Imagine this. You are the dutiful daughter or son and your mother is widowed and living in an assisted living facility. You happen to be living close by while your sister is living across the country, thousands of miles away. So the weight falls on you to be the one to help take care of…
Dublin Diocese has announced that priests are taking a 25% pay cut on already low salaries and that it is looking for one third of its 82 lay staff to take redundancies. Among those asked to consider redundancy are parish pastoral workers (see Page 4). The bishops’ conference in Maynooth is also cutting back on…
Dear Editor, Thank you so much to all at The Irish Catholic for your wonderful photos [IC 2/07/2020] of people returning to Mass. Although I was a bit nervous myself, I could not be separated from the Sacrament any longer, donning my facemask I left the house for Mass for the first time in so…
Notebook Picture the scene: two men face each other in debate in a stunningly ornate hall. A jury of experts listens intently. They are in Valladolid, the year is 1550, and the debate concerns the moral and legal status of the newly conquered ‘savages’ in Spanish territories. The two men: Dominican friar, Bartolomé de las…
Back in the 1990s, I seem to remember Irish students marching in favour of abortion rights, and carrying banners with the name and number of a London clinic – that of Marie Stopes International. The Marie Stopes name was being advertised, in effect, as a symbol of a ‘feminist’ cause of freedom. This, I think,…
The View This column is being written as we begin to be able to return to worship the Risen Lord as a real and not just a virtual community. What a shame the Government has flip-flopped so often on numbers. Of course, not everybody will be able to or should return. People with medical conditions…
We cannot expect perfection from all of those who went before us writes David Quinn You’ll have noticed in the last few weeks that statues of certain historical figures are under attack and have even being pulled down because of an association between those figures and racism. The most dramatic example took place in Bristol…
Letter from Rome This week I participated in a panel discussion here in Rome to present a new book by a friend and colleague, Edward Pentin, titled The Next Pope: The Leading Cardinal Candidates, to be published by Sophia Press on August 4. As I said that night, the book reflects a fairly conservative view on…
He taught us how to pray while not knowing how to pray – that’s a comment sometimes made about Henri Nouwen. It seems almost contradictory to say that. How can someone teach us to pray when he himself doesn’t know how? Well, two complexities conspired together here. Henri Nouwen was a unique mixture of weakness,…
Dear Editor, As the dioceses and parishes prepare to open up their churches and cathedrals again, albeit in restricted measures, I am sure many would join with me in thanking the many priests, bishops, religious, deacons and faithful who continued to minister to us during the weeks of lockdown. Through their creative usage of modern…
Fr Ronald Rolheiser
Michael Kelly
Mary Kenny
Breda O'Brien
David Quinn
John L. Allen Jr.