“Church archives and the records of ecclesiastical bodies such as religious orders of priests, nuns and brothers are what stitches together the rent and ragged fabric of Irish history,” says UCD’s Prof. John McCafferty, beginning an enthralling podcast on the Royal Irish Academy website, ria.ie. ‘In time of inquistion: preserving and using the archives of…
With the abuse crisis continuing to rock the Church at its highest levels, some thoughtful material is starting to be produced online grappling with the issues of abuse and concealment. Commonwealmagazine.org has published one of the most insightful and impassioned pieces in James Heaney’s article ‘Our myth, their lie’. “Ten years ago, I believed a…
“The Catholic Church is facing its most serious crisis in 500 years.” So, at any rate, claims Villanova University’s Prof. Massimo Faggioli in an article for the prestigious Foreign Affairs magazine entitled ‘The Catholic Church’s biggest crisis since the Reformation’. In an unusual move, the article can be read at foreignaffairs.com without registration, which at…
A diocesan website from the other side of the world may not seem the most obvious place for Irish Catholics to find relevant and fruitful reading but angelusnews.com, the news website of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles can be just that. While local and American news are obviously major points of concentration for the news…
Corruptio optimi pessima goes the old saying – the corruption of the best is the worst, and one of the most dispiriting things about the internal quarrels that have increasingly marked the English-speaking Catholic internet over the last few years is that commentators, publications, and websites that once were measured and thoughtful have become less…
Now that the dust is starting to settle after the World Meeting of Families and the papal visit, readers of The Irish Catholic may be wondering – especially readers who missed the WMOF pastoral congress or various papal events – how they can build on 2018’s unique highlights for the Irish Church. A useful starting…
It’s unlikely that there’s a more conspicuous or remarkable example of Catholic art in the modern world than Antoni Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia basilica in Barcelona, described by Pope Benedict in 2010 as standing “as a visible sign of the invisible God, to whose glory these spires rise like arrows pointing towards absolute light and to…
“It’s funny, I haven’t seen any outcry from ‘pro-life’ organisations about the treatment of children at the border,” observed author and columnist Jessica Valenti last week on her @jessicavalenti Twitter account. It was, she claimed, almost as though such organisations couldn’t care less about “actual babies”. Retweeted over 70,000 times, it’s worth reflecting on in…
Before the establishment of the Varangian Guard, when the Byzantine Emperors took to taking Vikings into their service to act as bodyguards, there were the Excubitors. In the mid-5th Century, before the last Western Roman Emperor was deposed, the Eastern or ‘Byzantine’ Emperors established an imperial guard known as ‘Sentinels’ or ‘Excubitors’. With the old…
After criticising Damian Thompson’s execrable spectator.co.uk podcast about the referendum in a recent Web Watch, it seems only fair to point to a far better spectator.co.uk piece on the referendum this week. ‘What really happened in Ireland’s abortion referendum’, a ‘Coffee House’ column by Wicklow-born but London-based Melanie McDonagh is marked, as perhaps inevitable nowadays,…
Greg Daly