Silence Martin Scorsese, who studied for the priesthood as a young man, has divided his directorial career between mainstream dramas and revisionist religious works like Kundun and The Last Temptation of Christ. Silence falls into the latter category. It’s been in gestation for many years and chronicles the fortunes of a 17th-Century Jesuit missionary called…
Father Mychal Judge, An Authentic American Hero by Michael Ford (Paulist Press, £15.99) Anthony Redmond Fr Judge, an Irish American Franciscan, died in the attack on the World Trade Centre as he gave the Last Rites to a dying fireman. During the last weeks of his life, Fr Mychal Judge had been reading the biography…
One of the most interesting programmes shown over the Christmas period was the film Strange Occurrences in a Small Irish Village on RTÉ 1. This documentary told the story of Knock Shrine, mainly through interviews with some of the people involved in that parish. Parish priest Fr Richard Gibbons was a central focus of attention,…
Well, there’s another year down, a year full of significant stories and media developments, with the prospects of a rather uncertain 2017 ahead. It strikes me that social stability and civilisation are fragile enough and that complacency would be a bad mistake. It was a year of high drama on the political front, from Brexit…
Christmas is now generally a time of universal celebration and festivity. But the days after the Nativity were different: after the joy of the new child came cruelty and persecution. As always the Bible is pervaded by a sense of the reality of human affairs that people, swept away by sentiment, so often overlook: cruel…
In a world where commercialism rules OK, Strange Occurrences in a Small Irish Village – ostensibly a documentary about the Marian shrine in Knock and the people who visit it but ultimately a commentary on the state of religion in Ireland today – was never going to wipe the more mainstream releases off the screen.…
Catholic University of America’s Christmas Concert EWTN Christmas Eve 11am and Christmas Day 3.30pm The annual Christmas concert presented by the Catholic University of America, featuring a brilliant blend of angelic voices and the wonderful sounds of the Christmas Season. The Word is Born: Christmas with the Louisville Chorus EWTN Christmas Eve 3.30pm and Christmas…
In these pages some of our regular reviewers provide a brief appreciation of their best most interesting books of the year, a selection of very varied reading which others will also enjoy.
Where I Find God: Personal Reflections from some of Ireland’s Finest Thinkers edited by Cora Guinnane & Joanne O’Brien, with a foreword by Mary McAleese (Columba Press, €24.99) Some 53 contributors, drawn from many fields of life share in a few brief but intense paragraphs their experiences of the mystical as they personally encounter it.…
The Birth of a Nation (15A)
Aubrey Malone
Brendan O’Regan
Peter Costello
Courtney McGrail