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A national Church collection will be held this weekend of 22/23 July to fund life-saving aid for people currently affected by the devastating hunger crisis in East Africa.  The money raised will go directly to Trócaire’s emergency response, which is helping to deliver food, water, healthcare and other life-saving aid to people affected. Severe drought, driven by climate change, is currently affecting Kenya, South Sudan, Somalia and Ethiopia and this has resulted in failed harvests and the widespread Read more…

‘Offer it up for the Holy Souls’, ‘there’s another angel in Heaven’, and ‘God only sends you a Cross you can carry’. These are examples of phrases that whilst having some little kernel of wisdom in them, are also examples of the types of phrases that can really annoy and upset people. Granted they may well be offered with the best of intentions, nevertheless they can irritate. Somehow they appear just a little too neat, too trite. It reminds Read more…

Happy Holiday!! Believe it or not this phrase is causing considerable annoyance amongst some Americans and indeed some Irish people. In itself it is of course harmless. The trouble comes when it is promoted as a politically correct way of wishing someone Happy Christmas, or Happy Thanksgiving. It is designed to ensure no offence is caused. It is promoted as a sensitivity to those who do not believe in Christmas. In fact it is an attempt to show a Read more…

Anyone who knows me and knows my awful track record in Maths will not be surprised at the above. I am sure there is no way it makes sense numerically nor is it a sensible equation or formula. Perhaps the only place it makes sense is in my head. Hopefully you can bear with me. I have never used mathematics in the rumblings and today is no exception. It just looks like it. Everyone knows one plus one equals Read more…

It was the night of August 16th 1977, I was sitting watching the news with my parents. News at Ten with the bell booming out the time and the gongs corresponding to the news items had just started. We all got a shock when we heard the ITN newscaster, Reginald Bosanquet in most sombre tones pronounce The King is Dead! This was accompanied by a picture of a young Elvis Presley in a pale blue shirt. Elvis Presley Read more…

Yes apparently it’s time to bin the Church. This sentiment was expressed just the other day. What surprised a lot of people was that this idea was expressed in the National Parliament, Dáil Éireann, by not only one of our publicly elected representatives, but one of our very own local representatives here in Ballyfermot. I must say I was further surprised by the source of this comment, not that I thought we would agree on everything, but I thought Read more…

Well how did the BBB go? The BBB? Now what might the BBB be? That would be the Big Birthday Bash? Last week was the Church’s birthday. Last week on June 4th we celebrated Pentecost, the great feast of the Church. Pentecost Sunday is the day in the year when we celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit and I was just wondering how did it go for you? What was your Pentecost celebration like? Of course I am Read more…

In the past ten days the name Salmon Abedi has been in the news quite a lot. The media have described him as ‘evil’, ‘a monster’ and the ‘devil’s child’. If you have not yet worked out who he is, Salman Abedi is the young man who is now known as the Manchester concert bomber. There can be no doubt that the act of targeting a pop concert where so many young children were innocently enjoying themselves can only Read more…

They say everybody loves a story. I think this is true. From when we were small children the idea of being told a story was very attractive to us. The bedtime story that soothed us to sleep, or the first stories that we read for ourselves, are logged somewhere in our memory. Perhaps there was a time in our lives when we liked stories that frightened us, perhaps now we would prefer to be comforted. Some stories make us Read more…

Recently I was a little alarmed to hear someone, whom I thought would know better, display a huge ignorance with what happens at Mass. Of course there are many things that happen at this beautiful and most extraordinary of experiences that we call The Mass or The Eucharist, including sorrow for sin, the communal expression of what we believe in the Creed and a missioning back into the world to spread, and indeed live, the Gospel. However at the Read more…