Rudolph Otto famously described the religious sentiment as the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, “the tremendous and fascinating mystery”, but to be honest, that’s probably not how most Catholics experience it. For many Catholics, the faith may be primarily about community and worship, or about a set of doctrinal convictions, or an ethical code, even a…
Long before he assumed the highest office in the United States, President Donald Trump’s contradictory statements on everything from the war in Iraq to abortion were subjected to quizzically raised brows and prime-time debates. None of which has done the billionaire businessman any harm as he harangues and denounces anyone brazen enough to try and…
Gamal Tawfiq, a Coptic Christian schoolteacher, was walking home from work when his killers struck on February 16. Having been stalked through the streets of el Arish, the largest city on Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, Tawfiq was shot from a passing motorcycle, on which the killers then made their hasty escape. The death of Tawfiq was…
Dear Editor, The State-funded Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission (IHREC) is now campaigning for abortion. In its statement to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women on February 13 in Geneva, and in its report submitted to the committee in January, it focused on “a woman’s right to bodily autonomy” and…
Our society tends to divide us up into winners and losers. Sadly, we don’t often reflect on how this affects our relationships with each other, nor on what it means for us as Christians. What does it mean? In essence, that our relationships with each other tend are too-charged with competition and jealousy because we…
Bro. Conor McDonough Picture the scene: a mid-20th-Century crowd of Irish emigrants in a newsagent’s after Mass. They all rush to buy the ‘Irish papers’ to find out what the important people in Dublin are doing and how the metropolis views the provinces. Then in walks a Monaghan eccentric. He has notions, so maybe he’s…
Dear Editor, Like Fr Tom Whelan (‘Fresh Mass translation ‘a long shot’’ IC 02/02/2017), I agree that the “pragmatics of administrators will win out,” when it comes to the future of the largely unloved 2011 translation of the Roman Missal. Its turgid prose, erratic use of capital letters and badly designed presentation of prayers in…
Inés San Martín On February 11, Pope Francis sent an envoy to Medjugorje in Bosnia-Herzegovina, not to rule on the credibility of the alleged Marian apparitions taking place at the site since 1981, but to assist with pastoral issues. Speaking to Crux, a source close to the matter said that Archbishop Henryk Hoser of Warsaw-Prague, Poland,…
“No-one wants them.” Across the plethora of reporting of the plight of Myanmar’s tortured Rohingya community, no single phrase summed up the plight of a people so precisely as that employed by Pope Francis on February 8. During his weekly General Audience, the Pontiff chose to make the despised Muslim minority community the subject of…
In the Hebrew Scriptures, that part of the Bible we call the Old Testament, we find a strong religious challenge to always welcome the stranger, the foreigner. This was emphasised for two reasons: first, because the Jewish people themselves had once been foreigners and immigrants. Their Scriptures kept reminding them not to forget that. Second,…
John L. Allen Jr.
Paul Keenan
Fr Ronald Rolheiser