The View Schools move back into operation this week, with over 300,000 four to seven-year-olds returning to the classroom. This is an age-group notorious for its inability to sit still, take instructions consistently, and with a developmental need for touch. Yet we adults — with a greater ability to take instructions, follow rules, and observe…
The human rights abuses of the communist regime are becoming worse by the day, writes David Quinn W hen Irish people pay attention to what is happening overseas, it is mainly what is happening in Britain and America that occupies our minds. That’s understandable, because so many Irish live in those countries and Britain is…
Letter from Rome From the beginning, Pope Francis has been committed to financial reform of the Vatican. It was the first study commission he created, it was the first major appointment he made, and it’s been a constant of his papacy over what’s now almost eight years. Yet after all this time, Francis faces the…
Two and a half years ago, Safa Al Alqoshy shared a heart-warming embrace with Pope Francis while in Rome to attend a Synod of Bishops on youth, before leaving the gathering early to care for his ailing mother. During their brief conversation, Al Alqoshy told Crux, the Pope “told me to have faith and he…
In 1986, Czechoslovakian novelist Ivan Klima published a series of autobiographical essays entitled, My First Loves. These essays describe some of his moral struggles as a young agnostic seeking for answers without any explicit moral framework within which to frame those struggles. He’s a young man, full of sexual passion, but hesitant to act out…
Notebook Bernard is a beautiful name (think of St Bernard of Clairvaux, patron of beekeepers and Gibraltar and all that). But I am not called after him. Bernard is also a surname in these parts, and my mother was born Maeve Bernard – hence my Christian name. My mother had a grand-uncle who was a…
Dear Editor, Thank you to Jason Osborne on his timely front-page article ‘Catholic parents voice anger at exclusion from school talks’ [IC 18/02/2021]. In a recent written answer to Sean Canney TD, Education Minister Norma Foley revealed that her civil servants are working with the National Parents Council Post Primary to amalgamate it with the…
Early tomorrow morning (Friday), Pope Francis will depart from the Vatican for the 33rd apostolic journey of his pontificate outside of Italy. Iraq will be the 51st country that the Holy Father will have visited since the inauguration of his papacy eight years ago this month. It is a visit that the Pope has wanted…
Susie Orbach is a well-known London psychotherapist who was Princess Diana’s emotional counsellor back in the 1980s. She has recently been speaking about the wave of ‘social depression’ that has arisen from prolonged lockdown. The severe restrictions on our everyday lives make us ‘solace-deprived’ and emotionally ‘squeezed-out’. Social isolation, she notes, is a form of…
The View Some 150 years ago, on January 18, 1871 at Versailles, a united Germany came into being as an empire in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. Reminders of it are low-key, confined to German newspapers and magazines. A thousand-year Reich had existed in the past, the Holy Roman Empire, that existed…
Maria Steen
David Quinn
John L. Allen Jr.
Fr Ronald Rolheiser
Michael Kelly
Mary Kenny