Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, visited several cities recently liberated from Russian occupation, including Bucha, where war crimes are believed to have been committed against civilians. On April 7, Archbishop Shevchuk also made stops in Gostomel and Irpin, according to the website for the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. Standing…
“They shall look upon the one whom they have pierced!” A phrase that names the voice that’s left behind on Good Friday. In 1981, an anonymous, young girl was brutally raped and murdered by the military at an obscure location in El Salvador, fittingly called La Cruz (the Cross). Her story was reported by a…
In our calendar, Holy Week is one which turns from triumph on Palm Sunday to breaking bread together on Holy Thursday, betrayal in Gethsemane, death and humiliation on a cross on Good Friday, the silence of Holy Saturday and ultimately the victory over the grave of Easter Sunday. On the first Holy Thursday at the…
Nothing quite prepares you for the intensity of Holy Week lived in a religious community. Since I entered the Dominican novitiate in 2009, every Easter has been profoundly moving, with an emotion that is communal. Together the community experiences disorientation in this week: familiar timetables are altered, familiar statues are covered, and the Lord is…
Dear Editor, There is much public discussion about the place and role of Catholic schools in Ireland today; a great deal of which is anecdotal and without much evidence. To this end, researchers with the Theology and Religious Studies Department of Mary Immaculate College, Limerick are currently undertaking a study to gather data that will…
The View Pope Francis hates it. Thomas Aquinas dedicated a section of the Summa Theologica to it, analysing all the different ways we can indulge in it. Robin Dunbar, the primatologist and anthropologist, judged it to be “the core of human social relationships, indeed of society itself. Without [it], there would be no society”. We…
How can a Churchman stand by Vladimir Putin and justify his utterly brutal attack on Ukraine? But the Russian ‘pope’, Patriarch Kirill has made it clear that he is fully aligned with Mr Putin and his ideological position – that Kyiv is essentially a part of Russia, in culture, religion and tradition. “It is my…
Catholics must support a swift peaceful resolution in Ukraine to avoid further catastrophe, writes David Quinn It still seems hard to believe that a major war is taking place again on European soil. It is not the first since the Second World War, of course. Long-running conflicts took place when Yugoslavia broke up in the…
Gunther Simmermacher In 1633, at the height of the Reformation, the Black Death was sweeping through Europe, including the southern German region of Bavaria. The terrified people of one small village decided to do something to protect themselves from this pandemic: The villagers vowed that every 10 years they would perform a “Passionsspiel” – a…
More than 4 million people have fled Ukraine in the past five weeks, and half of them are children, said two UN agencies. “Children make up half of all refugees from the war in Ukraine,” UNICEF said March 30 in a media release that included data from UNHCR, the UN refugee agency. UNICEF estimated that…
Fr Ronald Rolheiser
Michael Kelly
Breda O'Brien
Mary Kenny
David Quinn