The word “Protestant” is generally misunderstood. Martin Luther’s protest that led to the Protestant reformation was not, in fact, a protest against the Roman Catholic Church; properly understood, it was a protest for God. God, in Luther’s view, was being manipulated to serve human and ecclesial self-interest. His protest was a plea to respect God’s…

Fr Vincent Sherlock He pulled in to get petrol. The back seat of his car was filled with bits and pieces from his home – the bits, over and above, what the van had taken away earlier that day. The young petrol attendant, seeing the packed car said: “Are you the new man?” The priest, telling the…

Fr Andrew McMahon “I have no problem with civil partnership…I do think that marriage is separate…And I would be of the view that it doesn’t have to be the case for everyone, but the preferable construct in a society is the traditional family, and the State through its laws should protect that and promote that.…

I wish some bright young writer – or some bright older writer, indeed – would produce a book on the theme of ‘The Strange Death of the SDLP’. The collapse of the Social Democratic and Labour Party in Northern Ireland is one of the major electoral events, surely, of 2017. It also seems to be…

A Continental European friend remarked to me that “Ireland is much more European than Britain – I’ve found that the Irish are much more at ease with their Continental neighbours than the British.” If this is true, it is in no small measure due to the deposit of culture built up over the centuries between…

Very few readers of The Irish Catholic will be watching season three of Twin Peaks, I suspect. It’s not on one of the main channels and it has only a cult following because its content is too surreal for most tastes. But in one recent episode we were taken back to the first test of…

Though it sounds terrible to say out loud, generally speaking, the death of a Catholic bishop doesn’t really rate as a news story anywhere outside his own diocese. Most bishops aren’t towering public personalities, and besides which, with more than 5,000 bishops in the world and an age profile that skews old, deaths just aren’t…

Miguel Diaz Epluribus unum. This motto appears in the Great Seal of the United States, the seals of top US government officials, and on US coins. While not as explicitly religious as the oft-cited motto, “In God we Trust”, this other foundational American motto not only supplies the building blocks for authentic community and human…