Admiration for members of the British royal family is not something that comes to me spontaneously. It would, of course, be hard not to have sympathy for Queen Elizabeth II given some of the embarrassment her adult children have caused her. The monarch has witnessed first-hand the consequences of marital infidelity and subsequent family breakdown.…
Recently, two young women in Cork were pictured happily with new-born twins. Geraldine Rea and Niamh O’Sullivan were delighted with the babies and although Geraldine actually gave birth to the twins, both women will be registered as parents, under the Children and Family Relationships Act of 2015. They said it was a great step forward…
The View Predicting the future is a mug’s game. For example, anyone who predicted in December 2019 that the world would be battling a global pandemic for the following two years would have been encouraged to go and have a little lie-down. The folly of predictions notwithstanding, in the year 2000, I agreed to take…
Moving from maintenance to mission means reacting to accelerated decline due to the pandemic, writes Chai Brady The Government’s announcement of a raft of plans to rejuvenate rural Ireland have come at a time when rural Church communities face hard future decisions wrought by the pandemic. It may be too little too late. There is…
Sooner or later the hyper-individualism that exists in the West will burn itself out and the Church has to be ready to meet the disaffected, writes David Quinn A major new study published earlier this year showed a huge increase in the number of Irish people who say they never go to church. The study, called…
Letter from Rome Suppose that earlier this week, when plans for what eventually happened were confirmed, the Vatican Press Office had issued something like the following statement. “Pope Francis usually celebrates the Mass of the Lord’s Supper on Holy Thursday outside the Vatican with vulnerable and excluded people, expressing the Lord’s special love for them.…
Pope Francis on Easter offered consolation to all those still struggling as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, and he urged speeding up production of Covid-19 vaccines amid global delays and ensuring they reach the poorest countries. In his Easter Urbi et Orbi address, the Pope said the resurrected Christ is a sign of “hope…
The world will be saved by beauty! Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote that, Dorothy Day quoted it, and centuries before Jesus, Confucius made it central to his pedagogy. They were on to something. Beauty is a special language that cuts through and sidelines all the things that divide us – history, race, language, creed, ideology, politics, economic…
Notebook There’s a sense of the Church at its best going on this weekend. It’s that early enthusiastic excitement of a new relationship or hobby. We’ve got all the gear and are ready to spend ourselves fully in the pursuit of love of person, sport or activity. We couldn’t imagine missing a meeting, training session…
Talking to people in Catholic circles in Ireland in recent weeks there are mixed views about the plan of the Irish bishops’ to move towards a national synod of the Church. From my reading, the closer one is to active participation in the life of the Church, the more apprehensive one is about the potential…
Michael Kelly
Mary Kenny
Breda O'Brien
Chai Brady
David Quinn
John L. Allen Jr.
Fr Ronald Rolheiser