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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 […]
You have to hand it New York Orthodox Jewish community: the Irish Church leadership could learn a lot from them. When the Mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio – taking time off from marching in massive crowds against imagined rascism – decided to weld shut the gates of public parks and close down synagogues, […]
The interplay of trauma, existential insecurity, and general woe, and the story of mankind’s belief in another life, in God or in gods, seems to persist throughout the ages. We have the Great Flood accounts in both Gilgamesh and in The Bible — given in one as a story of man’s correction by his gods, […]
The global soul-searching over the issue of racism, contemporary and historic, that has taken place since the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis on 25 May has not escaped Ireland. It has taken many forms, some instructive, others less so. One of the most commented-on has been an investigation of the ways in which the […]
Fun fact: Iconoclasm was last in vogue, in the Christian world, during the reign of Leo the Armenian as Byzantine Emperor, from 815 to 843AD. Since then, most societies have shied away from the destruction of images of Jesus, because, well, it’s not very popular. Until now, anyway. A leading figure in the Black Lives […]
When everything else in life is stripped bare, God is the one certainty that we can cling to.
Ireland has very firm laws on animal welfare when it comes to food production. As might be expected, these laws aren’t in place so much because we love our animals, so much as that they’re in place because the European Union imposed them, and because the agri-food sector is so important to the economy. Having […]
A newspaper editor has accused former President Mary McAleese of “trying to give him a belt of her crozier”, after the former President wrote to the owner of his newspaper to complain that an article about her was “fake news”. Irish Catholic editor Michael Kelly revealed in his newspaper this week that McAleese had taken […]
“History is written by the winners” is a trite adage which was probably first circulated by some losers. Ever since, it has been used to cast a shadow of doubt over every account of struggles between human beings of which history purports to tell us. Searching through our past is a sacred pursuit. It is […]
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