There’s a famous billboard that hangs along a congested highway that reads: You aren’t stuck in traffic. You are traffic! Good wit, good insight! How glibly we distance ourselves from a problem, whether it is our politics, our churches, the ecological problems on our planet or most anything else. We aren’t, as we want to…

One of the great challenges that Pope Francis is setting before the Church is the need for Catholics to get out of their comfort zones and bring the Gospel closer to people. Francis likes to talk about the absolute urgent need to reach out to what he describes as the “existential margins” or “peripheries” of…

I am reminded of the somewhat cynical remark made by someone a few years ago when he said “it’s well for those who can afford to say their prayers abroad”. It was a comment on the many thousands of Irish people who every year travel to places of pilgrimage like Lourdes, Fatima, Medjugorje, Rome, the…

It’s crisis-time for students, and it’s especially crisis-time for students seeking accommodation. The situation, particularly in Dublin, is dire. We know it’s dire for homeless families as well, although the needs of students, and of families, are different. The solution for families is for more family homes to be built, pronto. The solution – or…

Ronan McGreevy Fr Willie Doyle SJ died as he had lived: fearlessly in the service of others. He ventured into no man’s land to give extreme unction to two officers lying wounded in a shell hole. Another German shell landed among them. Their bodies were never recovered from the battlefield. Fr Doyle was one of…

Extremist politics is on the rise on both left and right in Europe and America. We have just witnessed a far-right rally take place in Charlottesville, Virginia, with members of the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis taking part. They clashed violently with members of Antifa, a far-left group. One of the far-right demonstrators ploughed his…