Cathal Barry explains that Church Tradition is preserved by the bishops as successors to the apostles

A forthcoming law will be the most far-reaching attack on the family, writes David Quinn

The late President Kennedy is remembered fondly, in Ireland, as the first Irish-American President of the United States – although he wasn’t quite the first: there were quite a few Irish-American presidents before him, but they were from Ulster-Irish (generally Presbyterian) stock and that, somehow, discounted them. But JFK was the first Irish Catholic American…

I'm back in Australia after two months in Europe, including Ireland. I find it difficult to overestimate the rate and depth of change I witnessed and the collapse of a phase of the Church's life that is currently underway. Throughout the world, but particularly in Ireland, the sense of the end of an era that…

The right word makes the Word become flesh, writes Fr Ronald Rolheiser

"What were you expecting, lady?” asked the gun-toting Israeli soldier of the late Maeve Binchy. “A Renaissance table set for 13?” Maeve was visiting the bare church at the site of the Last Supper in Jerusalem and was stunned to find that it didn’t resemble what she had imagined. Her belief in the “special Irish…

Many of us, I suspect, know about the work of the renowned anthropologist, Rene Girard and the dissemination of his insights through the work of his student, Gil Bailie. With gratitude to them, I pass along one of their insights, an invaluable look at how we try to handle resentment in our lives. When astronauts…

The Irish Times carried an extraordinary story recently of a woman who got pregnant on her lunchtime break, using anonymously donated sperm from the Danish firm, Cryos.  What gave the story an added twist is that the woman is adopted, and had spent her whole life wondering “what it was like to look like somebody”.…

Globalisation is not something that is done to us, it reflects our choices, writes John Bruton