News of Boris Johnson’s weekend Catholic wedding has raised more than a few eyebrows. As my colleague Jason Osborne expertly demonstrates on page ten, the British prime minister has not received any special treatment that would not be available to anyone else. Neither is this a loophole, that has been exploited. None of these facts…

“Covid-19 has changed the Church,” we hear. It’s almost a cliché at this stage, but that doesn’t make it wrong. Change is a constant in life – the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus said: “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man”. Cardinal Newman put it well when he said:…

Growing up in the late 1980s, a staple of my childhood reading was magazines like the Far East filled with stories of the heroic work of missionaries in distant lands. I remember being enthralled by what I read about Irish priests, brothers and sisters and the risks they took in their ministry. Whether it was…

A report published by the Diocese of Limerick this week found “that challenges arise from the absence of formal ‘official’ recognition of the roles played by women in the Church and states that opportunities need to be created for women’s voices to be heard in our liturgies, in Church leadership and in Church life” (see…

Mercifully, public worship will return in the Republic next week. From May 10, Catholics will be able to attend Mass without fear of prosecution. Priests will be able to leave their homes to celebrate Mass without the fear of up to six months in prison. It will be a relief for us to get back…

As this newspaper went to press this week all eyes were on the cabinet meeting at which a further relaxation of the Covid-19 restrictions was due to be discussed. The Taoiseach Micheál Martin had indicated to religious leaders in a letter that there would be a relaxation of the ban on public Masses by mid-May.…

The right to religious worship has now been restricted in Ireland in some shape or form for 405 days. Apart from a brief period during the summer and the month of December, public Mass in the Republic has been disallowed for over a year. Many good people – instinctively trusting that the Government knew what…

Admiration for members of the British royal family is not something that comes to me spontaneously. It would, of course, be hard not to have sympathy for Queen Elizabeth II given some of the embarrassment her adult children have caused her. The monarch has witnessed first-hand the consequences of marital infidelity and subsequent family breakdown.…

Talking to people in Catholic circles in Ireland in recent weeks there are mixed views about the plan of the Irish bishops’ to move towards a national synod of the Church. From my reading, the closer one is to active participation in the life of the Church, the more apprehensive one is about the potential…

The howls of derision from some quarters that met the recent note from the Vatican confirming that the Church does not bless same-sex unions should sound a warning bell for anyone looking naively at the idea of a national synod. The Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) in a short document approved by…