This is a new one on me, to be honest. I wasn’t aware Cardinals got a salary, as such, and certainly not anything this generous. If this Gript thing doesn’t work out, that’s my next career move, for sure: VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis has ordered cardinals to take a 10 percent pay cut and […]
The question in the headline is not one which you really should be asking, in a modern western democracy, but asking it appears to be necessary. Consider this story from Chai Brady, a very good reporter with the Irish Catholic: A Co. Cavan priest who has not prevented parishioners from attending Mass in the church […]
The Vatican’s latest affirmation of marriage as the lifelong union of one man and one woman is presented as an unfeeling even judgmental rejection of the love of same sex couples. It is however just a re-iteration of the Church’s well considered understanding of what Scripture and Jesus have to say on the subject. The […]
Some of the left in Ireland can see the ‘far right’ everywhere, it seems: it’s their very own conspiracy theory, fueled by a mixture of paranoia, intolerance of anyone with a different opinion, and a strong dislike of religion. All these elements seemed to coalesce perfectly in this stupid-but-nasty tweet from Councillor Anthony Flynn who […]
A bit of a hangover from yesterday, which we didn’t get around to, but worth writing about anyway. Honestly, Mary, you’d be so much happier if you just left the Church and became a Protestant. Or a Muslim. Or a Hindu. Literally anything really. Why is she doing this to herself? The Catholic Church’s failure […]
Abolishing the Angelus on RTE is one of those perennials that pops up in the pre-occupations of Ireland’s dominant cultural class a few times a year. Sometimes it’s in silly season, when the press are looking for a story, but more commonly it’s when news stories about the nation’s past surface which tend to inflame […]
In a recent study, Bethany Gull and Claudia Geist identify two paths leading to men’s increased housework participation—one non-religious and egalitarian, the other religious and family-centered. Their results surprised them, as they had expected conservative religious men to have lower housework participation due to their traditional gender ideologies. We were not surprised by their findings. We suggest there […]
At some point in the 20th century history of Ireland, it was decided that the single worst thing you could be was an unmarried mother. It was so bad, in fact, that the words themselves were rarely spoken. Daughters – some of them still of childbearing age today – were warned not to “get into […]
Obviously, he’s not literally a Protestant. You’d hope they’d have noticed that when they interviewed him for the job. But judging by this interview he gave to the Irish Times last week, he’s more a Henry VIII loyalist than a Thomas More man: Dublin’s Catholic archbishop-elect Dermot Farrell has said he would like to see […]
Even in a covid prioritizing world, there is something strange and no doubt significant about the low level reaction to the beheading of a schoolteacher on a Paris street last month. The equally tepid response to the equally barbarous killing of three people, in no way associated with the provocation, in a Nice church over a […]
Our latest progressive reform only applies, it should be noted, to those schools which are fully under the control of the state. If your child attends a diocesan school, then he or she will still be able to learn in a classroom adorned with religious symbols, and will still have a graduation mass, and all […]
There’s been some sustained criticism of the Archbishops in recent days for their seeming passivity on the question of whether people should be allowed to go to mass during the lockdown, including from Gript columnists like Professor Ray Kinsella, writing here. And don’t the critics have a point? What’s the point in having Archbishops in […]