How do we search for God? It is easy to misunderstand what that means. We are forever searching for God, though mostly without knowing it. Usually, we think of our search for God as a conscious religious search, as something we do out of a spiritual side of ourselves. We tend to think of things…
Notebook Once upon a time in the Diocese of Cork, before retirement became a ‘thing’ for Church leaders, a parish priest went to his heavenly reward, aged well over 90. The bishop prevailed upon another parish priest to take over as pastor, even though this man was in his mid-seventies. And the people of the parish…
Just how toxic discussions about the Church and priests and religious have become in Ireland was evidenced a few years ago when novelist Marian Keyes suggested people throw stones if they see a priest. “No matter how ‘nice’ a priest is, no matter how many raffles he runs, he is still a foot soldier for…
Dear Editor, I am writing to respond to Jason Osborne’s article, Church leadership has to change to be seen [IC 14/01/2021]. He did provide helpful suggestions from people who have studied this crisis of faith we are facing e.g., Prof. Tom Inglis and Fr Eugene Duffy. Fr Duffy was right to emphasise the importance of…
It is so welcome, and so fitting, that Pope Francis has just declared the late French geneticist Jérome Lejeune as ‘venerable’. Prof. Lejeune, who discovered the chromosome that causes Down Syndrome, was surely a saintly man, as well as a very distinguished scientist. Before he identified this chromosomal difference in 1958, the condition was called…
The View Who America’s leader is matters to people around the world. With President Joe Biden there is now a Christian gentleman in the White House, whose ambition after all the turmoil of recent times will be to do what is right, working as much as possible with others at home and abroad. If he…
It would be a failure of moral witness if the Church did not point to policies at odds with the Catholic Faith, writes David Quinn On the morning of his inauguration as president of the United States, Joe Biden attended Mass. He carries a set of rosary beads on him that belonged to his late…
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.…
Fr Ronald Rolheiser
Michael Kelly
Mary Kenny
David Quinn
John L. Allen Jr.