I am writing this article while in Rome on Dominican business. By the time you read it, not only will I be back in Ireland, but there may very well be a new pope. As you can imagine there is only one topic of conversation in the city, be it in a shop, taxi, restaurant,…

The ethics of artificial intelligence When friends were transcribing a mound of material recently, I shocked myself by asking. ‘Why aren’t you using AI?’ I have significant moral objections to the use of AI. The foremost one is that it is based on systemic theft of intellectual property. Large language models were trained on vast…

The first pope I ever saw in the flesh was Paul VI, indeed he is the first pope I can remember. My parents had somehow won a package holiday and that included a day in Rome. It was 1975 and a Jubilee Year. I can’t remember exactly what time of year it was, probably spring…

Singer-songwriter Simona Congi adores music, but it was not until she met a Catholic record producer that she changed her playlist. She realised she had been listening to many popular songs with dark, or demonic themes. “All my Taylor Swift songs had the word ‘devil’ in there somewhere,” she told The Irish Catholic.  “I ended…

I hadn’t heard the word ‘neurodiverse’ until about a year ago, when a teacher friend mentioned the condition was increasing among school pupils. Since then, I’ve been aware of this widening diagnosis in children and adults. As I understand it, ‘neurodiverse’ basically means human brains function in different ways; but some people who are neurodiverse…

If there is a morality tale of our time, it may plausibly be woven around the sad story of Virginia Giuffre, Jeffrey Epstein, Prince Andrew and Ghislaine Maxwell. In the tumult of what was known as ‘the permissive society’ – more accurately, a licentious society – two lives have ended in suicide, one in irrecoverable…

As the world is caught up in the death of Pope Francis, it is also being drawn into a great mystery: the life of the Church – and our faith in the Lord’s resurrection. Almost from the moment Christ rose and departed the tomb, the lies began. Indeed, the first conspiracy theory was concocted in…

Catholic marriages and civil marriages are now almost neck and neck, according to the latest figures from the CSO. Soon enough, there will be more civil wedding ceremonies than Catholic ones. In addition, Ireland’s marriage rate has now dropped to the lowest level ever recorded, outside of the Covid years when we were locked down…

It may seem like a funny thing to say, but Pope Francis’s funeral last week got me thinking about fashion. Following the televising of the funeral and publication of photos of the various dignitaries in attendance, social media was alight with comments about who was wearing what, or rather criticisms about how inappropriately some (notably,…