The famous sociologist of religion Prof. Grace Davie coined the phrase ‘believing without belonging’ to describe the state of religion in Britain in the early 1990s. In 1994, Prof. Davie painted a stark picture of our neighbouring island as a country where church-going is largely a thing of the past, but many people still identify…
The retired Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin has borne the heat of the day. He will be forever credited for his decisive handling of the issue of clerical sexual abuse in the Church in Dublin – an issue which as Pope Benedict XVI pointed out, has done more to dim the light of the Gospel…
In George Orwell’s masterful novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four – which I read every summer, and eerily seems more prescient each and every year, ‘doublethink’ and ‘newspeak’ are used to describe how the establishment uses intentionally ambiguous speech to distort and obscure reality. It came to mind as I watched the hearings of the Oireachtas committee on…
The Vatican on Tuesday released the working document for the much-anticipated synod to be held in Rome in October. Known in Latin as an instrumentum laboris, the 60-page document will guide the month-long Vatican summit on a number of themes and concerns that have emerged during a three-year consultative process, which has focused on how the Church…
The Republic, apparently, has a national well-being strategy. To my shame, I never knew something existed until an email pinged into my inbox on June 9 from the Department of the Taoiseach telling me that later that very day the Government would publish Understanding Life in Ireland: The Well-being Framework 2023. The report provided this…
Pope Francis has been to the fore of leadership efforts around the world to highlight the Christian responsibility to reach out and look after those who are fleeing war and violent conflict. For the first time in many years, the continent of Europe is seeing war raging following Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine. Every day…
One of the good-natured grumbles I hear from priests about Pope Francis is the quip that it wasn’t the Argentine Pontiff who invented being nice to people. What do they mean when they say this? Well, the fact is that the overwhelming majority of priests – almost to a man, I would say – are…
It’s an Editor’s worst nightmare. A newspaper publishes an article which turns out to have been largely written using artificial intelligence and the accompanying photograph claiming to be the ‘author’ is also a hoax. Just how could The Irish Times get it so wrong and publish an article accusing Irish women interested in fake tan…
Wealthy Catholics in Germany seem set for a collision course with the Vatican, and the rest of the Church over their push to change basic Catholic doctrines and practices. Pope Francis has long warned of the danger of the synodal process being hijacked by elites pushing an agenda. It’s hard to think of a more…
One of the key planks of the Good Friday Agreement, the 25th anniversary of which we celebrate this month, was the idea of parity of esteem. In short, that no identity would be exaggerated in the region at the expense of another. We don’t need to rehearse the history, but the first 50 years or…
Michael Kelly