Dear Editor, While politicians campaign on issues such as climate change, Trump-economics, migrant pressures, etc., they ignore the writing on the wall; our birth-rate is in free-fall.
In many parts of Europe, their birth rate has plunged to less than half that needed for replacement.
Our collective unwillingness to make a healthy family life possible leaves us powering towards unsustainability, social collapse and ultimately national extinction.
Instead of a Dáil focused on exclusion-zones, publicly funded termination-of-life policies, and so on, all shrouded in deceptively evasive language, we urgently need a campaign to empower, normalise and encourage support for family life.
This challenge to our very existence will not go away by itself. It needs to be acknowledged in this election. We need to work for a future receptive to life; to those that would come after us, otherwise we are merely rearranging the deckchairs on a rapidly sinking Titanic!
Yours etc.,
Gearoid Duffy
Lee Road, Co. Cork
The wealthy benefactor who saved Matt Talbot’s story
Dear Editor, In ‘Matt Talbot and friends’ [The Irish Catholic – November 7, 2024] Fr Hugh O’Donnell SDB refers to a Ralph [also known as Raphael Mary] O’Callaghan “who paid the cost of [Matt’s] funeral expenses”. In fact, that wealthy benefactor (who at the time resided at 15 Windsor Road, Beechwood Parish, Ranelagh) not only saved Matt’s body from being interred in an unmarked pauper’s grave. He also initiated the printing of the pamphlet (of which I alone, maybe, have a copy of the first printing) but for which Matt’s story would have been ‘buried’ likewise. Raphael’s own body was in an unmarked grave (on which people walked daily) for 89 years until a plaque was placed on it in 2023.
Yours etc.,
Joseph F Foyle
Ranelagh, Dublin 6
Priests need to tell people to make euthanasia and assisted suicide an election issue
Dear Editor, The Archbishop of Armagh has given a welcome lead recently by telling people they should lobby their politicians to oppose euthanasia and assisted suicide. There might be a desire by some people to end their own lives but there is no such right from God. Now, with an election coming up, this is a good time for priests everywhere to take up his call and tell their people to make this an election issue when candidates come to the door canvassing.
This is surely more important than the rate of VAT! It is literally a life and death issue for everyone because when euthanasia or assisted suicide is legalised at all, even in the most restricted measure at first, it will soon become widespread and no one will be safe who becomes incapacitated or grows old, which is all of us at some time.
There is by now an abundance of evidence from other countries of vulnerable people being bullied and manipulated into signing their own death warrants or having it signed unknown to them by fake friends who claim to be “acting in their best interest”. Suicide, which we all regarded as a tragedy up to this, will also increase and the efforts of those who campaign against it will be in vain. Furthermore, hospice care, so good at present, will also change for the worse.
Priests who stay silent now out of a pathetic fear of offending someone will not be spared either. They have just two Sundays to get the message across.
Yours etc.,
Prof. Richard O Connor,
Rome, Italy
Facebook community
Ask politicians where they stand in assisted suicide, Bishop Crean urges
“Problem is the vast majority of political candidates don’t align with core Catholic beliefs, be they Mass goers or not! Abortion or assisted suicide can never be accepted by believers no matter how much the establishment woke machine pushes it.” – J O’Brien
“The Sacred sense of life is deeply embedded in the Catholic tradition. It needs to be upheld by all the disciples who know how God is directing them.”
– Eileen Quinn Knight, Ph.D.
Priests are heroic community leaders
“While on first viewing, this is shocking and worrying, the deeper discernment is to ask what God is asking of us in the face of this change of era for the Church. All will be well.”
– Jim Deeds