The cause for canonisation of Argentine businessman Enrique Shaw took another step forward this week as the alleged miracle attributed to his intercession passed the medical stage and will now be evaluated by a commission of theologians of the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints. The vice postulator of the cause and the military bishop…
Who couldn’t use a miracle right about now? After weeks of parties and packages, planning and platters, the world returns to something vaguely normal. Our waistlines are bigger, and our to-do lists are smaller. Christmas is in the rear-view mirror. The trees have been tossed to the curb. The lights have burned out. The toys…
September 5 began like any other day in Munich 1972. The Olympic Games were taking place there. Everyone was excited. Mark Spitz had just won his seventh gold medal in eight days. Then terror struck. Or to be more precise, terrorism. Eleven Jewish athletes were taken hostage by five members of a commando wing of…
An ongoing row over the closure of the Franciscan Friary in Clonmel shows little sign of a resolution as TD for Tipperary South Mattie McGrath says he’s going to Dublin to confront the Provincial of the Franciscan Order whom he claims has ignored his correspondence. Recent developments have seen aggrieved members of a prayer group…
US President Joe Biden spoke with Pope Francis last Saturday and named him a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom with distinction, the White House said in a statement. As the nation’s highest honour, the medal is “presented to individuals who have made exemplary contributions to the prosperity, values, or security of the United States,…
Mark Patrick Hederman explores the life and legacy of the Jesuit scientist/theologian In a nutshell I would describe him as ‘a mystic in a mouse trap.’ I would rank him with Gerard Manley Hopkins [also a Jesuit] as a poet who has left us with several beautiful thought-provoking images: treatises on the Eucharist, on the…
Edinburgh: A New History, by Alistair Moffat (Birlinn, £14.99 / €18.00) Edinburgh: The autobiography, edited by Alan Taylor (Birlinn, £20.00 / €24.00) I am always astonished when Dubliners extol the graces of Georgian Dublin, thinking to myself that they can never have seen Edinburgh to make such a statement. Undoubtedly the New Town of Edinburgh…
St Anthony the Great or St Anthony the Abbot was born in a village on the left bank of the Nile, Egypt, in the 3rd Century AD. At the age of 20, moved by the Scripture verse “Go, sell what you have and give to the poor” (Mark 10:21), renounced everything he had to live…
Last Sunday the Feast of the Baptism of Jesus marked the end of the Christmas period. Jesus moved from his private life – the carpenter son of Mary and Joseph – into his brief public life: the three short years of his ministry. We are told, “while Jesus after his own baptism was at prayer,…
Pope Francis, on January 9 speaking to the members of the Diplomatic Corps accredited to the Holy See, raised the issue of fake news. “We see increasingly polarised societies, marked by a general sense of fear and distrust of others and of the future, which is aggravated by the continuous creation and spread of fake news.…
Brandon Scott
Aubrey Malone
Peter Costello
Nuala O’Loan