Five words, delivered during a homily on Ash Wednesday, have never entirely left me: “You all have to change,” the priest declared rather prophetically on March 6, 2019. He did not know that four women in our Falls Road congregation had been told the previous night that their vocation as Sisters of Adoration was over.…
Easter might be late this year, but Lent has come early for a group of Irish men, who have signed up for ‘spiritual bootcamp’. While the Lenten journey is 40 days, an estimated 1,000 Irish men are about halfway through a 90 day experience – which includes daily cold showers and no television. “It’s Lent…
In the book of Genesis, we hear God tell Cain: “Your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground.” And these words echo, in my own heart, each time the media revisits the assassination of John F Kennedy, whose Irish roots run deep into the soil of County Wexford. He was the first…
It was a simple enough question, posed by a priest who had entered religious life as a youth around 50 years ago. “What is a priest’s ‘job’?” My first thought was: bringing the body and blood of Christ to us through the power of the Holy Spirit, the greatest ‘job’ in the world. But that…
It’s almost 300 years since the Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin penned his famous satirical essay, A Modest Proposal. The Anglo-Irish writer Jonathan Swift famously suggested the impoverished Irish, burdened by parenthood, need not go hungry. All they had to do was sell their own babies as food, like livestock, to wealthy English…
The band played The Battle Hymn of the Republic, as the culture wars exploded at Donald Trump’s inauguration in Washington last week. “We will forge a society that is colour blind and merit-based,” the American President declared, as he announced an end to government policies which try to socially engineer race and gender into every…
The story of a nun’s diary, found in the dust of a derelict house, captured my attention the other day. It came from a rather unexpected source: the author and republican, Danny Morrison, who I first met as a political correspondent in Belfast, long before I ever considered entering a convent myself! Mr Morrison had…
Her name was Luca, but her family called her Pearl, and she was one of eight children born into the Henry family in Charlestown, Co. Mayo. Her parents came from a line of teachers whose legacy could be traced to 1844 and the “hedge schools” where the poorest in society got an informal education. In…
In modern culture, it is still fashionable for reporters to be dispatched to hospitals to find the first-born of 2025. Children, whether the media admits it or not, remain the world’s most valuable resource. “The best hope for the future,” was how former Irish American President, John F. Kennedy, put it. And so, north of…
Counting down to 2025, an old child’s riddle came to mind: “What time is it when the clock strikes thirteen?” The answer is obvious: “Time to buy a new clock!” Though frankly, if it had been reported on RTE that the clock in Times Square had struck thirteen, as 2024 expired, would any of us…