Thursday of this week – September 10 – was marked as World Suicide Prevention Day, and a very good cause this is. The prevention of suicide is heart-breakingly necessary, as anyone who has lost someone they loved in this way knows. The fact that families often cling to the view that a tragic death was…

The View Ireland is approaching the final phase of the decade of centenaries, commemorating events which led to a separate Irish state in parallel with the creation of Northern Ireland and partition and the fighting of a civil war over terms of the Treaty between Great Britain and Ireland. The decade of centenaries, which in…

There appears to be no evidence that priests are more likely to abuse children than other clergy from other religious traditions which permit marriage, writes David Quinn The Vatican has just made a comprehensive response to an abuse commission in Australia. A bit of background is useful. In 2017, a Commission of Inquiry produced a…

The constraints brought about by Covid-19 have merely accelerated an inevitable decline, writes Chai Brady Archbishop Diarmuid Martin has never made a secret of the fact that he wanted out of Dublin when he was obliged to tender his resignation to the Pope on his 75th birthday. That milestone passed more than five months ago,…

Letter from Rome Some people, it would appear, simply are born for exile. Sometimes it’s a firebrand personality constantly irking the powers that be, but in other cases it’s mostly bad luck, circumstance and the fact that a given person is an inconvenient reminder of a system’s failures and blind spots even without trying. The…

Ed Condon Next month, the 2018 Vatican-China deal expires. Those close to the negotiations, both in Rome and in Beijing, now confidently predict a one-year extension to the two-year deal to be agreed. But while the last two years have failed to deliver any measurable progress on the Vatican’s priorities, the status quo of all-dialogue-and-no-delivery…

Notebook You may well consider this an example of too much information but when visitors to my home use the guest bathroom they rarely ever comment on the very high quality hand soap on offer or even the interesting selection of reading material strategically placed for those whose stay may be a little longer. However,…

Surely the best health news announced recently was that wild polio has now been officially eradicated from Africa. This was an ambition declared by Nelson Mandela in 1996, and it has now been achieved: the 47 countries in the continent of Africa have been certified by the World Health Organisation as “free of polio”. ‘Wild…