Pat O’Kelly Despite visiting Leipzig last year during its annual Bach Festival, my musical encounters centred not on Johann Sebastian but on Claudio Monteverdi, as the event also celebrated the Italian master’s 450th anniversary through his proto-opera Orfeo and magnificent Vespers of the Blessed Virgin. The St Nicholas Lutheran Church provided the resplendent ecumenical…
Ironically, after celebrating St Patrick abroad and at home, Government figures lost no time in getting down to making it easier to end the lives of unborn children. The issue figured intensively in the media most of the week and I wasn’t too pleased with RTÉ’s idea of balanced coverage. It felt at times too…
Fáilte Pope Francis … from the Children of Ireland (Columba Press, €14.99) This delightful book had its origins in a competition run by The Irish Catholic with primary schools all over Ireland encouraging young children to write a letter of welcome to the Pope on his visit in August this year to Dublin for the…
In the years immediately after the ending of the Great War, or the “War to save civilisation” as WWI was once called, Europe and then the wider world became aware of the existence in a remote village in Southern Italy of a priest for whom the most extraordinary claims, not just of piety, but of…
St Patrick’s weekend brought a flurry of snow and religious programmes of varying quality, some related to the feast day, some not. On the Friday, BBC2 launched a new series, Pilgrimage – The Road to Santiago, featuring a bunch of celebrities doing sections of the Camino pilgrimage over a few weeks. It was enjoyable, took…
Mary Magdalene (12A) Whatever we may say about the Biblical epics of yore, they exuded power. Even the run-of-the-mill (or should I say De Mille) ones. The problem with Garth Davis’ Mary Magdalene is that it tries so hard to be ‘authentic’ it sacrifices the iconic benchmarks of scripture to subdued sidebars. It’s a plodding film…
What We Talk About When We Talk About Faith by Peter Stanford (Hodder & Stoughton, £14.99) Emily Keyes Though religion implies community, it is easy to forget that religion is also an individual pursuit, with each practitioner possessing their own understanding of faith. This is what Peter Stanford, a long-time journalist for the Catholic Herald with…
John Redmond. Selected letters and memoranda, 1880-1918 edited by Dermot Meleady (Merrion Press, €29.99/£26.99) Ian d’Alton On March 6, 1918, John Redmond, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, died – “a broken-hearted man”, in his own words – at the relatively young age of 61 years. History was in the process of overtaking him, and what…
A Time of Our Lives: How We Grew Up From the 1940s to the 1960s by Gerald Rice (Order from A Time of Our Lives Ltd., 11 Mornington Green, Trim, Co. Meath; €10 + €2.95 p&p; e-mail: atimeofourlives@gmail.com) This is an unusual autobiography which will resonate with Gerald Rice’s contemporaries both in Ireland and the…
On Tuesday night of last week the Catholic Bishops made a significant intervention in the Eighth Amendment debate, issuing a humane and measured statement. On the Nine News (RTE 1) that night, Archbishop Eamon Martin expressed dismay that the right to life of unborn children could be “obliterated” from the Constitution. On Wednesday’s Morning Ireland…
Brendan O’Regan
Peter Costello
Aubrey Malone