Dear Editor, I write to express my welcome and support for the excellent article in your edition of 30/07/2015 by Fr Seán MacGiollarnáth on Amnesty International and that organisation’s support for widespread access to abortion. He expressed perfectly the inexplicable contradiction of a “human rights” advocacy group categorising unborn human life as worthy of protection,…

Dear Editor, Felix M Larkin’s review of Joe Good’s Inside the GPO 1916: A First-hand Account in the issue of July 30 acknowledges the author’s vivid account of his experiences in the turbulent years from 1916 to 1921. He is rightly critical of Good’s seeming lack of compassion and regret for those affected by the…

Dear Editor, Does Niall Guinan’s reasoning in ‘Not in my Name’ (IC 30/07/2015) add up? Fittingly he says “The eighth amendment is an equality provision, protecting the most vulnerable human beings among us”. Planned Parenthood takes “the most vulnerable human beings” with a spark of divine being, kills them, takes the parts, “dead” in the…

Dear Editor, Fr Peter McVerry states that the Church must learn from the young and focus less on the God of the law but on a God whose passion is compassion (IC 23/07/2015). I think very few of us would disagree in principle, but practically I am not sure what Fr McVerry is suggesting. Living…

Dear Editor, In an article of IC 23/7/2015 Fr Peter McVerry is quoted as saying that the young people telling the Church there is “something fundamentally wrong” with its message, need to be listened to. I can’t help but agree that yes, we must listen to those who are leaving the Church, but at the…

Dear Editor, I thought my eyes were deceiving me when I read that some seminarians at Maynooth were censured because they were “too conservative” (IC 02/07/2015). I wonder should this have read “too truthful” because they were proclaiming the truth of the Faith? I saw a documentary on Maynooth, long before the scandals broke there,…

Dear Editor, Has Amnesty International Ireland lost its way? This is the question I asked myself when I recently looked into their campaign for Asia Bibi the Pakistani Christian woman sentenced to death for blasphemy. There is no mention of her case more recently than November of last year when they made one mention of…

Dear Editor, Mary Kenny is wrong about Church weddings (‘Churches should advertise for weddings’ IC 23/07/2015). Marriage is a sacrament which the spouses confer upon each other by expressing their consent before the Church. If the spouses themselves do not believe in the Church’s understanding of marriage, or even in God, but go along with…