The Vatican City State tribunal has ordered the opening of two tombs in a small Vatican cemetery at the request of the family of Emanuela Orlandi, a young woman who disappeared in 1983. Emanuela Orlandi, a Vatican City resident and the daughter of a Vatican employee, disappeared in Rome on June 22, 1983, when she…
The vision of modern Irish saints needs to be told, Martin O’Brien learns By any standards, Dr Gladys Ganiel, a distinguished Queen’s University Belfast academic, formerly of the Irish School of Ecumenics, Trinity College Dublin, must be among the most remarkable Americans ever to have made their home in Ireland. One of the foremost…
The Editor-in-Chief and US CEO of the UK-based Catholic Herald have left the company against the background of disagreements with board members over the magazine’s November 2018 American expansion. July 4 saw longtime Herald Editor-in-Chief Damian Thompson announce on Twitter that he and the magazine’s “new owners” did not agree on the company’s “future direction”,…
Tourist arrivals to Sri Lanka rapidly declined in June, showing the severe economic impact of the Easter bombings on the Indian Ocean island nation. The Sri Lanka Tourism Development Authority said there were 63,072 tourist visits to Sri Lanka last month, a drop of 57% compared with June 2018, when the number was 146,828. The…
France’s Catholic Church pronounced a priest guilty of sexually abusing multiple Boy Scouts over several years and defrocked him last week, an unusually strong move that reflects France’s growing reckoning with clergy sex abuse. The ruling by a Church tribunal was the latest development in a case with repercussions that reached the highest levels of…
Jacobites: A New History of the ‘45 Rebellion by Jacqueline Riding (Bloomsbury, £25.00) John Bruton I have greatly enjoyed reading this new history of the 1745 Rebellion. It appears at a very appropriate time. I read it during my recent visit to Scotland, during which I was at Glenfinnan, where Prince Charles Edward first raised the…
Madison Duddy hears a chaplain’s advice to students returning home from college When every academic year comes to a close, students are forced to pack their things, leaving a life of freedom as they head for their hometowns. After the initial enjoyment of free food and clean laundry wears off, college students realise they…
Claims that the Vatican has whitewashed a history of women priests and bishops must be taken with a pinch of salt, writes Greg Daly “It used to be said that facts speak for themselves,” observed the English historian E.H. Carr in his classic 1961 book What is History? “This is, of course, untrue,” he…
100 days to a Younger Brain by Dr. Sabina Brennan (Orion Spring, £14.99) Dr Christopher Moriarty Recent decades have seen profound changes in human life and understanding: people are living longer and research workers have been equipped with instruments and techniques that have led to an understanding of the minutiae of how the brain functions.…
Simone Weil once commented that it’s not enough today to be merely a saint; rather “we must have the saintliness demanded by the present moment”. She’s surely right on that second premise; we need saints whose virtues speak to the times. What kind of saint is needed today? Someone who can show us how we…
Martin O'Brien
Greg Daly
Fr Ronald Rolheiser