You know the story, three times, on the shore of lake Galilee after the resurrection, Christ asks Peter the same question, and three times Peter answers, and three times comes the same command: feed my sheep. It’s a commission to the whole Church, handed to a single, frightened, newly-forgiven married fisherman. Two thousand years later,…
Two things happened in Catholic education this month, and read together they tell an uncomfortable story — not about the Church’s willingness to change, but about the State’s. On October 16, the Catholic Education Partnership (CEP) will launch the ‘Irish Church’s new Vision for Catholic Schools in Ireland’, the opening move in a three-year formation process that the Association of Patrons…
The future of the Irish Church Last week we argued that the Irish Church is managing decline rather than deciding what it wants to become. The question left hanging was what a real answer would look like. What we have actually done about the collapse in priest numbers can nearly be accounted for in three…
“The Synod is watering the garden, but the house is on fire.” That is not The Irish Catholic talking. It is the verdict of an experienced parish priest in the Diocese of Kildare & Leighlin, a man who supports the synodal pathway and has given years to it, speaking after this summer’s appointments were announced.…
Our contributor Fr Kieran O’Mahony OSA – readers will know him through his Hearers of the Word section in this paper – was buried last Friday at seventy-five, after an illness, and the tributes that followed called him what he was: a gifted teacher of Scripture, an Augustinian who spent decades making biblical texts breathe…
The Irish Church does not do managed decline. It never has. It lets the clock run down, keeps the show on the road for one more season, and then eventually presents the result — a parish has to be merged or a college closed, the community and or staff quietly told the numbers have run…
There is something very admirable about the Irish Synodal Pathway. The people involved — and this newspaper has spent considerable time examining who they are and what they do — are genuine in their commitment to the Church and to the reform they believe it needs. They are not cynics. They are not time-servers. Many…
Sunday May 3, 2026 marks the 35th Birthday Remembrance of the newly Canonised St Carlo Acutis. To mark this special occasion, the first Birthday Remembrance since Carlo was Canonised last September, Mass will be offered on Sunday May 3, 2026 at 12pm in Holy Family Church, Ardfinnan, Co Tipperary – the home of the First…
After a promising Easter, the Church faces its most urgent question The priests can breathe now. After the long procession of Holy Week — the oils, the darkness, the fire, the alleluias — Easter Monday brings something like silence. They’ve earned it. The reports filtering in from parishes around the country tell an encouraging…
The difference of views between Bishop Niall Coll (I-Gen and Gen Z youth) and Fr Brendan Hoban (writing recently in The Western People) is about more than one bishop’s reading of youth culture or one priest’s irritation with it. It goes to the heart of the deepest question facing Irish Catholicism: where, exactly, is renewal…