Archbishop Charles Scicluna of Malta has voiced his sadness at negative reaction to the Maltese bishops’ new guidelines on the implementation of Amoris Laetitia. Following the January 13 issuing of Criteria for the Application of Chapter VIII of Amoris Laetitia which advised priests that divorced-and-remarried Catholics who are “at peace with God…cannot be precluded from…
Three feast days are approaching next week – all within just a few days of one another! The feast day you are probably most familiar is the feast of St Brigid on February 1. So you will no doubt be gathering bunches of rushes this weekend to make St Brigid’s cross. Traditionally, her crosses are…
Darragh McGann Darragh McGann describes how a year of loss and illness brought him back to God With the exception of two years, I have lived all of my life at home with my mother. My dad died before I reached the age of six and having been adopted as a baby, I didn’t have…
Ireland never lets go of an Irish heart. The further we go from our homeland, the stronger it calls us home. French Canadians were never known for singing maudlin ballads lamenting the day they left Paris. English immigrants to Australia were not known to weep out of a heartfelt yearning for Suffolk. Yet we Irish…
Andrew Carpenter Jonathan Swift: The Reluctant Rebel by John Stubbs (Viking, £25) It is hard to know what to expect from a new biography of Swift so soon after Leo Damrosch’s massive Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World (Yale University Press, £10.99pb) in 2013, especially if the latest book is clearly designed for the…
The Editor Regrets… by James Good (Lettertec; copies from the author, Parkview, Church Street, Douglas, Cork) Ah yes, what novice contributor to the press has not received one of those rejection slips that give Fr James Good of Cork the title of his collection of essays, largely unpublished? As his own publisher, Fr Good can…
Friend of the Poor. Mary Aikenhead: Woman of Vision, Commitment and Inspiration by Rosaleen Crossan (Columba Press, €12.99) Pope Francis declared Mary Aikenhead to be Venerable on March 18, 2015. This is the first step towards canonisation. It was a much deserved accolade. Mary was born in Cork on January 19, 1787. Her father, David…
It’s hard to imagine a more inflammatory title for a blogpost than ‘Catholic pro-lifers at the Women’s March? Get used to it’, but American blogger Simcha Fisher has never been one to pussyfoot around. Writing at simchafisher.com, she starts with a bang. “Were you surprised, even shocked, to see Catholics and other pro-lifers joining in…
Leading campaigners tell Greg Daly about the realities of Ireland’s worsening homeless crisis DePaul CEO Kerry Anthony describes herself as a naturally optimistic person, but faced with the worst homeless crisis that she has seen in 20 years of working with homeless people, she occasionally finds herself asking herself in dismay how we have got…
Well, for better or for worse, for richer but hardly for poorer, it was Trump week. The dust had hardly settled on Martin Luther King Day when the media went into overdrive in anticipation of inauguration day. I can remember the hype for Obama’s first inauguration, and there were indeed some touching and emotional moments,…
Erin Fox
Rory Fitzgerald
Greg Daly
Brendan O’Regan