I spent the past two weeks on holiday in Assisi, home of saints Francis and Clare and now of Blessed Carlo Acutis – a young Italian boy who died aged 15 from leukaemia and who will become the first millennial saint probably during the Jubilee year of 2025. So, who is Carlo Acutis and why…
Men ought to call out one another’s misogyny, according to Taoiseach Simon Harris. Speaking in the Dail last week on the topic of male violence against women, he remarked: “It is incumbent on men to take leadership positions and not allow the worst of us to speak for the rest of us”. He added: “Every…
As I crossed the Boyne Peace Bridge, en route to the pro-life rally in Dublin the other day, an old tale sprang to mind: King Billy, fresh from the battle, was crossing the river, when the boatman asked: “Who won?” And King Billy retorted: “Why do you care? You will still be a boatman”. These…
Speaking to The Irish Catholic at the Rally for Life in Dublin, Bishop Phonsie Cullinan said politicians had opened the floodgates to abortion despite promising “repeatedly” that it would be “safe, legal and rare”. “Well I would say two things about that. They are not safe for the baby and they are certainly not…
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…
David Quinn
Martina Purdy
Breda O'Brien
Mary Kenny