Dear Editor, May I, through the medium of your paper, appeal to all priests to stop saying “Good morning” (or “Good evening”) immediately after saying “The Lord be with you”. “The Lord be with you” is a most sublime and wonderful greeting, calling on “The Holy One of Israel” to be present with every person…

Dear Editor, Fr Andrew McMahon’s September 10 article on confusion and Church communications during the marriage referendum helped shed valuable light on why the referendum was lost. It seems unfair, however, to blame the Archbishop of Dublin for claiming that he wanted to express his intention to vote ‘no’ through “the reasoned language of social…

Dear Editor, The National Eucharistic Congress begins at 10am on a Saturday and ends about 5pm Sunday. That leaves a lot of things for visitors to do. But is Knock the wrong location? Knock is basically a place for day visits only, since it has only one hotel, and that of 21 bedrooms, i.e. catering…

Dear Editor, Perhaps Archbishop Diarmuid Martin did confuse a handful of people during the referendum campaign, as Fr Andrew McMahon relates (IC 10/09/2015), but it is striking that those he quotes as examples of such confusion were an English deacon and an American website. Is it possible that something has been lost in translation, that…

Dear Editor, In the Catholic Church we have an ongoing discussion about the crisis in vocations in the ministerial priesthood in Ireland in terms of staffing numbers and the challenges it poses. It perplexes me to see reactions from around the country when parishes get upset when their bishop announces he no longer has a…

Dear Editor, I was surprised to see so little coverage in The Irish Catholic of how people from Drogheda walked to Tallaght on August 29 to present the Dominican HQ with a petition signed by 22,000 people objecting to the impending departure of the town’s Dominican community. Surprised, but not heartbroken. Isn’t it time to…

Dear Editor, It is encouraging to hear that parishioners across Ireland are making plans to welcome refugees from North Africa and the Middle East, and encouraging too to hear of bishops attempting to coordinate this response. Unfortunately, you report the Department of Justice as saying that a mere 520 migrants will have refugee status, with…

Dear Editor, I live beside the refugee centre, outside Portlaoise, which was the Montague Hotel. I have been making their case over the course of the last eight years. Many of these people have been kept here, each family with only one room as their living quarters, since it opened in 2007 and the State…

Dear Editor, It was disheartening to read the ‘Letter from Rome’ by Cindy Wooden in the issue of August 27. The notion that a group of theologians and canon lawyers spent three days engaged in semantics aimed at placing conditions on the mercy and compassion of Christ poses certain challenges to the debate. Likewise, the…

Dear Editor, In his most interesting letter regarding the face of Our Lady of Knock sculpted by the renowned Italian sculptor Professor Lorenzo Ferri (IC 03/09/2015), Msgr Denis O’Callaghan correctly observes that the professor “was inspired to read the image of the Mother of Jesus as a reflection of that of her Son on the…