, with a host of other Catholic news sites taking a similar line and with predictable fits of the vapours across the Catholic internet. Interviewed by…
Classically Christianity has listed seven sins as ‘deadly’ sins, meaning that most everything else we do which is not virtuous somehow takes its root in one these congenital propensities. These are the infamous seven: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth. In spiritual literature the first three – pride, greed and lust – get…
Susan Gately
John L. Allen Jr.
Fr Ronald Rolheiser
Greg Daly
Mary Kenny