Imagine this scenario: Two people are having a conversation. One says to the other: “I’m against racism personally, but I just think that it’s a serious moral question and people should be given the choice to discriminate on grounds of race if they wish. After all, we can trust people.” Could anybody confronted by logic…

The Vatican foreign minister’s lecture raised as many questions as it provided answers writes Martin O’Brien   It was a considerable coup for the organisers to secure as distinguished and high-powered a figure as the Vatican’s foreign minister to deliver the Cardinal Cahal B. Daly Centenary Memorial lecture in Queen’s University, Belfast at the weekend.…

Integrity was the cornerstone of Liam Cosgrave’s life, writes Msgr John Wilson   iam Cosgrave’s wife Vera died on September 16, 2016 and was buried from this Church. Now just over one year later we gather once more this time for Liam’s funeral and for his last journey to and from this Church where he…

Today’s Fine Gael would have no place for its 1970s Taoiseach, writes David Quinn   Liam Cosgrave is the first Taoiseach I can remember. My father, a newspaper man like his father before him and his son now, was thrilled. My father was Fine Gael through and through and Cosgrave’s was the first Fine Gael-led…

Thirty years ago, the American Educator, Allan Bloom, wrote a book entitled The Closing of the American Mind. This was his thesis: in our secularised world today our language is becoming ever-more empirical, one-dimensional and devoid of depth and this is closing our minds by stripping us of the deeper meanings inside our own experience.…

Editor’s Comment The number of people coming forward to discern a vocation to the priesthood and religious life in Ireland is stubbornly low. There is some evidence that when vocation-promotion is prioritised, interest increases. A few years ago, after the Church hosted a ‘Year of Vocations’, Irish dioceses saw the largest number of ordinations in…

Bishop Phonsie Cullinan of Waterford and Lismore has made a graceful apology for his remarks criticising the HPV vaccine. His overall points had been that the vaccine against cervical cancer might not be completely safe: and it might also have the effect of encouraging promiscuity among young girls. He has subsequently called his remarks “an…

Aid to the Church in Need is one of the most important organisations working in the Church today because one of the needs it meets is particularly keen, namely saving the Christians of the Middle East from extinction. This is a forgotten story. Most times it is one that is never even told, not by…