Ireland joined the French Commonwealth – the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie – at the end of last year and its presence is now being more widely noted. The OIF gathers together the 88 countries in the world (including 27 ‘observer’ nations) which are French-speaking and Ireland has been welcomed as one of the observer…
Young people leaving care face a mountain of obstacles, with homelessness being one of the most acute. Although it is true there are challenges for any child in becoming independent, the life experience of many exiting the State’s charge lead to highly complex cases. In the context of Ireland’s housing crisis there are now over…
The View In recent times, there has been a media frenzy about Tiger Roll, the brave little horse that won the Aintree Grand National for the second time. But the fact that a horse died at the Grand National, the Willie Mullins-trained Up For Review, has received far less coverage. The horse was seen…
A former Government minister’s take on Humanae Vitae is too simple, writes David Quinn Pope Benedict XVI once memorably spoke of a “dictatorship of relativism”. Just prior to becoming Pope in 2005 he said: “Today, having a clear Faith based on the Creed of the Church is often labelled as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, that…
Letter from Rome Last Tuesday made official a transition that’s been quietly underway for a while in terms of the Vatican’s response to the clerical sexual abuse scandals: Pope Francis and his aides are rethinking, if not the substance of a ‘zero tolerance’ policy, at least the rhetoric of it, becoming increasingly unwilling to…
Inés San Martín When she first heard that Pope Francis wanted her to write the meditations for the world’s most followed Way of the Cross ceremony, Italian Sr Eugenia Bonetti said she was “embarrassed” but soon realised that it could be a “great opportunity”. An opportunity “not for me, but for the many people who through…
When the Romans designed crucifixion as their means of capital punishment, they had more in mind than simply putting someone to death. They wanted to accomplish something else too, namely, to make this death a spectacle to serve as the ultimate deterrent so that anyone seeing it would think twice about committing the offense for…
Shortly after his election to the papacy six years ago last month, Irish newspapers predicted with rare confidence that Pope Francis was set to appoint two Irishwomen to the College of Cardinals. The would-be Princesses of the Church were said to be former president Mary McAleese and Trinity College-based theologian Linda Hogan. At the time,…
The Notebook Fr Conor McDonough There’s a strange paradox at the heart of modern celebrity culture. On the one hand, thanks to Instagram, celebrities are the object of unprecedented interest, love, envy and devotion. Pop stars and influencers all have their ‘fandoms’, hordes of utterly devoted fans who spend large parts of their free…
Dear Editor, Dr Phyllis Zagano’s article on the female diaconate (IC 4/4/2019) invites some very serious questions, not just about the prospect of ordaining women as deacons but about the purpose of male deacons. If we are honest about this, it seems indisputable that there were indeed women deacons in the early Church, with confusion…
Mary Kenny
Chai Brady
Breda O'Brien
David Quinn
John L. Allen Jr.
Fr Ronald Rolheiser
Michael Kelly