How do we each play our part in passing on the Catholic Faith in today’s society? The Gospel reading for the fourth Sunday of Easter points us in the right direction. Jesus is depicted as the Good Shepherd –the one who lays down his life for his sheep. Sheep are known for their tendency to…

I spent my birthday last year at Knock. It was my first time going and I didn’t know what to expect. On the bus ride we prayed the rosary and there was a great feeling of peace and gentle anticipation. It was the celebration of 800 years of the Dominicans in Ireland, and Archbishop Anthony…

In the quiet coastal village of Ardmore, Co. Waterford, where the sea whispers against the cliffs and the rolling green hills meet the sky, a boy named Declan Deasy was born on November 14, 1930. Little did anyone know then that this child would grow into a man whose life would become a living testament…

There is a troubling aspect to civic discourse that is getting progressively worse. As a constituency, we (the Irish public, the ‘western’ public) seem increasingly less able to disagree without falling out, or to hold nuanced or contextualised positions on almost any aspect of civic engagement. This degeneration of discussion is in part fuelled by…

There is a poignant scene in the series The Chosen which, irrespective of our reaction to it, demands reflection. This is the scene: Just before curing Peter’s mother-in-law of a fever, Jesus has a private conversation with Peter’s wife. He begins by telling her that he knows how close they are to each other as…

How striking it was to hear the first words of Pope Leo XIV’s pontificate. They surprised, in no small part of course, because the world had never heard before from a pontiff born in the United States. But even more significantly, the first words he spoke as pope were not his own. Stepping out onto…

When two companions or close friends part company, they promise each other to stay in touch with each other. How is it possible to keep this bond of friendship alive, when they are physically separated? Like anyone else, who is close to us who is preparing to leave while packing, doing those last little jobs…

St Rita of Cascia is a unique saint, in that during her life she was a wife, a mother, and later, a nun. Born in 1381 in Cascia, a republic in the Umbrian valley of Italy, Margherita Lotti was the daughter of noble parents. Given the nickname of ‘Rita’ from her youth, St Rita was…

Last week, I managed to get my hands on a copy of a PhD thesis from 1987 entitled ‘The office and authority of the local prior in the order of Saint Augustine’ by one Robert Prevost, then a doctoral student only a few years older than myself. For years it had lain totally untouched in…