Catholic blogging is, in many ways, a thing of the past. My own thethirstygargoyle.blogspot.ie site was last updated a year and a half ago, for instance, with just two posts from the previous 12 months, while it’s been almost four years since the ‘Lux Occulta’ blog of the pseudonymous ‘Shane’ at lxoa.wordpress.com saw any new…
EXCLUSIVE Dublin diocese looks set to divert funds previously reserved for future priestly training to pay lay pastoral parish workers instead. It is believed this initiative comes straight from Archbishop Diarmuid Martin and is to be debated this week by the Dublin priests’ council. The move comes as the shortage of trainee priests continues…
Moves towards a parish-based ‘apprenticeship’ model of priestly formation would mean the end of the national seminary at Maynooth, a former professor at the college has said. Calling for prospective clergy to study theology in Trinity College Dublin rather than at St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, Boston College’s Prof. Oliver Rafferty SJ told The Irish Catholic that any…
Parish-based formation could have academic advantages, Greg Daly is told Every cloud, as the saying goes, has a silver lining, and if there’s an unlikely advantage to Ireland’s currently tiny numbers of seminarians it’s that it’s giving hierarchy an opportunity to transform priestly formation in the country. For Fr Eamonn Fitzgibbon of Limerick’s Mary Immaculate…
The Church may hold the keys to reviving civic society, a top Anglican theologian tells Greg Daly “Catholic social teaching,” wrote the Guardian columnist Andrew Brown some years ago, in a column otherwise largely critical of the Church, “and the attempts to produce an economics centred around the needs of humans, rather than of…
Under new plans being considered, men training to be priests would spend most of their time working in parishes rather than in the traditional seminary environment. It would see seminarians living in parishes with more time involved in active pastoral work alongside priests and lay pastoral workers and would, according to one bishop, give them…
A medieval friar may hold the keys to tackling modern confusion, Greg Daly is told Today’s young people have a natural craving for a coherent vision of the world and our universities are not helping them towards this, Fr Thomas White OP says, following numerous meetings with students and young academics in top universities…
A call from European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker for the EU to rediscover its Catholic roots is an invitation for politicians to bring Catholic values to bear in their work, Bishop Noel Treanor of Down and Connor has said. Addressing the spring assembly of COMECE – the European bishops’ conference – Mr Juncker spoke effusively…
Fr Aidan Troy, a priest who came to prominence shielding local schoolgirls from loyalist mobs in Belfast, has said families are terrified by conflicts between police and protesters in Paris, and that dialogue is the only way of ending the violence. Famous for his role in the Holy Cross Ardoyne protests in 2001, Passionist Fr…
A prominent Irish-American cardinal has used St Patrick’s Day to hit out at anti-immigrant rhetoric, and called on Catholics to look beyond stereotypes to see people as they truly are. “In the 1870s, the code images for Irish people were drunken apes,” Cardinal Joe Tobin wrote on Twitter. “The same sort of calumny is used…