The Family is Good News: Selections from Amoris Laetitia (The Joy of Love) by Pope Francis, prepared for the Council for Marriage and the Family of the Irish Episcopal Conference (Veritas, €9.99) The Beatitudes of Pope Francis: A Manifesto for the Modern Christian by Aidan Donaldson (Veritas, €7.99) These two books inspired by Pope Francis provide the ordinary reader with…
I find myself naturally drawn to programmes about the media, and if they’re done in dramatic form, well that’s the icing on the cake. And so it was I checked out the new drama Press (BBC1) last Thursday night. The story revolves around rivalry between two newspapers – a serious paper and a tabloid. And so…
Pat O’Kelly With the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra bringing Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony to the National Concert Hall and Irish National Opera unveiling its production of Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann simultaneously in Dublin’s O’Reilly Theatre tomorrow evening, it can be safely said that the 2018/19 ‘classical’ season is well underway. It actually began at…
Historian Dr Donal Corcoran describes his lifelong fascination with the Irishmen who served the Pope in defending the Papal States during the war of Italian unification in the 19th Century, which had lead him to do extended research on the subject for his newly published book. As a child I was fascinated with two war medals that my grandfather…
I Will Not Serve: The priest who said NO to Hitler by David Rice (Red Stag / Mentor Books, €14.99) This is a true story of Fr Franz Reinisch who was beheaded for refusing to serve in the Wehrmacht. His refusal arose from his unwillingness to swear an unconditional oath of obedience to Adolf Hitler, its…
Paris Echo by Sebastian Faulks (Hutchinson. £15.99 / €17) Peter Hegarty Faulks’ explores the German occupation (1940-44), a closed subject in France for decades after the wars. That those years were off-limits for so long shows that “the human drive to ignorance…is a force as powerful as its opposite”, as Hannah, one of the two main…
Now that the dust is starting to settle after the World Meeting of Families and the papal visit, readers of The Irish Catholic may be wondering – especially readers who missed the WMOF pastoral congress or various papal events – how they can build on 2018’s unique highlights for the Irish Church. A useful starting…
The Children Act (12A) The penultimate scene of this moving (if occasionally sugar-coated) study of lives lived to the full, lives thrown away and those gone stale, is heavily reminiscent of the last one in John Huston’s magisterial The Dead. In that film, Gabriel Conroy (Donal McCann) has to listen to his wife Gretta (Anjelica Huston) telling him…
At the end of last week’s article I wrote about the beginnings of papal visit reviews. It was mixed, with some positive commentary at times. One of the most positive was an engaging interview with the Richardson family on the Ray D’Arcy Show (RTÉ Radio 1) on Tuesday of last week. Mary and Damien, the…
Why we Need Religion by Stephen T. Asma (Oxford University Press, £20.00) Christopher Moriarty The dramatic increase in secularism and fall in numbers of professed adherents to religion has been a feature of the past few generations in the western world. Its roots lie in the application of the scientific method which began to explode in…
Peter Costello
Brendan O’Regan
Greg Daly
Aubrey Malone