Wijngaards Institute’s tribute to its founder John (Hans) Wijngaard, 1935-2025

Pádraig McCarthy has re-formatted ‘The Joy of Love’ on A4 pages as a downloadable and printable PDF file.

Has the world gone mad?  Nuclear obliteration and environmental annihilation have never come closer.  How should Christians be responding? Sheila Curran Followed by Q & A 7.30 pm Wednesday 26th…

Brendan Hoban writing in the Western People argues that as long as Bishops don’t listen to people and priests “we (as church) relegate ourselves to the sidelines because we present ourselves as controlling and demanding, refusing to listen or engage with the issue.”
Brendan also suggests that there is a crying need for competent church people to be used to communicate effectively with media and public. “Not every bishop is blessed with the ability to think on his feet or to manage the combination of words that does justice to what he wants to say.”

An edited version of this article by Peter Stanford about the bishops’ meeting in Rome to discuss clerical sexual abuse appeared recently in The Observer.
“It is an appalling moral failure and needs to end now, but that will involve rethinking an entire approach to sexuality in Catholicism that is peculiar, punitive and often plain perverse. The Jesus of the gospels had almost no interest is such matters. Why does the Church leadership? “

Note: In response to many queries as to when and where seminars and retreats are taking place and as a means of ordering books from the Wood You Believe series,…

In his weekly Western People column Brendan Hoban ponders the question that many are asking themselves this week, ‘how will I vote’, because “come Friday, there’s no middle ground between Yes and No.”