Dear Editor, Your front-page story about Irish missionaries in Venezuela was a perfect illustration of the varied gifts religious life offers to the Church and the world God has created, and a wonderful demonstration of the ‘mosaic’ of consecrated life your paper showcased this week (IC 7/2/2019). The German journalist Peter Seewald interviewed the then…
As If she didn’t have enough to concern her in her own job, Minister for Culture Josepha Madigan launched a broadside against the Catholic Church this week. Speaking at an event in Dublin, Ms Madigan referred to what she described as “catastrophic moral failures”. Ms Madigan went on to express the view that Catholics need…
Some years ago, I was invited to accompany an Australian right-to-life group to a witness vigil outside a Melbourne abortion clinic. I was staying with one of the women involved in the event, so I said I would. It was a peaceful and respectful gathering. The participants were seated on a wall, or on the…
The View Martin Mansergh January brought Ireland into the second and more difficult phase of the decade of centenaries dominated by the birth pangs of a new State. Part of the price of this or any form of Irish self-government was partition. There are two modes of remembering. The ceremonial joint session of…
The Church in Ireland badly needs a public affairs office, writes David Quinn The Catholic Church in Ireland needs a full-time public affairs office. At the moment, the response of the Church to issues of the moment is far too hit-and-miss and there is an almost total lack of ‘joined up thinking’ and ‘joined…
I was very blessed during my theological formation to have had the privilege of taking classes from two very renowned Catholic scholars, Avery Dulles and Raymond E. Brown. The former was an ecclesiologist whose books often became textbooks which were prescribed reading in seminaries and theology schools. The latter was a Scripture scholar whose scholarship stands…
The Notebook Fr Vincent Sherlock Some time ago I received a text from a parishioner, telling me that there was no need to visit her mother on my First Friday calls since her mother was in hospital for a few days. The level of devotion this daughter showed in caring for her mother…
Dear Editor, Mary Kenny’s discussion of the pros and cons of censorship, and how her own views on the subject have varied over the years (IC 31/1/2019) was the sort of honest analysis Ireland’s media sees too little of. Too often our airwaves and newspapers are rife with dogmatic claims that censorship is never right,…
“A punch in the stomach followed by a kick in the teeth” – that’s how a priest described his reaction to the death of Fr John Cummins. A priest of the Kildare and Leighlin Diocese, 52-year-old Fr John died in an accident last week. Speaking at the requiem Mass for Fr John, Bishop Denis Nulty recalled…
You can change your mind about a subject not just once, but several times. The subject over which I have vacillated in the course of my lifetime is that of censorship. As a young person, I was vehemently against censorship, largely because both movies and books were subject to sometimes quite draconian censorship: either the…
Michael Kelly
Mary Kenny
David Quinn
Fr Ronald Rolheiser