Dear Editor, While it is good for us to seek to defend faith-based schools in a pluralist society, I see little benefit resulting from such effort while the Church in Ireland continues to devise and use catechetical programmes which have so diluted the Catholic Faith as to make it virtually impotent. As the letters of…

Dear Editor, Minister Katherine Zappone’s childcare scheme unfairly discriminates against stay-at-home parents. This is both unfair financially and disastrously flawed socially. The scheme sees parents who are both earning the median industrial wage, with two children in daycare, increase their previous yearly net income of €32,542 by €1920 (after tax and childcare costs). Meanwhile, a…

Dear Editor, What are we going to do about the huge gulf that exists between the more erudite members of the Church and the ordinary people who are not being taught to meet Jesus Christ in the world of today? The teaching Church in the Vatican seems to have become an increasingly unwieldy bureaucracy. Words…

Dear Editor, I was amazed to read Gerard Gallagher in your ‘Notebook’ section (IC 13/10/2016) say that commentators have described Ireland’s young Catholics as “over-catechised and under-evangelised”. Any commentator who truly believes that could usefully spend half an hour in the company of Catholics in their teens, twenties, or even thirties and forties: one thing…

Dear Editor, Over the last month several Irish Catholic clergy have expressed in public opinions on abortion that are clearly at odds with the teaching of the Church. Last month Fr Brian D’Arcy of the Passionist order was reported as saying that in counselling women on the subject of pregnancy he always took the view…

Dear Editor, With the approach of Hallowe’en, we see lots of ugly masks, witch outfits, vampire costumes etc. in the shops. Perhaps we could do something to counteract the superstition and occult association with Hallowe’en, the eve of All Saints. Last year some people placed Rosary beads on their front door for the month of…

Dear Editor, Your front page story ‘North feels “forced out of EU” by Brexit, Bishop warns’ (IC 6/10/2016) was as predictable as it is alarming. The concerns Bishop Donal McKeown expresses about and on behalf of ordinary working class people in Derry and elsewhere in the North following Britain’s vote to quit the EU give…

Dear Editor, Tim Kaine, the Democratic candidate for US Vice-President, claims he is personally opposed to abortion but he does not think that he should impose these views on others: “I am personally opposed to affronts to life, such as abortion, but I will not advance that view through law.” This is also the prevailing…

Dear Editor, I could not agree more with Michael Kelly’s editorial comment (IC 6/9/2016) that “what is hidden by badges proclaiming Repeal the Eighth is the horror of what the phrase actually means”.  Some political parties and even the Minister for Children, Katherine Zappone TD, seem to be oblivious to how provocative it can be…

Dear Editor, How can we live in a society where a man like Donald Trump is permitted to berate the world with his bigotry, let alone run for presidency of a so-called ‘superpower’? Trump reminds me of the drunk who torments punters down the local, spouting out nonsense and ignorance that nobody wants to hear.…