With Enoch Burke after having spent over 400 days in jail for refusing to abide by a court order, related to his initial refusal to comply with a request/instruction to refer to a pupil by their preferred pronouns at Wilson’s Hospital Secondary School, teachers and school administrators remain in the dark as to what is…
In a stroke of irony, the Vatican’s doctrinal office on Thursday, which marked the United States’ Independence Day, convened and formally declared that a former US envoy charged with schism was excommunicated. In a July 5 statement, the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) announced that nearly six years after calling on…
Way back in the early years of this century, God help us, Christians’ major worry was the four horsemen of the apocalypse, as the new atheists were dubbed. Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens all wrote influential books although they also gained traction through the smartphone revolution that allowed easy mass access…
A working document for the final gathering of Pope Francis’s controversial Synod of Bishops on synodality, presented Tuesday in a news conference, may strike most observers as more notable for what it didn’t say than what it did. The official working document, called an Instrumentum Laboris, for the second Rome-based session of the Synod of…
I grew up listening to Frankie Byrne. She was the star of the sponsored programme hosted by Jacobs on RTÉ Radio and had the title of Ireland’s agony aunt. The problems she was dealing with “might not be yours today”, she insisted — “but they could be some day”. That’s how I feel about the…
I’ve often wondered what it is like to experience a vocation as a cloistered nun, and now I think I understand what it’s all about. Catherine Coldstream is an Englishwoman who grew up in a somewhat Bohemian household, and after her father died, she felt adrift in the world. In her twenties, she became a…
I’ve been following developments in French politics – and culture – for some years, and I’m not at all surprised at the victory for Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) in the first round of the parliamentary elections. It’s all been brewing for a long time. As anyone who has read the writings of French…
Martina Purdy In the 1950s, Americans would tune in to a popular game show called Truth or Consequences. Contestants were required to answer an almost impossible question accurately or perform a silly stunt. Answering truthfully often led to even more complicated questions, so contestants often skipped the truth part and opted for the consequences, however ridiculous, even…
The United States is in the midst of a three-year Eucharistic Revival from 2022 to 2025, with four pilgrimage routes from right across the country culminating in a National Eucharistic Congress in mid-July. One of the inspirations for the Eucharistic Revival was a dispiriting 2019 poll from the highly regarded Pew Research Centre, which found…
Walking though the centre of Dublin last Friday, fans of Taylor Swift were much in evidence hours before the first of her three concerts in the Aviva stadium even started. They were mostly teenage girls, sometimes with their mothers along for the experience. A lot of the fans (both the teenagers and their mothers) were…
Breda O'Brien
Mary Kenny
David Quinn