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Brendan Hoban in the Western People reflects on the decision of the Anglican communion to ordain women as bishops. He concludes that change will have to come in the Catholic Church as well , whether we like it or not. It will be measured and careful, but it will come because it has to come because the Catholic Church has to face the inevitable truth that the Eucharist is more important than celibacy.

High Time for ‘Elder Wisdom’ At a time when specialists in elder care in the UK are advocating the installation of CCTV in every room in every care home (to…

Brendan Hoban in the Western People maintains that if novelist John Updike believed that God could be found in a perfectly struck five-iron approach shot to the green, then surely there’s a spark of something other-worldly in the impossible swerve of a Messi or the immaculate balance of a Van Persie.

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

Brendan Hoban, in his Western People column, questions what has effectively become an institutionalised gambling culture in Ireland.

Donal Dorr offers some suggestions of how to deal with the problem of the ‘new Missal’.

This study has been commissioned by the ACP in order to ascertain the views of Irish clergy regarding the New Missal, introduced in November 2011.

» Download the New Missal Survey Results here

Brendan Hoban, in his Western People column wonders whether we’re able at all to use the intelligence God has given us and to assess reasonably what fits or doesn’t fit within the boundaries of our faith, what makes sense and what’s just plain, well, daft.

The death has occured, on Thursday 29 May, at Crofton, Maryland of Fr. Paul Surlis

Brendan Hoban offers his thoughts, in his weekly Western People column, on Mary Kenny’s ‘Something of Myself and Others’. He says it is an entertaining and worthwhile read, surely the best insight there is into the life of the carer. Kenny dissects compellingly, in this brutally honest memoir, the lived experience of a carer’s life.

Hannah Roberts reports from Rome for The Tablet that Italian Bishop Nunzio Galantino wants the church to listen to diverse opinions of topical matters.