I wasn’t aware until quite recently who Rosie O’Donnell was. And even though she starred in the film Sleepless in Seattle, her name didn’t ring a familiar bell. An American comedian, Donald Trump has had her in his sights for some time.

Now that the merger of Killala and Tuam dioceses into a new ecclesiastical unit edges ever closer and the curtains are being drawn on ‘the way we were’, I’ve been throwing my eye over the soon to be defunct dispensation that was once Killala diocese ...

As I write the news headlines remind me that in Dáil Éireann this Tuesday morning, the Cabinet has its standard weekly meeting with, on its main agenda, housing. Or should that be - housing, housing and housing.

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.

As I write, the Democratic Party in America is struggling to cope on four fronts: a series of gaffes on television that made President Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential election inevitable; the electoral gain its rivals, the Republic party, ...

Once upon a time, the annual announcement of priests’ changes – usually in June or July – was one of high points of the summer.

Joe Biden, most recently the toast of Ballina and the great hope of the Democratic Party in the upcoming US presidential election, now finds himself in a no man’s land.

Three weeks ago in this space, I wrote about the organised attempt by extreme traditionalists in the Catholic Church to undermine the reforms that Pope Francis is now anxious to introduce – change that was supposed to be implemented 60 years ago ...

One of my favourite columnists is Liz Dodd who writes for The Tablet, an English Catholic paper, and sometimes in The Sunday Times.

In the end, the results of the local and European elections were all about trust. Trust – and the lack of it. A sub-text is how sophisticated Irish voters are, when the chips are down.

Pope Francis gives interviews all the time. Generally on informal occasions he tends to favour delivering a few off-the-cuff remarks. Even when his words are misinterpreted and clarifications need to be issued later on, he loses no sweat over it.

For political egg-heads the prospect of three elections – local, EU and general – is manna from heaven but for those who at best tolerate elections, not so much! And not too far ahead, for the really smitten election enthusiast, there’s the added ...

Pope Francis gives interviews all the time and has no problem, even in the most informal of circumstances, delivering off-the-cuff remarks to the delight of reporters, ever anxious to file up-to-the-minute copy.

As a young man, the spiritual writer, Henri Nouwen was travelling around Ireland. In Donegal, he witnessed an ‘Irish’ burial, watching it over a stone wall.

A Dublin parish priest recently took exception to what he regarded as critical comments about priests by Pope Francis and Fr Tony Flannery in The Tablet, a weekly Catholic periodical.

Why would anyone want to be a politician in Ireland? The late John Kelly, a Dublin TD and UCD academic, once justified his own obsession with politics by suggesting it originated out of a desire to serve his country.

Recently, the once-well-known BBC literary pundit, Joan Bakewell, was asked: ‘How old is old?’ Now in her 90s, she dismissed the question as ‘old hat’.

When I was 13 or so and a boarder in St Muredach’s College, I was given the honour of serving Mass every morning for the then Bishop of Killala, Patrick O’Boyle, who lived adjacent to the college.

If memory serves me right, the song ‘Fools rush in where angels fear to tread’ was issued as a single by Glenn Miller and his Orchestra in 1940, the second year of World War II.

Last Tuesday (April 9) could be called Simon Harris Day as Dáil Éireann, the media, Fine Gael and others pulled out all the stops to celebrate the political beatification of a new Taoiseach.

As the inevitable encroachments of old age continue apace, and with the space we oldies inhabit progressively constricting, people of my vintage find ourselves musing about the state of the world.

On a recent Faith Alive! programme on Mid-West Radio, in the wake of Leo Varadkar’s resignation as Taoiseach, I made the comment that I thought the response in the Dáil to his final Leader’s Questions was less gracious than it might have been.

In today’s papers (as I write) there’s a report on an investigation by the Garda Anti-Corruption Unit into the activities of a Garda unit based in the Dublin area. Four officers have been arrested and are currently suspended from duties.

As I write, a sea of daffodils outside the window reminds me that, though yet early enough in the year, Winter has begun to pay its reluctant homage to another Spring.

As the RTÉ cameras scanned the crowd at the State funeral of the former Taoiseach, John Bruton, it lingered on the faces of the great and the good – those expected to be present and a few who seemed out of their comfort zones.

It would be gratuitous not to congratulate Michelle O’Neill of Sinn Féin (SF) and Emma Little-Pengelly of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) on their day in the sun.

I remember very well the evening of Friday, November 3, 1995. How could I possibly forget it? For the first and last time, I was a guest on the panel of The Late Late Show – with Gay Byrne then in charge of RTÉ Television’s signature programme.

Archbishop Charles Scicluna is a busy man with three heavy responsibilities.

John Henry Newman (1801-90) was a famous Anglican clergyman who converted to Catholicism in 1845, was made a cardinal in 1879 by Pope Leo XIII, and was canonised a saint in 2019.

In the All-Ireland Football Club final last year, Watty Grahan’s Glen (based in Maghera, Derry) fell short by one point.

The title of last week’s RTÉ documentary, The Last Priests in Ireland, reflected the grim reality for Irish Catholics – no longer a perception or a wild prophesy – that priests are not just becoming fewer but in danger of almost disappearing in ...

There’s a story told (and it’s true) about a visit the late Cardinal Conway paid to Enniscrone Golf Club many years ago. An avid golfer, Conway was accompanied by his classmates, Bishops Tommy McDonnell and Paddy Mulligan.

I’m not too sure who counted them (or how it was done) but apparently 60,000 swearwords were broadcast in Britain last year.

For the first column of another new year, let’s take a subject of some importance: has religion a future? The doubters used to say that when science had explained all the mysteries of the world and when we were all millionaires, that we’d no longer ...

At present, I’m researching and writing a chapter for a book to be published in America this year (2024). The book is the third in a series entitled, Heroes.

Christmas is, well, Christmas. It demands our attention. It insists that we defer – even if only once a year – to liturgies, religious and personal, that we sense we need to remember and repeat. Practices that have become hallowed by time.

It’s a given wisdom – though our unionist fellow-Irishmen and women would not easily agree – that there is much the present residents of our divided and disunited Emerald Isle – North and South – hold in common.

To go to the country, or to not yet go to the country, that is the political question. For the date of the next General Election is on the mind of every politician in Ireland, whatever they might say in public.

Despite sharing the most common surname in Ireland (and a popular girls’ first name), Ashling Murphy’s profile now seems indelibly etched on the public consciousness.

After the Covid-19 lockdown, a father was questioned by his daughters as to what he missed most during the long months of isolation. He thought for a moment and replied: "A lot of things but mainly two: going to Mass and attending funerals.

It appears that the experience of participants in the recent October synod created something of an unlikely buzz in Rome.

Now that the first part of Synod 2023-24 in Rome has drawn to a close, a 40-plus page report from Synod 2023 provides a synthesis of progress to date.

As I was ordained in 1973, that year became a pivotal point in my life for that and for a variety of other reasons.

According to the findings of a recent Irish Times/Ipsos opinion poll, 40 per cent of the Irish public will not pay their television licence fees this year.

The recent Positive Ageing Week is a timely reminder for us – Oldies, Seniors, Elders, OAPs, Old Fogies or whatever we call ourselves now – to Always Look on the Bright Side of Life, as the song has it.

Budgets are not what they used to be. Once they were significant, even formalaic occasions with their own set rubrics and liturgies.

Boris Johnson and Donald Trump are birds of a feather that once flew together.