Dear Editor, I wish to commend Fr Martin Delaney for his powerful and courageous article addressing the annual transfer of priests. In highlighting the personal and communal impact of these transitions, Fr Delaney invites us all to reflect more compassionately and thoughtfully on how we support our priests and our parish communities through such changes.…
The world lacks strong and outspoken leaders who can forcefully take to task the Israeli government and what its forces are doing in the Gaza Strip right now: killing the Palestinian civilians there through violence or starvation — a move that many have condemned as genocide. As many as 111 humanitarian organisations around the world…
The anti-Catholic dialogue and its inaccuracies Dear Editor, it was good to see letters and articles in recent issues of The Irish Catholic in defence of the catholic authorities, including those nuns who ran the Mother and Baby Homes. I feel a strong sense of gratitude to all those people who still come out in…
Greetings from the holiday month of July “Summertime And the living is easy, Fish are jumping And the cotton is high…” With apologies to the composer of this tune, George Gerschwin, it is the jazzy voice of Ella Fitzgerald which sums up how July feels for this pastor. It’s a lovely month in most country…
Dear Editor, The Irish Catholic has noted the Government’s intention to pay tribute to Daniel O’Connell in 2029, an intention without reference to his achievement of Catholic Emancipation in 1829. It’s best to leave the State to do its own thing. It believes it can celebrate O’Connell as an accomplished human rights activist while it itself…
Dear Editor, the recent Ukrainian ‘Operation Spider web’, which targeted airbases and military hardware across Russia in a simultaneous drone attack over several time zones deep behind enemy lines without loss of life, was a sharp contrast with how the rest of the war was being waged in the trench warfare in eastern Ukraine aka…
Should more energy be put into sacramental preparation programmes? Dear Editor, Chai Brady reported (July 10) that the percentage of baptised children making First Communion and Confirmation is declining. The Iona Institute argues that the decrease makes a strong argument for a further divestment of Catholic schools, perhaps arguing that the Church should focus on…
The past is a different country Dear Editor, L.P. Hartley wrote “The past is another country. They do things differently there.” When we look at the past through the eyes of the present we end up taking the high moral ground from societies abandonment of unmarried pregnant women to mother and baby homes to the…
I had the wedding from hell this month — or maybe more correctly the bridal couple who seemed to have been spawned there. It is probably my fault, my misunderstanding: I thought that in giving the couple oodles of time to share their story with me, I was building rapport with them, but in fact…
I’ve been taking part in the annual conference of the Council for European Studies (CES) at Temple University, Philadelphia, June 25-27. The theme this year is ‘Legacies and Ruptures: Making Sense of Europe’ and within that there’s a special focus on the transatlantic relationship. I gave a presentation on Day 1 entitled, ‘An Ocean Apart:…