Dear Editor, Your recent front page on the Mercy on the Mall initiative in Shannon parish (IC 26/11/2015) should be an inspiration to other priests during this Year of Mercy. Having Confessions heard by priests in a shopping centre reminds me of a recent trip to New York when clergy were posted at subway stations…

Dear Editor, For the first time in a long time I feel there is a bit of a positive buzz around the Church in Ireland, thanks to Pope Francis nominating the Year of Mercy. I was very heartened to read in The Irish Catholic (IC 26/11/2015) that most dioceses across the country have embraced the…

Dear Editor, I was fascinated to read ‘Mother Teresa’s dark night of the soul’ (IC 26/11/15). Of course, there is a close link with Ireland in that Blessed Mother Teresa came to the Loreto convent (now an Irish school) in Grange Road, Rathfarnham, as a novice in the late 1920s. As religious affairs correspondent of…

Dear Editor, The Catholic sacrament of matrimony comes to us from the non-Christian Latin word ‘matrimonium’, meaning the state or position of being a mother. The problem is that the word ‘marriage’ also comes from the Latin and, in my view, means much the same. I am not a lawyer and for all I know…

Dear Editor, Fr Rolheiser (IC 19/11/2015) praises certain saints for their “stunning self-confidence” and “very robust self-image” in comparison to the rest of us, “simply lack[ing] sufficient self-image and self-confidence to do what they did”. In doing so he, to my mind, creates too sharp a contrast between the “spiritual giants” and us non-giants. He…

Dear Editor, In your November 26 edition the question is asked, is there evidence that Irish people “punch above their weight” in paedophilia? There is no such evidence.  But the impression has been successfully given that paedophilia is a specially Irish or Catholic or clerical problem. It is not.  Catholics are partly to blame that such an impression…