Letter from Rome Among the many traditions surrounding a presidential inauguration, Catholics seem to have created one of their own, especially when it’s a Democrat: Mixed messages from the Vatican and the US Conference of Catholic Bishops. Twelve years ago, when Barack Obama was elected, Pope Benedict XVI dispatched a note of congratulations on November…
John Lavenburg Hope Border Institute executive director Dylan Corbett sees first-hand the hardship thousands of people face in Ciudad Juárez – the Mexican city opposite the border to El Paso, Texas – while they wait in limbo to pursue their asylum cases and hopefully enter the United States. Resources “It does not have the infrastructure…
Lying is the most pernicious of evils, the most dangerous of sins, the worst of blasphemes, and the one sin that can be unforgivable. Perhaps we need to be reminded of that today, given our present culture where we are in danger of losing the very idea of reality and truth. Nothing is more dangerous.…
Notebook The report on the mother and baby homes is the latest in a line of painful spotlights to be shone into dark areas of our society during the decades following the setting up of the Irish Republic. One of the questions the report sought to answer was, why there had been the need to…
There’s a terribly jarring advertisement on the radio at the moment. The trite catchphrase goes something like “this is us…staying at home…keeping away from one another…this is us”. It’s undoubtedly well-meaning and designed to affirm people in their persistence in observing pandemic-related restrictions. But, there is something desperately sad in it because this is actually…
Dear Editor, Victims of the mother and baby homes deserve every apology and compensation. Most of these ladies were young and innocent, many of them were sexual victims of employers and others known to them. Their treatment was cruel and inhumane. We need to place the blame where it belongs. Firstly, they were abandoned by…
We are now at the stage of the pandemic where the gurus are emerging to bestow advice about depression and the toll that lockdown is taking on our mental health. A variety of nostrums are being offered to help deal with the stress of continuous lockdown – with little hope of eased restrictions this side…
The View Have you ever felt that perhaps you should not say what you think to the people you are with? It’s a big question. In a land in which we proudly proclaim our rights and our freedoms, we can still be afraid to say what we think, and even what we believe, because of…
The temptation to put respectability ahead of faith is the death knell for any authentic religion, writes Ruadhán Jones As a young Irish Catholic, it’s impossible not to know of the mother and baby homes, but reading the final report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes was still difficult. Ireland, during…
The story is complex, yet the trope of the Catholic bogeyman remains even after the report makes clear that a simple denigrating of the religious is not only misguided but false, writes Dualta Roughneen Much of the commentary around the mother and baby homes prior to the publication of the final report last week has been…
John L. Allen Jr.
Fr Ronald Rolheiser
Michael Kelly
Mary Kenny
Nuala O’Loan
Ruadhán Jones