Focus Ireland have warned that despite the number of people in homelessness dropping in December, there was a 14% increase in homelessness over the last year. Focus Ireland CEO Pat Dennigan said: “The fall in homelessness in December is very welcome and we hope this trend continues. However, it would be remiss of us not…
Religiously unaffiliated people, often referred to as “nones,” now make up the largest religious category in the US, according to a new report by the Pew Research Centre. Pew’s new report, released January 24, shows that nones now account for 28% of the total US population, outstripping the next largest group, Catholics, who make up 20%.…
There are good reasons behind why Lent begins as it does, writes D.D. Emmons Among the beautiful, meaningful and solemn ceremonies of the Catholic Church is the gathering of the Faithful on Ash Wednesday. This special day begins our Lenten journey. It is the start of 40 days of prayer, penance and almsgiving as we…
Consecrated Life Supplement Fr Bryan Shortall OFM. Cap. Consecrated life is the free and generous choice a woman or a man makes to follow God in the religious life, living with others in community and living the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. The man who feels he might have a call to live his…
Quinton Amundson According to the Catholic Civil Rights League’s database, at least 85 Catholic churches have been set ablaze or vandalised since the unproven discovery May 27, 2021, of 215 suspected unmarked graves near the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. Police are investigating the latest victimised house of worship, St Gabriel Catholic Mission Church in…
Is it legitimate to call Mary the ‘Mother of God’? Some Christians reject the title, saying it implies that God himself somehow has his origin in Mary. How could the Creator of all things, who depends on no one else for his existence, possibly have a ‘mother’? To understand why Christians have called Our Lady…
Consecrated Life Supplement In March we celebrate International Women’s Day. So today I want to tell you part of the story of Sr Nina Underwood MMM. I say part of the story because recently I read her account of being kidnapped by guerrilla fighters during a bloody civil war. But we will let that part…
Public sector unions can rightly be pleased with the 10.25% pay increase that they secured from the Government for their members late last week. Now, one in every three Euro raised in taxes is being spent on public sector pay and pensions. The Government has, so far, been tight-lipped on long-awaited ‘reforms’ and ‘efficiencies’ that…
Dear Editor, I read with great interest the interventions of my learned brother Prof. Tom Whelan. Fr Tom is very right that the local Catholics in these territories need the priests ‘ten times more than we do’. I am very much aware that my brother being versed in liturgy knows more than I do that…
Clonfert, Co. Galway, is the resting place of one of the most adventurous of Irish monks: St Brendan the Navigator. Stories of his seafaring inspired not only his contemporaries in Ireland, but later generations across medieval Europe too. Even in our time his story was a major influence on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and…