There are times when I wonder – is it just me? Or maybe it’s that the world has lost its way, lost its connection to the essential truths that act as a kind of anchor protecting us from a sea of nonsense.

Two pictures by James Crombie from the INPHO sports photo agency – one on the front page of The Irish Times and the other on last week’s Western People – provide a compelling and life-enhancing background to Mayo’s frustrating defeat by Donegal.

Rory McIlroy and Shane Lowry are among the most famous Irish sporting superstars at present.

The continuing decline in priest numbers in the Catholic Church – with the future heavily weighted by a phalanx of elderly priests – has created a mathematical certainty that within a few years a cliff-face is approaching when numbers will plummet.

The more books I buy and don’t get to read, the more I return again and again to the books I treasure. The practice has shaped a bit of advice I give to people who ask me to recommend ‘a good book’.

As I write, the headline on the front page of today’s Irish Times reads: ‘Pressure builds on Israel to halt Gaza offensive’.

I’m sure that I’m stretching my readers’ interest and my editor’s patience by returning to a papal theme for more times than I care to remember but this may be the last bite of that particular cherry.

What an extraordinary time the last few weeks have been for the overwhelmingly positive media coverage the Catholic Church has enjoyed. The illness and death of Pope Francis was followed by the election of our new pope, Leo XIV.

Today, May 7, 2025, the 252 members of the College of Cardinals, 135 who are under 80 and therefore qualify to vote, will enter the Sistine Chapel in Rome, where they will be traditionally corralled out of sight and out of reach until two-thirds of ...

Very few, I imagine, were surprised that the death of Pope Francis provoked such a widespread public response as different constituencies of interest lined up to pay their tributes.

A constant mantra today is that everything is changing and that all we can be sure of is that everything will keep changing. Some people are frightened by this, preferring to put the wagons in a circle and to try to keep change at bay.

Rome wasn’t built in a day. So the word goes. And Catholic Rome doesn’t move very far in a day, a year or even a lifetime. It’s why the famous Jesuit priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, composed a reflection on ‘The Slow Work of God’.

Recently, Bishop Donal Roche, Auxiliary Bishop of Dublin, said he was worried that the sacredness of the liturgy is being eroded by, for example, people looking for pop-songs at funeral Masses and wanting to bring up footballs and fishing rods in ...

People of my vintage will remember a time in Ireland when priests were so plentiful that in very busy parishes with teeming congregations, multiple priests were needed to assist with the distribution of Holy Communion.

When the history of the present time is written historians will agree that the key change that took place in the second Trump presidency will be the dramatic shift in the position of the United States of America in relation to the rest of the free ...

Almost 50 years ago now, Thomas Green S. J. , a Canadian (I think, or possibly an American), wrote a famous book called When The Well Runs Dry.

Instinctively, when a pack gathers to hunt down a quarry – whether hounds braying for a kill or a human being cornered by his or her critics – the fear (whatever its origin) is usually evident in the eyes of the hunted.

Last year, a total of 174 people lost their lives on Irish roads, according to statistics published by the Road Safety Authority (RSA). The deaths were the result of 160 fatal collisions across the country.

Recently I chanced on an article I wrote back in 2013 in The Furrow journal – the year Pope Francis was elected pope.

A friend suggested to me recently that what the Catholic Church needed now was a return to the days of religious persecution.

Fifty years ago, in the summer of 1975, in the bicentenary year of the United States of America, I spent six glorious weeks in sunny California. It was my introduction to the west coast of America.

Everything costs something. And elections are no different.

A few weeks ago, tickets for the Irish Life Dublin Half Marathon were thrown open to the public, and less than two hours later their website announced that the thousands of available tickets had been allocated.

Some years ago on a bracing sunny day, I visited Auschwitz concentration camp on the outskirts of Krakow in Poland, where more than one million Jewish men, women and children were murdered as part of Nazi Germany’s ‘final solution’ to the Jewish ...

Some weeks ago, Catholics celebrated (as we do every year) the Feast of Christ the King. It’s usually on the last Sunday of the Church’s calendar year – or the Sunday before the First Sunday of Advent. It usually falls around the end of November.

Christmas is coming – in fact it’s almost here – and the big news is that Santa Claus has, if not now then in the new year, a gift for everyone in the country, a sparkling new government.

It’s not news anymore that religion, particularly the Catholic religion, is now either no news or bad news. That’s obvious in both the general and the particular.

In the pause after the election campaign concluded and the last seat was filled, politicians and public drew a collective breath. Assessments included 'Not very memorable' and 'Much ado about very little'.

I remember well the famous election of 1977 when Jack Lynch led the Fianna Fáil party to a landslide victory with 84 seats and a whopping 21-seat majority.

Last year when US President Joe Biden visited Ballina and, from outside St Muredach’s Cathedral, addressed thousands of people encircled at every possible vantage-point around the loop of the two bridges, I thought of those who at a time of endemic, ...

At long last a proposal that could actually make a real difference to changing the ever-increasing statistics of road deaths and accidents.

Not too long ago when a competitive spirit between Christians of different denominations was the order of the day and religious identity seemed more significant than it is now, there were accepted benchmarks that underlined denominational labels.

Cardinal William Conway (Archbishop of Armagh and the leader of the Irish Catholic Church, 1963-'77) was known as ‘a cute man’ who had a talent for playing his cards close to his chest.

One of my favourite writers, A. N. Wilson, has written yet another book, Goethe: His Faustian Life – though I doubt (despite my own enthusiasm) that it will be a best-seller.

A lot can happen in a very short time. Or as the former British prime minister, Harold Wilson, was reputed to have said during one of the UK’s seemingly never-ending crises in the 1960s, ‘A week is a long time in politics’.

It goes something like this. You wake up. It’s the middle of the night. You are in your own home, but you don’t know where you are. You decide to get dressed but you can’t find your clothes. You decide to go downstairs but you can’t find the stairs.

“And they’re off” conveys a sense of excitement and expectation at the start of what everyone hopes to be, for better or for worse, a memorable even a life-changing and possibly historic event.

Remember the Grand Old Duke of York immortalised in the words of the nursery rhyme? Oh! The grand old Duke of York He had ten thousand men He marched them up to the top of the hill  ...

Have you noticed that, despite continuing to plummet in the polls, Sinn Féiners are smiling again. Probably, I suspect, for two reasons.

I may be wrong but I suspect that few of my readers took in the recent Electric Picnic, Ireland’s biggest outdoor festival.

I’m in a mildly reminiscent mood this week as I reflect on the recent death of the writer, Edna O’Brien, and the memories it evokes.

Almost 60 years ago when, with 83 classmates, I entered Maynooth College to study for the priesthood, we were given a number of books to guide us (as it were) on our way. One was Philips Meditations, another an introduction to meditation.

In the light of my reflections last week on the subject of priests’ changes, a reader both commends me for a column I wrote some months back and challenges me to comment on what he presents as a grim reality for priests (and people) in parishes now.