Dear Editor, I believe your paper’s coverage of the blasphemy question – most recently in your Book Editor’s comments – misses the point (IC 25/05/2017). Blasphemy is not about passing comments on God, or the beliefs people hold about God; these are already explicitly allowed for in our Constitution and the law itself. Rather blasphemy…
Dear Editor, I was glad to see you give prominence to the selflessness of missionaries on last week’s front page (Nun Vows: ‘They’ll have to shoot us’ IC 18/05/2017). The words of Sr Margaret Sheehan FCJ that she would only be driven out of her work in South Sudan at gunpoint is typical of the…
Dear Editor, Fr Eugene Duffy and the staff of Mary Immaculate College are to be congratulated on organising a seminar entitled ‘Reimagining Sacramental Preparation’. Up to the present, our evangelising was based on a very simple strategy. The parents had the Faith and practiced it as a family and as part of the parish community.…
Dear Editor, Your use of the word “cowardice” in your Editor’s Comment (IC 27/04/2017) in relation to the Church and the increased likelihood of a referendum on abortion in 2018, certainly struck a chord with me. It came during a week when Pope Francis had mentioned to us the case of a young mother in…
Dear Editor, Greg Daly’s article on the so-called ‘Citizens’ Assembly’ – ‘Unrepresentative advice from an unrepresentative body’ (IC 27/04/2017) – is illustrated by a picture of the gathered group of citizens and a sheet showing the result of one of the ballots conducted by the assembly. The ballot, considering the question of whether abortion should…
Dear Editor, In recent weeks The Irish Catholic has featured fascinating interviews with the American apologist-philosopher Dr William Lane Craig (IC 30/03/2017) and with Jonny Somerville (IC 13/04/2017), the key figure behind an ambitious new series of films intended for youth evangelisation. As I understand it, Dr Craig visited several Irish cities while he was…
Dear Editor, I welcome the contribution which The Irish Catholic is making to the mission of the laity with Greg Daly’s article (IC 23/03/2017). It would be good to hear more on the topic of lay-led liturgies. It was pointed out in his well-researched article, it is fraught with difficulties if not approached from a…
Dear Editor, “If I, then, the Lord and Master, have washed your feet, you should wash each other’s feet. I have given you an example so that you may copy what I have done to you.” (John 13: 14-15) Pope Francis has washed the feet of prisoners in Rome, men and women, some of them…
Dear Editor, I was delighted to read that Minister Frances Fitzgerald will not be lifting the ban on the sale of alcohol on Good Friday (IC 30/03/2017). Every year publicans bring up this issue as if it is some kind of religious persecution to deny them one day’s profit in a country that has a…
Dear Editor, Thank you so much for your article ‘Children of the Famine’ (IC 23/03/2017) about the mindset that sustained the networks of social control independent Ireland inherited and developed from the British. Too often commentators act as though our clergy and religious were Vatican shock troops parachuted into Ireland, despite these supposed agents of…