A friend of mine shares this story. She grew up with five siblings and an alcoholic father. The effect of her father’s alcoholism was devastating on her family. Here’s how she tells the story: “By the time my father died his alcoholism had destroyed our family. None of us kids could talk to each other…
Notebook Last Sunday two young men called to see me after Mass. They’re students, sharing accommodation and, apart from their studies, they want to grow in holiness, to become the men God made them to be. They told me they had cleared a space on their bookshelves for books that would help them in this…
Tourism chiefs were all over the airwaves this week as it was announced that the ‘Lonely Planet’ travel company had selected Galway as one of the top 10 cities in the world to visit in 2020. It was a rather convenient fit with the fact that the Government has pumped tens of millions in to…
Dear Editor, At the canonisation of Cardinal John Henry Newman at the Vatican, Prince Charles praised many aspects of the new saints’ labours. These included his establishment of the Catholic University in Ireland – the predecessor of today’s University College Dublin. He said: “His example has left a lasting legacy. As an educator, his work…
Does the provision of free and accessible contraception – to be introduced in Ireland within the next 18 months – halt the rate of abortion? There is a very useful opportunity for some sociology student to address this question, perhaps as a PhD thesis, over the next five years. Many people have believed that contraception…
Coverage of eco and pro-life activism are a case study in media bias, writes David Quinn If you want to know what a favoured movement looks like, and you wish to contrast it with one that is disfavoured, look no further that the environmentalist and pro-life movements. The starkly differing ways in which they are…
Facebook and Twitter can’t make hate go away, and we shouldn’t ask them to, writes John McGuirk “Hatred,” The Sunday Business Post declared this week, “is still having its say”. The paper’s eye-catching headline referred to a story by its reporter, Aaron Rogan, that Facebook and Twitter were still, as he put it, failing to…
In a remarkable book, The Inner Voice of Love, written while he was in a deep emotional depression, Henri Nouwen shares these words: “The great challenge is living your wounds through instead of thinking them through. It is better to cry than to worry, better to feel your wounds deeply than to try to understand…
Dear Editor, In attempting to shed light on Ireland’s vocation numbers (Letters, IC 3/10/2019), it seems that Canon Paul Ferrer has drawn attention to just how much fog and confusion bedevil this subject. The term ‘pre-seminary’ never appears in the Holy See’s 2016 Ratio Fundamentalis on priestly formation, he says, highlighting how the document identifies propaedeutic formation…
“I remember when you used to visit the school, and we had such good times and fun there, but I never thought that the future would ever be like this.” I knew what he meant. His mother had just died following an accident – a young woman, with so much left to live and to…
Fr Ronald Rolheiser
Michael Kelly
Mary Kenny
David Quinn