By the time you read this, Charlie Gard, a baby born almost one year ago, may already be dead. Charlie was born with an extremely rare condition that causes progressive muscle weakness, including of the heart, and brain damage. He has been on life-support for months and at the time of writing his medical team…

Sometimes while praying the Psalms, I’m caught looking quite uncomfortably into a mirror reflecting back to me my own seeming dishonesty. For example, we pray these words in the Psalms: “My soul longs for you in the night. …like a deer that yearns for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you my God. …for…

Fr Bernard Cotter Why is it that undertakers are nearly always thanked for their ‘professionalism’ while clergy are never praised in this way? I’m referring to those acknowledgement notices placed in newspapers some time after a funeral, which contain a kind of general ‘thank you’ to everyone who helped, but which usually name people whose…

Freud famously said that “anatomy is destiny” – perhaps challenged, now, in our transgender era – but for nations, geography surely can be destiny. Italy currently feels this acutely, as it bears the brunt of the great numbers of migrants brought to its shores. The number crossing the Med, mainly from Libya, is currently at…

Des Hanafin will have been an extremely familiar figure to many of the readers of this newspaper down the years. He was a long-serving Fianna Fáil Senator and a founder and the long-time Chairman of the Pro-Life Campaign. Des died last week, aged 85. He had been unwell for a long time but was still…

While it’s probably too much to say that Pope Francis has an explicit ‘Swedish strategy’, it’s becoming increasingly clear that Sweden has both a place in the Argentine Pope’s heart and a role to play in his vision of a ‘Church of the Peripheries’. In some ways, the plates had already been shifting in the…

Four years of Pope Francis notwithstanding, it remains generally true in Europe that the more overtly Catholic a political party is, the more likely it is to advocate a restrictive line on immigration. That’s the case with the Law and Justice party in Poland, for instance, as well as Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party in Hungary,…

An announcement last Wednesday night, drowned in the saturation coverage of London’s appalling tower-block fire, deserved not just to make the news but to trigger a national examination of conscience. Sadly, it hasn’t. Tim Farron, an evangelical Christian, decided to stand down as leader of Britain’s third party, the Liberal Democrats, because “to be a…

Charity is about being good-hearted, but justice is about something more. Individual sympathy is good and virtuous, but it doesn’t necessarily change the social, economic and political structures that unfairly victimise some people and unduly privilege others. We need to be fair and good of heart, but we also need to have fair and good…