Month: October 2016

Has Faith any chance in a tabloid culture?

Articles, Editor's Choice
10 Comments

Seamus Ahearne once again challenges us with his musings on the interaction, or lack of interaction, between our faith and modern culture.
“How can a tiring priesthood be pioneers of a new way of sensitising hearts, minds and imaginations? In a world devoted to celebrity culture and to tabloids and to Bake offs and to cheap politics – what hope is there for faith? Brexit and Trump are extremes of the crudity of our culture but they do infect us. Give me poetry. Give me art. Give me music. Give me the privileged half-door into the hearts of people. Give me God. May the colours of autumn stir our souls.”

Honouring the Dead: More respect or just more rules?

Editor's Choice
11 Comments

The CDF has issued new instructions ‘regarding the burial of the deceased and the conservation of the ashes in the case of cremation.’
The text is included for your information.
Are these instructions needed or is the cdf instructing people on an issue they have long since decided for themselves? Will these instructions impinge on how priests interact with bereaved parishioners?

Time to Break Out

Articles, Editor's Choice, Pope Francis
1 Comment

Pope francis urges bishops to be vigilant over who they admit to the seminary as world needs “mature and balanced” clergy according to a report by Christopher Lamb in www.lastampa.it
The report continues ‘Priests must leave their “fortresses” ‘ says Francis and also quotes him as saying ‘the Church should stop reducing Catholicism to a “recipe of rules” while clergy needed to break out of their closed worlds.’

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CHRISTOPHER LAMB

3rd International Conference of Church Reform Network; Chicago, October 2016

ACP News, Reform of the Irish Church
9 Comments

Tony Flannery reports from Chicago on the recent 3rd International Conference of Church Reform Network.
” A wide range of issues were discussed and worked on. The one I myself was most involved with had to do with the need for some type of Declaration of Rights in the Church. We believe that at all levels in the Church there is a lack of accountability in the exercise of authority, and little or no means of appeal or redress. A group, of which I am a member, was set up to work on this over the next year.”

Ground-hog day in abortion debate

Articles
6 Comments

Brendan Hoban in his Western People column takes a look at the debate on abortion and how current opinion polls are indicating outcomes to the ongoing discussions and disagreements in society. But, as he says, ‘ who knows how extremists on both sides of the debate will eventually, by campaigning not wisely but too well, alienate their own ‘supporters’, as they are prone to do.
In any event, I suspect we have a long way to go.”

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