Dear Editor, For as long as I can remember the annual novena to St Gerard Majella took place in the Redemptorist church in Dundalk in October. As a youngster, I used to walk, with others, from the far side of the town for the devotions just after school. It was a novelty for us kids…

Dear Editor, Readers may notice how publicly-funded RTÉ presenters, and other media, have been using their publicly-funded media pulpits to attack the Eighth Amendment, Catholic ethos in schools and generally use their public position to advance secularisation.  Typically this involved inviting anti-Eighth Amendment studio guests in and then feeding them nice, soft, leading questions. We…

Dear Editor, It is incredible that in the present financial climate, as hundreds of Irish people are being evicted from their homes, we have homeless people dying on our city’s streets, refugees living in institutions that are a form of open prison and thousands of Syrians coming to our shores to escape warfare, that Ruth…

Dear Editor, In this digital age where so many of us have a closer relationship with our allegedly ‘smart’ phones and less with our creator, might I respectfully suggest that the better accessory to which we should become attached is a set of rosary beads. Granted, such rosarys lack technology but neither will they run…

Dear Editor, Your October 22 front page headline ‘Some Catholic teachers feel “intimidated” in faith schools’, makes for very sad reading. Prompted by this and your August article on the quality of religious education (RE) in secondary schools, I have reflected upon my experience as principal of two English secondary schools. English bishops organise regular…

Dear Editor, There was a major statistical error in Mary Kenny’s piece on the rise of strictly Orthodox Jews in Britain (IC 22/10/2015). The UK Jewish community is just under 0.5% of the total population not the 5% she quoted. This amounts to a community of just under 300,000 out of a total UK population…

Dear Editor, The dispute within Britain’s Labour Party over its ability to win the next (2020) general election is similar to the issues facing our bishops at the synod in Rome. In Britain, the argument seems to be that Labour must do whatever it has to do in order to become electable, a position rejected…

Dear Editor, “Church urged to include divorced and remarried Catholics in Eucharist” (IC 01/10/2015). This is a rubbish headline and it wouldn’t be a first in The Irish Catholic as it panders to the ‘have your cake and eat it’ brigade. No one better than Pope Benedict XVI to cut through such baloney with crystal…

Dear Editor, Your recent article about “red tape gone mad” preventing priests from visiting their parishioners in hospitals throughout the country, seems like a further inroad from aggressive secularism (IC 08/10/2015). Hospital mission statements, framed and prominently displayed in out patient’s waiting areas, make much of patients’ rights to courtesy and proper respect from hospital…

Dear Editor, Austen Ivereigh writing about the current Synod on the Family (IC 08/10/2015), quite rightly states that the backdrop to the synod is “the massive collapse across the western world of support for the Christian understanding of marriage in culture and now law – as Ireland, and most of our families have witnessed at…