When the US bishops elected a centre-right prelate and protégé of an influential conservative Italian cardinal as their president last November, it was framed in much reporting and commentary as a protest vote against Pope Francis. ‘Bishops elect anti-Francis archbishop as president,’ was how the National Catholic Reporter headlined an editorial blasting the choice of Archbishop Timothy…

Notebook I learned a new word this week and it is ‘presentism’. Basically presentism is the use of present-day standards to impose judgements upon historical figures and practices in the sometimes-misguided belief that the standards of our contemporary world are morally superior. I realised that this new word names and describes a trend which I…

Is the departure of Ryan Tubridy from The Late Late Show the end of an era? Maybe the ‘end of an era’ with the LLS came some time ago. I sometimes ask people what they think of the broadcast nowadays, and the most frequent answer I get is “I hardly ever look at it these…

The View The rewriting of Ireland’s Constitution continues apace. We are now due to have as many as three constitutional referendums this November. These are being marketed as being about women’s rights and equality. However, they look set to change the definition of the family, while also inserting the concept of gender into the constitution.…

Politicians need to learn that it is voters not the Church leading resistance on schools, writes Ruadhán Jones Almost everyone seems to be in agreement that Ireland needs to have a more pluralist school system, giving parents a choice of multi-denominational and Catholic schools. Bishops are for it, politicians are for it and the general…

Healthy and well-adjusted societies do not see surges in the use of drugs, writes Jason Osborne According to a recent United Nations report, Irish people are the joint fourth-highest consumers of cocaine globally, relatively speaking. The report (based on data from 2019 – the most recently compiled) revealed that 2.4% of Irish people reported having…

Proposals seem designed to weaken the rights of parents in favour of the State, writes David Quinn We look set to have three more referendums later this year, probably in November. We have a Government that can’t get enough of them and is determined to completely recast Ireland in its image. The three come under…

Letter from Holy Land Tom Tracy The priest-director of the Cultural Heritage Office for the Custodia Terrae Sanctae, or Custody of the Holy Land, in Jerusalem opened a drawer of vestments and casually dropped an unexpected historical tidbit about a clerical chasuble he was showing a group of foreign guests. The chasuble was part of a…

A top aide to Pope Francis said there’s a need for dialogue with the German bishops after a recent vote in favour of blessing same-sex unions, insisting that the move does not align with official Catholic doctrine. “A local, particular Church cannot make a decision like that which involves the discipline of the universal Church,”…