Liam Fitzpatrick Personal Profile 50 years ago, the world was a radically different place. U2 hadn’t been formed yet, push-button phones revolutionised communication, and Star Wars wouldn’t come out for another five years. There has been one constant, however – Fr Jerry McSweeney’s priesthood. Navigating his own relationship with God and living through a time…
Margaret Atwood once wrote that sometimes a thing needs to be said, and said, and said again, until it doesn’t need to be said anymore. That’s why I write a column annually on suicide, mostly saying the same things over and over again. The hope is that, like a note put into a bottle and…
In 2021 Pope Francis launched the Laudato Si’ Goals as an effort to encourage all sectors of Church to try to achieve ecological sustainability by 2030. It is an enormous task but one which we are invited to embrace, to help heal our relationship with our common home and with each other. We have been…
The Sunday Gospel Mass this Sunday puts aside the purple vestments of Lent and the white vestments of Eastertide as we return to the green of Ordinary Time. We take up from where we left off before Lent with Luke’s Gospel as our guiding light for the rest of the year. There is an old tradition that,…
Reading is one of the most valuable activities to invest in and summer is the perfect time to do so, writes Jason Osborne To my mind, there’s nothing better than finding a free hour or two and sitting down to enjoy a good book. Whether it’s fiction or non-fiction, diving into a story, real or imagined,…
Mindful Living “The blood of Christ, who offered himself as the perfect sacrifice to God through the eternal Spirit, can purify our inner self from dead actions so that we do our service to the living God” (Hebrews 9:14). In his writings, St Paul uses the metaphor of the body of Christ in two quite…
Climber banned for faking Everest ascent reaches summit An Indian climber banned from Everest after faking a summit of the world’s highest mountain has successfully scaled the peak for real, telling AFP he returned to “prove” himself. Narender Singh Yadav claimed to have reached the top of the world’s highest mountain in May 2016. But…
It was the middle of May and my oldest daughter had heard me talking about the Sacrament of Confirmation a lot in recent weeks. One day in the car she said to me: “I thought about my own Confirmation. I nearly crashed the car – she had only just made her first Holy Communion last…
There are still people everywhere who believe there’s no longer any issue regarding the status of women. Widespread is the belief that today, at least in democratic countries, women enjoy full equality with men. As well, for many, feminism is a bad word, politically charged, representing a radical liberal ideology whose agenda is at odds…
Personal profile When Msgr Basil O’Sullivan entered All Hallows in September 1950, along with 33 other young men, he did so out of desire to be of service to the global Church. And since his ordination in 1956, he has spent his life ministering to the people of Scotland, a country where he gave and…
Fr Ronald Rolheiser
Ruadhán Jones