The summer used to be regarded as the silly season for current affairs, but I don’t think that holds true anymore. Sunday Morning Live, back on BBC 1 on Sunday mornings, has no shortage of topical religious and ethical issues to cover. Last weekend’s episode started with an illuminating discussion prompted by the recent attack…
Nobody reading this review is likely to have heard of Hugh Mahon. So why does he merit a biography – in fact a projected two-volume biography? The book to hand is the first instalment, with the second to follow in the not-too-distant future. Mahon was born near Tullamore in 1857, and lived in Canada and…
Dear Editor, The recent media and political reports about the young pregnant mother detained under the Mental Health Act 2001 show a large lack of knowledge of what suicidal ideation is and how mental health law works around it. If any person arrives to A&E in an actively suicidal state they are assessed quickly and…
Des Hanafin will have been an extremely familiar figure to many of the readers of this newspaper down the years. He was a long-serving Fianna Fáil Senator and a founder and the long-time Chairman of the Pro-Life Campaign. Des died last week, aged 85. He had been unwell for a long time but was still…
Colm Fitzpatrick talks to a Kerry priest who’s a part-time magician Fr Ger Godley, a name most fitting for a priest, has sparked the interest of many because of his bewildering magical talents. All starting with a magic set that he received for Christmas when he was a child, the native-born Kerryman has pursued the…
Pope Francis is first of all a shepherd who makes seeking out the lost and forgotten his top priority. But he also knows that wherever he goes, the cameras and news coverage will follow. He leveraged his pull on the media spotlight early in his papacy when he went to Lampedusa for his very first…
While it’s probably too much to say that Pope Francis has an explicit ‘Swedish strategy’, it’s becoming increasingly clear that Sweden has both a place in the Argentine Pope’s heart and a role to play in his vision of a ‘Church of the Peripheries’. In some ways, the plates had already been shifting in the…
Zambia’s president is guilty of intimidating opponents and silencing the media, according to the head of the Zambian Catholic bishops’ conference and other religious leaders in the east African country. Describing the country as being at a crossroads as it faces “many challenges related to governance, the muzzling of people’s freedoms and human rights violations”,…
The reported desecration of a Catholic chapel in the Philippines by terrorist gunmen has been condemned “in the strongest terms possible” by Cotabato’s Cardinal Orlando Quevedo. About 300 members of the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters, an ISIS-affiliated group known as BIFF, attacked Pigcawayan town on June 21, displacing about 1,700 people and destroying religious images…
Recognising that “all people are born with inherent equal dignity and worth and have a fundamental right to life” is at the heart of human rights, the Vatican’s UN nuncio has said. Speaking to Latin American leaders at the Organisation of American States’ general assembly, Archbishop Bernardito Auza voiced concerns over how “the right to…
Brendan O’Regan
David Quinn
Colm Fitzpatrick
John L. Allen Jr.