Speaking to The Irish Catholic at the Rally for Life in Dublin, Bishop Phonsie Cullinan said politicians had opened the floodgates to abortion despite promising “repeatedly” that it would be “safe, legal and rare”. “Well I would say two things about that. They are not safe for the baby and they are certainly not…
With Enoch Burke after having spent over 400 days in jail for refusing to abide by a court order, related to his initial refusal to comply with a request/instruction to refer to a pupil by their preferred pronouns at Wilson’s Hospital Secondary School, teachers and school administrators remain in the dark as to what is…
In a stroke of irony, the Vatican’s doctrinal office on Thursday, which marked the United States’ Independence Day, convened and formally declared that a former US envoy charged with schism was excommunicated. In a July 5 statement, the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) announced that nearly six years after calling on…
Human trafficking: a crime against humanity Dear Editor, I was deeply moved by the recent article discussing the escalating issue of human trafficking and the call for increased parish involvement in combating this grave injustice. Cardinal Vincent Nichols’ stark observation that “things are getting worse” underlines the urgent need for action within our communities [The…
Way back in the early years of this century, God help us, Christians’ major worry was the four horsemen of the apocalypse, as the new atheists were dubbed. Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens all wrote influential books although they also gained traction through the smartphone revolution that allowed easy mass access…
A working document for the final gathering of Pope Francis’s controversial Synod of Bishops on synodality, presented Tuesday in a news conference, may strike most observers as more notable for what it didn’t say than what it did. The official working document, called an Instrumentum Laboris, for the second Rome-based session of the Synod of…
I grew up listening to Frankie Byrne. She was the star of the sponsored programme hosted by Jacobs on RTÉ Radio and had the title of Ireland’s agony aunt. The problems she was dealing with “might not be yours today”, she insisted — “but they could be some day”. That’s how I feel about the…
I’ve often wondered what it is like to experience a vocation as a cloistered nun, and now I think I understand what it’s all about. Catherine Coldstream is an Englishwoman who grew up in a somewhat Bohemian household, and after her father died, she felt adrift in the world. In her twenties, she became a…
It was a curious feature of the erstwhile British government that, despite the ruling party being officially named the ‘Conservative and Unionist Party’, the higher-ups in London showed very little interest in the part of the United Kingdom on the northeast of this island. The role of Secretary of State for the North has never…
I’ve been following developments in French politics – and culture – for some years, and I’m not at all surprised at the victory for Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) in the first round of the parliamentary elections. It’s all been brewing for a long time. As anyone who has read the writings of French…
Martina Purdy
Breda O'Brien
Mary Kenny