Anybody watching St Patrick’s Day festivities with a thoughtful eye last weekend must have wondered what exactly was being celebrated. Was it Irishness? Maybe so, but that’s missing the point of the day in spectacular fashion: St Patrick’s Day is, after all, a celebration of the gift that Patrick and other missionaries brought to Ireland,…
Taoiseach Leo Varadkar’s call for a new relationship between Church and State remains an important call for dialogue, Dublin’s Archbishop Diarmuid Martin has said. “So far no progress has been made by the Government in developing the Taoiseach’s idea of a Covenant,” Archbishop Martin said yesterday about Mr Varadkar’s Dublin Castle speech during the papal…
Making a willingness to perform abortions a job requirement for consultant doctors threatens the training and recruiting of hospital staff, Ireland’s bishops have said. In a statement following the Spring 2019 General Meeting of the Irish Catholic Bishops’ Conference, the hierarchy “noted with regret the pre-conditions for applicants listed in the recent advertisement for a…
Priests and people in the Diocese of Ossory need to take ownership of local pastoral needs to ensure parishes face the future in a healthy and dynamic way, Bishop Dermot Farrell has said. Speaking to The Irish Catholic about his pastoral letter ‘A Pathway for our Parishes’, Bishop Farrell said change is already afoot and…
The failure of the Irish Church to hold a nationwide mission as requested by Pope Benedict is “disappointing”, a Rome-based priest has said. In his March 2010 Pastoral Letter to the Catholics of Ireland, the then Pope had listed concrete actions the Church in Ireland could take to renew itself, among which, he said, should…
Irish people setting out from Sarria to walk to Santiago de Compostela will find the scenery through which they make their way oddly familiar. Lush and green, it could hardly be more different from the parched plains so emblematic for many of the modern Camino, and will strike many as being almost Irish. They’ll not…
Understanding religion is vital for understanding Ireland, writes Greg Daly One would think that the obvious theme of Prof. Kevin Whelan’s Religion, Landscape & Settlement in Ireland would be that it’s impossible to make sense of the Irish landscape without considering the role of religion, but this isn’t even the half of it, he…
There’s a rich vein of Catholic writing in the modern Irish canon, Greg Daly is told “It is a curious thing, do you know,” observes a friend of Stephen Dedalus, James Joyce’s alter ego in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, “how your mind is supersaturated in the religion in which…
Minister Josepha Madigan should concentrate on tackling poverty and inequality in Ireland rather than complaining about the Church, Bro. Kevin Crowley has said. In a letter to The Irish Catholic, the leading homelessness campaigner appeals to the minister to use her influence with the Taoiseach and other Government ministers to champion the cause of fighting…
The conviction for abuse of a top Vatican cardinal looks highly suspicious, writes Greg Daly “What a load of garbage, and falsehood, and deranged falsehood,” Cardinal George Pell had retorted when questioned by police about allegations that he had sexually assaulted two 13-year-old choirboys in 1996. It’s the kind of brash, blunt comment for…