Year: 2014

Seamus Ahearne muses about life in the context of the speculation about a new cabinet, the on again off again Garth Brooks concerts, Pat Rabbitte’s 20 second dismissal our own “new” missal and of course the letter from the bishops to the acp.
It reminds him that ‘the Word of God can be heard only when it is soaked up in human life and spoken with human accents.’

Eugene Cullen Kennedy is emeritus professor of psychology at Loyola University Chicago. In the National Catholic Reporter he comments on what motivates the catholic bishops of the U.S.A. under the leadership of Pope Francis.
“We must feel for these men trained to be one kind of bishop now searching for some way to become another. For this and other blessings already beyond counting, we may be grateful to the loving God who gave us Francis.”

Presiders’ pages for the Sundays of August have now been published on the ACP website

Brian Eyre, a married Catholic priest, in Recife, Brazil suggests it needs to be clearly stated and explained that marriage and priesthood are not irreconcilable and that obligatory celibacy is a discipline that can be removed without changing the nature of priesthood.

Over 50 years ago, a cardinal asked the Vatican Council: ‘Where’s the other half of humanity?’ In her own inimitable way, Mary McAleese last week posed the same question, writes TP O’ Mahony in The Irish Examiner.

Report of recent Clogher meeting:
“We must ask ourselves in all honesty if we are able to work effectively with people, because Priesthood of the future will be relational.”

Sean O Conaill, http://www.seanoconaill.com, states he is totally baffled by the apparent interpretation of some of the ‘Fall’ passages in Genesis as literal history in the recently published ‘Irish Catholic Catechism For Adults’.

Brendan Hoban, writing in the Western People, suggests that the prospect of attracting sufficient male celibate vocations is so remote and that the implications of the crisis so far-reaching that “Doing nothing is not just irresponsible but a counsel of despair. Denial is no longer an option.”

Brendan Hoban, in the Western People, reflecting on current controversies says that what really released the dam of anger and emotion was the revelation of clerical sexual abuse ­ and the failure of Church authorities to understand its enormity and to do something about it. The revelations on clerical sexual abuse gave people the freedom to surface and to name other resentments.

Reporting on the Tuam story has often been wild and sensational, and out of touch with known facts.
Padraig McCarthy