I had known that the parish church in Tubbercurry turned 90 in 2023. I wasn’t sure of the date but had mentioned it at a pastoral council meeting and thought we should mark the event as the year was coming to a close. I called Bishop Paul and asked if he might be free to…
As each New Year dawns, we marvel at the passage of time. We take stock of our lives, and how far we’ve come, and how far we have yet to travel. Time inevitably brings change. Yet few of us, as individuals, have changed nearly as much as this Irish nation in which we live.
The year 2023 is not a year on which I will look back with undiluted pleasure. At this time of year, our thoughts naturally turn to those who are no longer with us. At a lot of our dinner tables this year, there will be an empty chair where there was unbridled joy and laughter just a year ago.
Every Christmas, a concept at the heart of the season is the birth of Christ as Saviour. ‘Christ the Saviour is born’ we sing in the carol Silent Night; ‘Saviour’s Day’ warbled Cliff Richard and on Christmas night.
Italian Prime Minister, Georgia Meloni, often described as right-wing, seems to have struck up a molto simpatico friendship with the British PM Rishi Sunak. There was much hugging and embracing by the pair when both attended a festival of ideas in Italy last weekend. The word is that the chemistry between them is excellent. Personal…
We must strive for the common good of immigrants and citizens alike, writes David Quinn What is the right Christian approach to immigration? There is definitely one approach that is all wrong, which to simply close our borders and never ‘welcome the stranger’, to always say ‘there is no room at the inn’. But after…
The View Christmas is becoming two separate feasts: for Christians it is the feast of the Nativity, the time when we remember and celebrate the birth of the Christchild in Bethlehem, with all that followed right up to the moment of the crucifixion and the resurrection; for others it is an unidentified festival – a…
Notebook We won the county final. The rural parish where I’ve been based since 2022 took on the big urban city clubs in the biggest county in Ireland — and we won. It was some achievement for a tiny parish like ours. Some may wonder who is this “we”. I haven’t been known previously for…
Letter From Rome H.L. Mencken once famously quipped that love is like war, in that it’s easy to begin but very hard to stop. Had Mencken plied his journalistic trade in the internet age, he might well have added rumours to that list, which are notoriously easy these days to put into circulation and virtually…
My colleague Fr Ron Rolheiser writes in this edition about connecting the dots between the crib and the cross. We’re not used to thinking about the cross at Christmas, but in one sense, Calvary always casts a permanent shadow over Bethlehem. Even today, it sometimes surprises pilgrims in the Holy Land that Golgotha and the…
Michael Kelly
Mary Kenny
David Quinn
Nuala O’Loan
John L. Allen Jr.