You think about strange things when you wake up with a bout of insomnia at 3am. One of those small-hours anxiety I’ve had is that my driving licence expires in eight months’ time. And I’m worrying whether it will be renewed. Will I pass the tests for older drivers, of alertness and awareness, and will…
Letter from Rome When roughly 300 Catholic leaders gather in Rome from October 6-27 to talk about the Amazon, it will be the 29th time since 1965 a Pope has convoked a Synod of Bishops. For most of that span, the body’s role could have been described in the same ironic terms Bob Dole once…
Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, Major Archbishop of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, has urged those considering allowing priests in the Latin rite to marry in order to help solve a crippling shortage, to proceed with caution, saying marriage has not curbed shortages in his own rite. With five blooming seminaries in Ukraine alone, “thanks be to…
It’s no secret that today we’re witnessing a massive decline in church attendance and, seemingly, a parallel loss of interest in religion. The former mindset, within which we worried, sometimes obsessively, about sin, church-going, and heaven and hell no longer holds sway for millions of people. As one parent, worried about the religious state of…
Dear Editor, Chai Brady’s article about missalettes (IC 05/09/19) highlights a situation which has been allowed to continue for far too long and which needs to be seriously addressed. When the ‘New Mass’ in English was introduced in the late 1960s – as a result of the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy from the Second…
Notebook Some months ago, I heard a request on our local radio station for a song by Max Boyce [pictured above]. The song played was familiar to me but not so the performer. I had never heard of him before and, no doubt, that says more about me than him. In any case, I liked…
An elderly priest – long since gone to his reward – once recounted a story to me about his time as an ecclesiastical inspector. What we now call a religious education advisor, his job was to tour schools ensuring that children were properly prepared for the reception of the sacraments. On the whole my priest…
The View If you build it, they will come. This famous catchphrase from the 1989 movie Field of Dreams is actually a misquote. In the film, an Iowa corn farmer played by Kevin Costner is walking through his fields one night when he hears a disembodied voice saying: “If you build it, he will…
Ireland is increasingly a cold house for people who hold values seen as out of step, writes David Quinn The American Vice-President, Mike Pence, was in Ireland last week and it is fair to say he did not receive a hundred thousand welcomes. Yes, he was met by President Higgins, and Leo Varadkar and…
One of the most cheerful developments over the course of my lifetime has been the advent of cheap clothes. In my mother’s generation, elegant garments were beyond the reach of most people, and especially most women, who often yearned for pretty things. Look at the photographs of yesteryear: people of means did have decent clothes,…
Mary Kenny
John L. Allen Jr.
Fr Ronald Rolheiser
Michael Kelly
Breda O'Brien
David Quinn