The first time I visited Jerusalem, I was an impressionable 21-year-old. I fell in love with the place. Everything about the city was intoxicating to me: the sites, the smells, the sounds, the food, the religious diversity cheek by jowl…I was captivated on my first visit and it was to be the beginning of a…

At many parishes across the world, Massgoers enthusiastically sang “Easter glory fills the sky” on Sunday morning. It was dark plumes of smoke that filled the skies above churches in Sri Lanka as parishioners gathered for the most important festival in the Christian calendar. Occasions like Easter Sunday and Christmas Day are usually occasions of…

For the believer, Holy Week and Easter is the culmination of the Faith when we mark the saving death and lifegiving resurrection of the Saviour. Even if the non-religious relegate Easter to a mere festival of overindulgence in chocolate eggs, the glory of this festival transformed our world. The Carpenter of Nazareth revealed in the…

Shortly after his election to the papacy six years ago last month, Irish newspapers predicted with rare confidence that Pope Francis was set to appoint two Irishwomen to the College of Cardinals. The would-be Princesses of the Church were said to be former president Mary McAleese and Trinity College-based theologian Linda Hogan. At the time,…

“You’ll have to do something for the young people, Father!” If a priest had a fiver for every time a good-hearted and well-meaning parishioner offered this piece of unsought advice, he wouldn’t think twice about changing the car. The fact is that youth ministry is difficult and there’s no substitute for hard work. There’s no magic…

A man recently came up to me after an event in which I was participating in a neighbouring parish to his own. A hugely-committed man with a background in accounting, he recounted to me his not-so-happy brief membership of the finance council of his own parish. He had been approached to join the council by his…

Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger was the Archbishop of Paris until he retired in 2005. Lustiger – a convert from Judaism – was a towering figure in the global Church and considered a key ally in the reforms of Pope St John Paul II. Among the projects Cardinal Lustiger himself embraced with gusto was the reform of…

The first time I ever visited the United States it was to the state of Louisiana in the deep south. Unusually for the south of the US, Louisiana has a relatively healthy Catholic population with some 26% of residents identifying as members of the Church. Other states in the ‘Bible Belt’ like South Carolina, Georgia,…

For good or for ill, the symbiosis between nationalism and Catholicism that was once a given all across Ireland is still potent in the North. It’s not surprising given the sectarian nature of the six-county state from its creation almost a century ago that Catholics united in opposition. From the beginning, anti-Catholicism was endemic and…

In a way, every time someone is talking about clerical sexual abuse the Church is losing. Few things convulse people with anger and dismay as much as revelations that those charged with leading people to God betray that trust and instead inflict the most appalling harm. Perhaps, the only thing to come close is when…