It is now commonplace in Ireland to present the Catholic Church in the most negative terms. Sometimes this is deserved, but on its own it leads to an unbalanced view of the Church in Ireland and in the world more generally. In practice, very few people are well informed about the history of Irish Catholicism. In an important new essay for the Dublin Review of Books, the Jesuit historian, Fr Fergus O’Donoghue, offers a necessary corrective to the current, caricatured understanding of the Church in this country.

Read more here

 

Love—caritas—will always prove necessary, even in the most just society. There is no ordering of the State so just that it can eliminate the need for a service of love. Whoever wants to eliminate love is preparing to eliminate man as such. There will always be suffering which cries out for consolation and help. There will always be loneliness. There will always be situations of material need where help in the form of concrete love of neighbor is indispensable.

~ Pope Benedict XVI