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Recently, I spent some time on the phone with Niall Ferguson, the Scottish historian and Milbank Family Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, for a review I was writing of his latest book, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe. In the first chapter, Ferguson refers several times to religion as “magical thinking,” and I asked him if he […]
Amidst all the tiresome controversy around the proposed ethos of the new national maternity hospital, which is now slated to cost, naturally, some €800m, one thing has been forgotten: The Sisters of Charity, in an act of timeless folly, volunteered for this public whipping. After all, they are choosing to donate the land on which […]
Thank God for Mary McAleese. It was shaping up to be a fairly slow news day today, ad we were sitting around scratching our heads wondering if anything at all would pop up that was slightly interesting, and worth writing about. Thankfully, Mrs. McAleese has come through to save the day by saying something immeasurably […]
From 2012 to 2017 the decision to relocate the National Maternity Hospital at Holles Street to a site on the Elm Park campus of St Vincent’s Hospital in Dublin, owned by the Religious Sisters of Charity, created sustained levels of public controversy. Indeed, the proposal was attacked from every side of the political and cultural […]
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 […]
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