Fr Bernard Healy There is a chapel known as ‘Domine Quo Vadis’ on the Via Appia, the old road that leads southwards out of Rome and there is an unusual tale dating back to the 2nd Century about the site that it’s built on. It is said that during a time of persecution St…
Ask any Catholic serious about their Faith what the biggest challenge the Church faces is and they will almost universally say a variation of the same thing: reaching out and engaging young people. Often when a priest is assigned to a new parish, he will be met with earnest parishioners who implore him “you’ll have…
Dear Editor, Can I congratulate you on the clear-eyed way The Irish Catholic has analysed the papal visit and World Meeting of Families in recent weeks? Pieces asking searching questions about the Pope’s speeches, his apparent ignorance of the reality of modern Ireland and most recently the low turnout in Phoenix Park for the closing…
The View The BBC is making a series of programmes about loneliness as a result of a study involving 55,000 people that it conducted. The findings are somewhat counter-intuitive. Young people are lonelier than older people. Some 40% of respondents aged between 16 and 24 years old said they experience loneliness often or very…
I sense that there is rather more interest in electing (or re-electing) the President of Ireland on October 26 than there is in voting to repeal the single line in the Constitution which deals with blasphemy. This article (40.6.1.i) states that: “The publication or utterance of blasphemous, seditious, or indecent matter is an offence which shall…
According to the Office of Public Works, just under 152,000 people attended the papal Mass in Dublin’s Phoenix Park on August 26. While organisers’ claims that over 180,000 Communion hosts were distributed suggest a counter-estimate of about 200,000 people, a respectable figure for a miserable day where Mass attendances held up around the country, one…
It is increasingly becoming heretical to say that there are differences between the sexes, writes David Quinn Not that you would think it from reading our newspapers, but one of the things that Pope Francis frequently criticises is so-called ‘gender ideology’. This is the belief that men and women are the same and if…
Letter from Rome Moments of great crisis generally affect institutions in multiple ways, some of which are immediately evident and others that take longer to discern. Amid the clerical abuse scandals currently rocking Catholicism, it’s worth asking if one such long-term result is playing out before our eyes. To wit, are we seeing a…
Michael W. Higgins One could be forgiven for thinking that it has never been as bad as this—Church authority assailed from within and from without, the episcopate in so many jurisdictions discredited, the papacy under siege from schismatic factions, the non-Catholic world appalled by a level of corruption the magnitude of which seems incomprehensible,…
If ever there was a baffling headline in Ireland’s self-proclaimed ‘newspaper of reference’, it was last week’s ‘Primary teachers disproportionately white, Irish and Catholic’, with its equally perplexing sub-head ‘NUI Galway finds Irish-nationality teachers “significantly overrepresented”’. For those inclined to skimming headlines and moving on, confusion about the Irish Times article will mainly have been…
Michael Kelly
Breda O'Brien
Mary Kenny
Greg Daly
David Quinn
John L. Allen Jr.