“I’m packing for Poland,” Sr Briege McKenna tells me down the phone, pronouncing on prayer, priesthood and Pope Leo. The globe-trotting nun, with a gift for healing and evangelisation, recently returned to Ireland for the fiftieth anniversary of Intercession for Priests, a mission founded in Dublin by the late Fr Kevin Scallon to heal and restore…
By the time you read this, Heather Humphries or Sean Kelly MEP might well be the Fine Gael candidate for the presidency, but so far it has been a very strange presidential race, such as it has been one at all. There is only one candidate at the time of writing who actually has the…
The Catholic Church has welcomed many kinds of popes in its long history — reformers, diplomats, visionaries, caretakers. With Pope Leo XIV, history’s first American successor of Peter, the Church appears to have received something rare: a shepherd intent on binding up wounds without tearing at old scars. His first hundred days offer every sign…
The news that St John Henry Newman is to be declared a Doctor of the Church has been greeted with joy. This has been expected for some time, having been requested by, among others, the Episcopal Conference of England & Wales, the Irish Episcopal Conference and the Bishops of the Church of England. Newman joins…
Harvey’s death shows urgent need for health system accountability, says Peadar Tóibín TD I want to convey my deepest sympathies to the family of Harvey Morrison Sherratt. It’s a disaster for any parent to lose their child. Harvey’s death is particularly heartbreaking given the suffering that he endured in his short life and the lack…
The hope and dream of the late Pope Francis was to reform the Catholic Church and make it a synodal Church at every level, where everyone — laypeople, priests and bishops — are considered equal before God and Jesus of Nazareth, working together, sharing thoughts, listening and learning from one another, and participating humbly in…
Over this whole period of concern about the war in – and occupation of – Ukraine, I have frequently thought about the Anglo-Irish situation in 1921. Vladimir Putin regards Ukraine as part of Russian culture and history – the Russian Orthodox Church’s very roots are in Kyiv. And Winston Churchill, who held the British government’s…
We must act now for Gaza Dear Editor, what are we to say in the future when they ask us what we did during the Gaza genocide? What will we tell the children and grandchildren when they ask? That we wrung our hands at the horrors, lamented the starvation, the brutality, the bombings, the killings…
Now, let us praise the humble potato. It’s been long associated with Ireland – and negatively, too, because of the terrible failure of the crop prompting the Great Famine. Irish potato consumption has been falling in the past decades, and the Irish appetite for the spud has been overtaken by consumers in Belarus, Poland, Ukraine…
Before Mike Nesbitt entered politics, he was an accomplished journalist, respected for his forensic skills on live radio. “He was a rottweiler,” recalled one former colleague. “I wouldn’t have wanted to be interrogated by him.” Now it is Nesbitt, the Health Minister, who must come up with the answers.And it would appear he is more…
Martina Purdy
David Quinn
Mary Kenny