Dear Editor, As we approach next month’s Synod of Bishops on the family, one needs to be careful which side one chooses to take in all this. In relation to the Kasper proposal, Cardinal Kasper and others are putting forward a proposal for changes to allow divorced and ‘remarried’ Catholics to receive Holy Communion and…
Category: Opinion
No need for the greetings
Dear Editor, May I, through the medium of your paper, appeal to all priests to stop saying “Good morning” (or “Good evening”) immediately after saying “The Lord be with you”. “The Lord be with you” is a most sublime and wonderful greeting, calling on “The Holy One of Israel” to be present with every person…
Archbishop wanted reasonable debate
Dear Editor, Fr Andrew McMahon’s September 10 article on confusion and Church communications during the marriage referendum helped shed valuable light on why the referendum was lost. It seems unfair, however, to blame the Archbishop of Dublin for claiming that he wanted to express his intention to vote ‘no’ through “the reasoned language of social…
Beautiful shrine, poor infrastructure
Dear Editor, The National Eucharistic Congress begins at 10am on a Saturday and ends about 5pm Sunday. That leaves a lot of things for visitors to do. But is Knock the wrong location? Knock is basically a place for day visits only, since it has only one hotel, and that of 21 bedrooms, i.e. catering…
Lost in translation
Dear Editor, Perhaps Archbishop Diarmuid Martin did confuse a handful of people during the referendum campaign, as Fr Andrew McMahon relates (IC 10/09/2015), but it is striking that those he quotes as examples of such confusion were an English deacon and an American website. Is it possible that something has been lost in translation, that…
Priests do not grow under cabbages in bishops’ gardens
Dear Editor, In the Catholic Church we have an ongoing discussion about the crisis in vocations in the ministerial priesthood in Ireland in terms of staffing numbers and the challenges it poses. It perplexes me to see reactions from around the country when parishes get upset when their bishop announces he no longer has a…
Silence on loss of Dominican community
Dear Editor, I was surprised to see so little coverage in The Irish Catholic of how people from Drogheda walked to Tallaght on August 29 to present the Dominican HQ with a petition signed by 22,000 people objecting to the impending departure of the town’s Dominican community. Surprised, but not heartbroken. Isn’t it time to…
Is 520 the best we can do?
Dear Editor, It is encouraging to hear that parishioners across Ireland are making plans to welcome refugees from North Africa and the Middle East, and encouraging too to hear of bishops attempting to coordinate this response. Unfortunately, you report the Department of Justice as saying that a mere 520 migrants will have refugee status, with…
Where the liturgy is celebrated
The Church teaches that when the faithful assemble in the same place, they are gathered to be ‘built into a spiritual house’, writes Cathal Barry
How we are all overstimulated in our grandiosity
There are now more than seven billion people on this Earth and each one of us feels that he or she is the centre of the Universe. That accounts for most of the problems we have in the world, in our neighborhoods and in our families. And no one’s to blame for this, save God…

Courtney McGrail
Cathal Barry
Fr Ronald Rolheiser