Do you remember where you were when the planes hit the Twin Towers in New York? Most people do. You may also remember where you heard the news of Princess Diana’s death. I remember both. And I also remember hearing the news that Notre Dame cathedral in Paris was on fire. I was having my…

The election of Robert Cardinal Provost as Pope has been met with a certain amount of warmth outside of the Church itself, which is surprising considering the profile of the man. In a time that sees the Church as an anachronism in the ‘developed’ world, an American ought to have felt like a step back…

Belfast’s youngest parish priest could not resist the road to Rome on May 8. Fr Conor McGrath had just marked his 38th birthday. There are only a handful of priests his age in Down and Connor where he also serves as vocations director. In the years to come, would he get another chance to see…

Last weekend, in the small, picturesque seaside town of St Agnes in Cornwall, a plaque was unveiled to the hundreds of thousands of unmarried mothers in England and Wales who had been subjected, in the past, to forced adoptions. The plaque is situated at Rosemundy, which was once a mother-and-baby home in the West of…

Naturally enough, journalists covering the Vatican tend to seek out figures in the system from their own countries or language groups. French speakers seek out the French, Spanish speakers the Spaniards and Latin Americans, the Italians gravitate to their paesani, and, by the same logic, Americans are drawn to fellow Americans. Thus it was that when…

I am writing this article while in Rome on Dominican business. By the time you read it, not only will I be back in Ireland, but there may very well be a new pope. As you can imagine there is only one topic of conversation in the city, be it in a shop, taxi, restaurant,…

The ethics of artificial intelligence When friends were transcribing a mound of material recently, I shocked myself by asking. ‘Why aren’t you using AI?’ I have significant moral objections to the use of AI. The foremost one is that it is based on systemic theft of intellectual property. Large language models were trained on vast…

The first pope I ever saw in the flesh was Paul VI, indeed he is the first pope I can remember. My parents had somehow won a package holiday and that included a day in Rome. It was 1975 and a Jubilee Year. I can’t remember exactly what time of year it was, probably spring…

Singer-songwriter Simona Congi adores music, but it was not until she met a Catholic record producer that she changed her playlist. She realised she had been listening to many popular songs with dark, or demonic themes. “All my Taylor Swift songs had the word ‘devil’ in there somewhere,” she told The Irish Catholic.  “I ended…

I hadn’t heard the word ‘neurodiverse’ until about a year ago, when a teacher friend mentioned the condition was increasing among school pupils. Since then, I’ve been aware of this widening diagnosis in children and adults. As I understand it, ‘neurodiverse’ basically means human brains function in different ways; but some people who are neurodiverse…