Christopher White Speaking to young people on the beaches of Rio de Janeiro at the 2013 World Youth Day, Pope Francis encouraged those present to go home and shake things up. Perhaps one result of that was in the US where an experiment took place last month in an attempt to bridge the divide between…
Fr Eugene O’Neill Few things are calculated to raise the hackles of hardworking priests in parishes more than being told how it should be done by fellow clerics with fewer years in the Lord’s Vineyard under their belt. I once turned to an older colleague – a man of depth, wisdom and vast experience –…
Notebook We are still in the early days of Lent so maybe there’s space here for a thought or two around the journey to and through repentance. There is a call to repentance that is central to the Lenten season. I recall sitting in the church one morning, a while before Mass. This is something…
Dear Editor, When I first went to Jaffa, Israel, to work as a chef for an Anglican guest house a different choice of breakfast was offered each morning of the week. One of the choices was homemade pancakes, or crepes, which had to be tossed in a very hot frying pan. Some of the volunteer…
Larry Donnelly At a recent town hall forum sponsored by Fox News, likely Democratic primary voters had a chance to interact with the 38-year-old Mayor of South Bend, Indiana and then a candidate for his party’s presidential nomination, Pete Buttigieg. One possibly unexpected and trying question came from Kristen Day, head of the Democrats for…
My inclinations are to regard the hullaballoo about the coronavirus – Covid19 – with a pinch of salt. Yes, it’s upsetting that more than 3,000 people world-wide have died from the epidemic: but (at the time of writing) that’s out of 90,933 who have caught it. To put it in perspective, the World Health Organisation…
How should the Catholic Church respond when a pandemic breaks out? What is the correct pastoral response? What kind of pastoral response best fits with medical best practice? Are priests generally good at a time like this? What should we as individual Christians do? It’s hard to know at this stage whether ordinary people have…
Like many others, I was deeply distressed to learn of the recent revelations concerning Jean Vanier. He was a person whom I much admired and about whom on numerous occasions I have written glowingly, so the news about him shook me deeply. What’s to be said about Jean Vanier in the light of these revelations?…
The ‘free movement of peoples’ is one of the most strongly-held tenets of the European Union. It would not be too much to say that the EU’s absolute adherence to this principle was one of the triggers of Brexit. David Cameron, as British Prime Minister, begged the EU to allow the UK some leeway on…
The View One mercy of the General Election is that it diminished attention to the actual moment of Brexit on January 31. Brexit was not an election issue, given all-party agreement and support, but history will give credit, absent from the ballot box, to the Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and the Minister for Foreign Affairs Simon…
Mary Kenny
David Quinn
Fr Ronald Rolheiser