Notebook Recently I went to the United States to visit some people and to spend a bit of time with my aunt who lives in Richmond, Virginia. She was turning 98, and I was happy to be able to see her in the lead up to that day. A mighty woman, but that’s another story!…
Dear Editor, We have a new strain of Covid, with more mutations, and possibly more powerful than our vaccinations. This is frightening, and people are very worried and scared. People are divided, some are vaccinated, others have chosen not to be. Older people, in many cases, are staying at home, and some have never emerged…
Editor’s Comment When he was first made a bishop in Argentina, Pope Francis took as his motto the Venerable Bede’s account of Jesus recruiting the tax collector Matthew, miserando atque eligendo, which roughly translates “He saw him through the eyes of mercy and chose him”. Friends say that Bishop Bergoglio liked the way Latin had…
We can expect the literary focus of 2022 to be the centenary of the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses: but an equally important milestone, especially for Christians, was the appearance of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in 1922. This long poem burst upon the world with considerable fanfare, as Eliot’s biographer Richard Ellmann put it,…
The View Advent and Christmas are meant to be seasons of hope and joy. Nonetheless, many people have found 2021 much more distressing than 2020, as our resilience has been tested by the ongoing strain of the pandemic and the restrictions that accompany it. We have seen our church-going friends give up going to Mass,…
The vast network of monasteries helped to lay the foundations of the welfare state we are now so familiar with by helping the poor in organised ways writes David Quinn Back in 1986 a movie called The Name of the Rose went on release internationally. It was based on the book of the same name…
Pope tells young people to dream big Spending a bit of time with young people before leaving at the end of his apostolic trip to Cyprus and Greece, Pope Francis encouraged them to have the courage to hope, to dream and even to question their faith. He met with Catholic teenagers and young adults from…
I could never be a literary critic, not because I can’t tell good literature from bad, but because I lack the hard edge. If I dislike a book, I hesitate to say so. Conversely, if I like a book, I tend to be more its cheerleader than its critical assessor. Be that as it may,…
If someone who had never heard the story of Jesus were to ask any of us about his origins, we would, I suspect, begin with the story of his birth in Bethlehem. It’s a story that we’re all familiar with from childhood. In schools and parish halls across the country, countless generations of Irish children…
Have you ever noticed how faulty your memories can be? Think of the summers you enjoyed growing up: did the sun always shine for long days of fun? That’s how I remember my growing-up days too, though meteorological reports for those years show just as much rain then as now. But I only remember the good…
Michael Kelly
Mary Kenny
Breda O'Brien
David Quinn
Fr Ronald Rolheiser