Articles

A complete chronological listing of shorter pieces written since 1995.

Any of these articles that are not the copyright of a specified publication may be freely copied and distributed.

Articles are listed in inverse chronological order – i.e. more recent articles first.

  • Towards a New Evangelism III: United Christian Aid
    Doctrine & Life June 2001
    How the most awful of experiences - the murder of an only son - changed Michael McGoldrick and his wife Bridie when they turned to prayer. With the Mayoman Tom Lennon they soon set to work on behalf of some of the poorest in eastern Europe, proving again that the most effective evangelisation is heroic Christian action.

  • Towards a New Evangelism II: The Cursillo in Derry
    Doctrine & Life May 2001
    How the different and often deeply traumatic experiences of Derry men and women can become stories of deep Christian conversion, and how the 'Cursillo' evangelical weekend at Termonbacca monastery allows them to be told in a context of celebration and renewal.

  • Towards a New Evangelism I: What’s so good about the ‘Good News’?
    Doctrine & Life Apr 2001
    How are we to understand and practise 'evangelisation' in Ireland, in the aftermath of deep clerical scandal and the alienation caused by Christian fundamentalism? Do we first need to realise that the period of history known as 'Christendom' is over and to return to the church's original mission - to address the injustices that still foster ill health and serious want in Irish society?

  • Understanding the Downward Journey
    © Spirituality 2001
    To seek self-esteem by gaining the esteem of others is a mistake. That is the upward journey to acclaim, when paradoxically it is only through the granting of esteem to others - the downward journey travelled by Jesus - that we can find true happiness.

  • Protecting the Absolute Truth
    © Doctrine & Life March 2001

    Why the Creed needs to include the obligation of a love of neighbour that forbids us to even think of imposing our own beliefs upon anyone. And why we need to understand that Jesus subverted all power systems by refusing to compel anyone to follow him.

  • World and Church Revisited
    Doctrine and Life February 2001

    'Worldliness' as the seeking of esteem from our neighbour, a problem from which churchmen are not immune. Why we need to study the different senses in which the word 'world' occurs in the Bible if we are to agree on what needs to change, and on what should not.

  • The Myth of Materialism
    © Doctrine and Life January 2001
    In diagnosing material accumulation as materialism Catholic churchmen mislead themselves on its root cause - that uncertainty about our own status that tells us we 'need' the objects owned by celebrities. Bishops who constantly seek preferment to a more prestigious diocese have exactly the same problem.

  • Rejecting the poison chalice of church-state unity
    ©The Irish Times 2000
    Memory and Reconciliation, the Jubilee document by Pope John Paul II that acknowledged most of the mistakes of the Church under Christendom, did not provide a scriptural rationale for the principle of religious freedom, or acknowledge the danger of too close a relationship between church and state.

  • Craggy Island Revisited
    © Doctrine and Life 2000
    Irish Catholics can benefit from the catharsis of laughter at re-runs of 'Father Ted' - acknowledging what was truly absurd about so many of the conventions of lay/clerical protocol in 'Catholic Ireland'?

  • Bishop J.S. Spong’s ‘Why Christianity must change or Die’
    Post to Vatican II website, 1999
    Why Bishop John Shelby Spong's strategy for saving Christianity is sadly mistaken.

  • Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust: The Real Lessons
    © The Irish Times 1999
    If the Pope is the 'Vicar of Christ' can he be excused the challenge of risking reprisal against the church from an evil regime? That question needs to be asked in the debate over the role of Pope Pius XII in relation to the Holocaust.

  • Disempowerment in the Church
    © The Furrow 1998
    Nostalgia for the past could counsel the Irish clerical church to attempt to recover its lost power. Instead clergy need to seize the opportunity to make a clean break with the 'will to power', and recover the aspiration to be a church of service.

  • Why Ireland is Godless: Secularism as Divine Retribution
    © The Irish Times 1998
    It was the Catholic Church's preference for the Ancien Regime and social hierarchy that alienated it from the egalitarian drive of modernity and made much of Ireland associate belief in God with a snobbish past. In an important sense Irish secularism is God's verdict on this mistake.

  • Secularism and an Adult Church
    The Furrow 1997
    The Irish Catholic Church crisis can only be addressed by a recognition of the parallel crisis of secularism - the failure of the Enlightenment to deliver Utopia. Catholic schools cannot form adult Christians: only a new dialogue between clerical honesty and adult disillusionment can reverse the Irish church's decline.

  • Scandals in the Church
    Studies 1995
    Back then it seemed obvious that the shock of the Brendan Smyth scandal would jolt the Irish Church leadership into full transparency and accountability. How naive I was - yet the absence of these, and the consequent infrequency of frank adult dialogue between clergy and people, remains the critical weakness of the Irish Catholic Church.

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