Tis supposed to be the year of St Brigid. But with six months to go to the 1500th anniversary of her death, I was thinking there was a dearth of celebrations when a text came through about Brigid 1500. To mark the year, Dana has just written and recorded a new song for St Brigid.…
What does it mean to be Irish today? In the increasingly multi-ethnic nation that Ireland now is, that’s a question that will be pondered over. Olympic athletes like Rhasidat Adeleke and Daniel Wiffen demonstrated that a person representing Ireland may now have come from backgrounds not traditionally rooted in Ireland. (Wiffen’s family were from Yorkshire,…
It was with a mixture of disbelief and shock that the news of the untimely death of Archbishop Noël Treanor emerged on Sunday morning as Mass goers gathered to celebrate the Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time. From his native ‘stoney grey soil of Monaghan’ to the sprawling housing developments of his adopted home in Belfast,…
I recently caught up with some back issues of The Irish Catholic and I was struck by a comment from Senator Ronan Mullen in his View from the Seanad on June 27th. In attempting to discern a Christian way to protest, he finds that ‘People have been too passive to date of the anti-culture that…
This is one of those man-bites-dog stories. A survey has just been released by the Ombudsman for Children which shows that secondary school children want more, not less religion taught in class. This is the precise opposite of what we’ve been led to believe, which is to say, that secondary school pupils want less religion…
Courtney Mares Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s secretary of state, spoke on the phone last Monday morning with Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, in a conversation that underlined the need for dialogue, negotiation, and peace. According to Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni, the cardinal “expressed the Holy See’s serious concern about what is happening in the…
In a new interview with the Jesuit province of China, Pope Francis expressed his desire to visit the country and spoke of his admiration for the faith of the Chinese Church and culture, as well as various aspects of his papacy, including criticism and opposition. Asked by Jesuit Fr Pedro Chia, who conducted the interview,…
Letter from Rome Last week the Vatican’s Academy for Life issued a new text on a series of bioethical issues, including the provision of food and hydration for patients in a vegetative state, which marks a modest departure from the Vatican’s previously held position on the issue. Published Thursday by the Pontifical Academy for Life…
Notebook I have in my possession a copy of the Irish Catholic Directory 2018, printed just before COVID. There are over 4,000 priests named in its index, but only a handful of Co-PPs. An Irish Catholic Directory 2024 (if there were one) would include quite a few more. I am one myself, since 2022. But…
Celebrities can often shine a light on a personal, or social, problem, and bring more focus to a troubling issue. And this, it seems, is what Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, intends when she speaks about suicide. She has been publicly reflecting on her own experience of having suicidal thoughts when she was expecting her first…
Martina Purdy
Mary Kenny
Michael Kelly
David Quinn