The sense of Sunday still resonates deeply with Christians throughout this country and throughout the world, writes Julie Kavanagh A s a parish cantor, I have been one of the privileged few able to attend Mass on a Sunday throughout this pandemic. I don’t take that privilege lightly. I have experienced first-hand the loneliness of…
Assisted suicides present an unhelpful and dubious choice of relief or continuous pain, writes Fr SeánMacGiollarnáth, O. Carm. The Hippocratic tradition in medicine is under threat through the removal of traditional protections at the beginning and the end of human life. Law and medicine both reflect dominant tendencies and practices in culture and politics which…
It beggars belief that the same people who insist they want to protect vulnerable people from Covid-19 are now pushing assisted suicide, writes Niamh UíBhriain While everyone is distracted by the ongoing coronavirus crisis, Dáil deputies have moved forward a bill which would make it legal for doctors to help a person who is terminally-ill…
In Buenos Aires, the future Pope Francis saw same-sex marriage as an attack on children but he did think that gay people should be included in civil unions, writes Austen Ivereigh In Argentina, there was one issue over which a direct confrontation with the government was inevitable. Although Cristina Kirchner was president, it was Néstor…
Francis is willing to risk confusion for the sake of inclusion, writes Michael Kelly The Pope’s backing for legislation for civil unions for gay couples is a big deal. It’s also a significant shift away from the policy of his immediate predecessors who warned Catholics that opposing such unions was an obligation. It’s important to…
Letter from Rome Almost 75 years ago, Arnold Toynbee described what historians are trying to find as they scour the past in his book Civilization on Trial: “The things that make good headlines are on the surface of the stream of life, and they distract us from the slower, impalpable, imponderable movements that work below the…
After almost a year of civil unrest, interrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic, Chileans overwhelmingly approved a bid to scrap the constitution written under the mandate of General Augusto Pinochet, a dictator who ruled the country until 1990. The Chilean conference of Catholic bishops called the referendum, where almost 80% of those who cast a vote…
What’s right and what’s wrong? We fight a lot over moral issues, often with a self-assured righteousness. And mostly we fall into that same self-righteousness whenever we argue about sin. What constitutes a sin and what makes for a serious sin? Different Christian denominations and different schools of thought within them lean on various kinds…
Dear Editor, I was dismayed to read that NPHET’s reason for their recommendation that public worship should not continue [during level 3 restrictions], accepted by our government, was to decrease contacts in areas that, as a society, are relatively speaking in the context of a pandemic, less important. As a Catholic, I most strongly disagree…
Before Covid-19, about a third of Irish people reported that they attended a religious ceremony at least once a week. Some 100,000 people went to Mass every single day before the pandemic restrictions were imposed. When we entered level three, all public worship was banned – the only country in Europe to do so (Wales…
Austen Ivereigh
Michael Kelly
John L. Allen Jr.
Fr Ronald Rolheiser