The Irish now favour a “more liberal, less dogmatic” Church, according to a new poll carried out by the pollsters Ipsos/MRBI. This turns out to mean, first of all, that many people favour an ending to celibacy in the priesthood and are for the ordination of women. I wasn’t aware that these practices were ‘dogmas’.…

Everyone who came away from an encounter with the Pope was uplifted, writes David Quinn   My first reaction to the address by Leo Varadkar to Pope Francis in Dublin Castle was positive but since then it has become a lot less so. Indeed, I think the address, and the reaction of the Government to…

Sometimes all you can do is to put your mouth to the dust and wait. That’s a counsel from the Book of Lamentations and while perhaps not the best response to the recent revelations of clerical sexual abuse and cover-up in the Roman Catholic Church, it seems the only helpful response available to me as…

The Notebook Fr Bernard Healy   During the past 10 years of parish ministry, I’ve often been asked how priests deal with the sheer variety of our work. There are days when you have to go from a funeral to a baptism, or from a wedding reception to a deathbed. At all times the priest…

A friendly English Catholic I know whizzed by me on her bike, and then drew up. We exchanged greetings and pleasantries, and then she said: “By the way, one of my sisters is going to Dublin to throw eggs at the Pope at the weekend!” Oh, why? She shrugged. “It’s a bit vague. It’s to do…

The View   In just a few days Pope Francis will come to Ireland for the World Meeting of the Families. It will be a brief visit and its primary focus will be the family, not the whole Church in Ireland, nor its future nor its past. So what can we realistically expect will happen…

Failures to take hard choices continue to haunt the Church, writes David Quinn   The issue of abuse of children by priests has loomed large over the visit of Pope Francis to Ireland this week, and over the World Meeting of Families, the reason for him being here. The scandals have re-erupted in Chile, Australia…

There’s a rich literature being written today by some highly intelligent, sensitive men and women who might best be described as agnostic stoics. Unlike some of their atheistic counterparts whose one-sided attacks on religion suggest that they “doth protest too much”, this group doesn’t protest at all. They don’t attack faith in God; indeed they…