This year, the Christian churches can celebrate Easter together. But that is the exception. All efforts to find a common date have come to nothing. Bonn (KNA): The calendar provides a steep template: this year, the churches are celebrating the 1,500th anniversary of the Council of Nicea – and thus also the establishment of the…
The modern trend in education is towards the co-ed school. Single-sex schools are in decline, and often regarded as archaic relics of a past time, unhealthily segregating boys and girls, Taliban-style. But what strikes me as I watch schoolkids piling boisterously onto trains and buses is how uneven the physical development of boys and girls…
Lent kind of crept up on me this year. I had barely adjusted to writing 2025 instead of 2024 and yet it was already Ash Wednesday. I was relieved when my nephew, Jason Conroy, asked if I wanted to be part of a WhatsApp group that would follow along with Cardinal Pell’s prison journals for…
In Leo Tolstoy’s famed novel, Anna Karenina, one of the main characters, Kitty, is heartbroken when the man she thought she was going marry, Count Vronsky, has designs on Anna instead. Kitty becomes listless and melancholic. Kitty’s family bring her to a health spa in Germany to recover, which she finally does by befriending another…
Having celebrated the feast of St Patrick, now is a good time to consider our call to evangelise in our day as St Patrick did successfully in his. Explored here are four basic components of evangelisation: the personal, inter-personal, liturgical and cultural. First, the personal. Karl Barth, the Swiss Protestant theologian from the last century,…
There is a long Christian tradition – rooted in the Gospels – of showing compassion for women who work as prostitutes. Christian women and early feminists took up this cause in the 19th century – the anti-slavery Christian campaigner Josephine Butler sheltered prostitutes, and halted young girls from being trafficked into prostitution, too. Compassion and…
It was on the way to Mass that I first heard the story of St Joseph and Bobby Clarke. My friend’s aunt, Ann Kelly, needed a lift, and the pair of them were catching up, as I listened from the back seat. “As you know,” said Ann, “I fell out with St Joseph for 33…
A view from the Seanad The Trump/Vance vs Zelenskyy dust-up in the White House was widely portrayed as an ambush of a tired and strained war-hero by a cynical and narcissistic duo bent only on self-aggrandisement. But with the wisdom of hindsight, it seems that Zelenskyy played his hand very badly that day. In old-style…
Each time we leave Mass we are told to “go in peace” Our mission is “to love and serve the Lord”. What does this mean for each of us? The recent final document of the Synod last November tells us what it is to be a Catholic “each according to their diverse roles – within…
The anniversary of the two most recent referendums came and went last weekend. Do you remember them? I’m not sure you’re meant to. One was about inserting the concept of ‘durable relationships’ into the Constitution alongside marriage. The other was an attempt to remove from the Constitution the requirement that the State should seek to…
Mary Kenny
Breda O'Brien
David Quinn
Martina Purdy
Senator Ronan Mullen
Nuala O’Loan