Bro. Conor McDonough Not all public voices in Ireland want to consign the Church to “the dustbin of history”, as at least one of our elected representatives apparently does, but many want it to stay behind the four walls of the church building. Many believers too, perhaps humiliated by very real scandals within the Church,…
Dear Editor, I read Bishop Denis Brennan’s comments on a vocation being “an adventure” with interest (IC 15/06/2017). Other newspapers who had covered Bishop Brennan’s homily at the ordination in Horeswood, Co. Wexford, had only mentioned his comments warning the new priest about having the “anger/hostility people have for the Church in general directed at…
Changes in the political environment have occurred in the past 18 months with almost bewildering frequency, in many cases requiring radical reassessment of where we stand. This week, a new Taoiseach Leo Varadkar is due to be elected. Our reaction, regardless of any political affiliations, should be to wish him well, as the country faces…
On July 1, you, and as many other people as you can muster, are urgently required at the most important Rally for Life ever organised in Dublin. This is the rally to Save the Eighth, and there has never been a more critical, more crucial, time for the pro-life majority to stand up and be…
The report into the country’s mother and baby homes is due out next February. I think that points very strongly to an abortion referendumwithin weeks of that, in other words in March or April of next year. The Government won’t want public anger at the mother and baby homes to go to waste. Those who…
Here’s a papal pop quiz: When’s the last time you can remember a Pope openly demanding that all the priests of a specific diocese, whether they currently live there or not, write him a personal letter within 30 days pledging their loyalty, and threatening them with suspension if they don’t comply? If your answer is…
Ever since the election results were confirmed, we Brits have been speaking a lot of ancient Greek. For a start, there’s the hubris of the prime minister, Theresa May, in calling an election to secure a strong, stable government to better negotiate with Brussels, only to find herself weak and wobbly in a hung parliament,…
Dear Editor, Your front page story last week (08/06/2017) about Bríd Smith’s comments that the Church should be thrown in the “dustbin”, depressed me more than anything else. I have gone past the stage of anger and outrage, at how easy and popularly acceptable it has become to attack the Catholic Church. I would imagine…
There’s a popular notion which suggests that it can be helpful to compare every century of Christianity’s existence to one year of life. That would make Christianity 21 years old, a young 21, grown-up enough to exhibit a basic maturity but still far from a finished product. How insightful is this notion? That’s a complex…
Recently I found myself surprisingly grateful to Alison O’Connor, journalist and regular contributor to radio and television panels. Ms O’Connor was a member of the panel on Brendan O’Connor’s The Cutting Edge on RTÉ One. One of the items discussed was abortion. Ms O’Connor’s contribution was as follows: as a woman who found it particularly…
Dr Martin Mansergh
David Quinn
John L. Allen Jr.
Austen Ivereigh
Fr Ronald Rolheiser