Another Advent season is upon us and another Christmas is just around the corner. The season of Advent has two halves – the first period focuses on hope for the coming of Christ in the future and second part (from December 16) concentrates on the coming of Christ in the past with his incarnation and…
Is the institution of marriage doomed? According to a leading British think-tank, ‘Civitas’, wedlock is declining possibly beyond repair – it is now subject to “exponential decay”. About one in 100 couples are currently married; in 40 years’ time, the researchers predict, the numbers will be one in 400. The statistics apply to England and…
The View The internet can be dark, distracting place but sometimes those clicks can lead us to a place of grace. Recently, I stumbled across the online columns of Warren Harbeck, who writes for the Cochrane Eagle weekly newspaper in Alberta, Canada. His mood chimed with mine. Harbeck was troubled by the war in Ukraine,…
Catholic social teaching is about instilling virtue and right action in people, writes Dualta Roughneen Often described in certain quarters as the Catholic Church’s best kept secret, its corpus of social teaching goes back long before the first ‘social’ encyclical of Pope Leo XII, Rerum Novarum, in 1891. You could say that it goes back to…
Pro-lifers must fight cleverly to whittle away abortion laws, writes David Quinn The repeal of Roe vs Wade last summer by the US Supreme Court was a great moment for the pro-life movement everywhere. From 1973 until this year, the result of Roe vs Wade was that a very liberal abortion law was forced on…
Readers may have noticed that I’ve been absent from the Crux site for more than three weeks. The reason, which I didn’t announce in advance, is that I recently had to have a fairly major surgery on my oesophagus, and then I spent more than three weeks in the hospital here in Rome recovering. Although I’m home…
by Carol Zimmermann Although Catholic leaders and state Catholic conferences had pushed for the defeat of ballot measures protecting legal abortion and urged voters to pass measures restricting abortions, state voters ultimately went the other way November 8. Voters in California, Vermont and Michigan approved abortion protections, while Kentucky and Montana voters rejected abortion restrictions.…
Forty years ago in November of 1982, I began writing this column while a doctoral student in Belgium. I chose to call it ‘In Exile’ for two reasons. Superficially, I chose this title because I was living in Europe, far from much of what I considered as home. While I was not pretending to be…
Notebook “To be or not to be”, cogitated Hamlet. Our dilemma as a ‘Family of Parishes’ was slightly different: “To grasp the nettle, or not to grasp the nettle?” The nettle in question would be understood by rural parishes everywhere and is summed up in six words: “Too many churches, too many Masses.” The simplest…
Dear Editor, Many of the reactions to Fr Sheehy’s homilies, including Bishop Browne’s reaction, seem to overlook completely a very important truth, namely, that Jesus Christ preached strongly against sexual sins. In Matthew 5, he warns us that lustful thoughts can lead to damnation and must be avoided even if this involves serious sacrifice. In…
Mary Kenny
Breda O'Brien
David Quinn
John L. Allen Jr.
Fr Ronald Rolheiser