Some 20 years after predictions were made of a ‘Catholic restoration’, the Church finds itself lost in modern Ireland, writes TP O’Mahony

Pope Francis has beatified Pope Paul VI and declared that God is not afraid of new things as he concluded a remarkable meeting of bishops debating family issues.

Robert Blair Kaiser

Over 50 years ago, a cardinal asked the Vatican Council: ‘Where’s the other half of humanity?’ In her own inimitable way, Mary McAleese last week posed the same question, writes TP O’ Mahony.

As strong as the Catholic Church may have seemed, one of the reasons for the Pope’s 1979 visit was worry over its decline, writes Diarmaid Ferriter

Former president Mary McAleese has decried the Church’s treatment of five silenced priests, accusing Rome of operating through fear and imposing strictures on the clerics which “consume the truth”.

Fifty years on from Vatican II, Catholics are still split on what it actually achieved. Desmond Fisher wonders what next for a Church in crisis

Eighty years and a world away from its last staging in Ireland, the International Eucharistic Congress has returned to Dublin to the delight of devout Catholics and a marked indifference by the wider public.

The sight of married men baptising babies and presiding at weddings in the Catholic Church will be novel to the faithful.

YOUR two page special investigation (Keeping the Faith, June 24) continues to roll out the 40-year myth which should never have happened.

THE letter from Anne-Marie Desmond (September 25) about the ordination of women made my blood boil.

Roman Catholic sisters in the US will be questioned about their loyalty to church doctrine amid fears of a Vatican crackdown on liberalism in women’s religious communities.

YESTERDAY afternoon’s statement from the 18 Catholic congregations party to the scandalous Woods deal, which capped the religious organisations implicated in child abuse liability at €128 million, truly beggars belief.

LAST year 228 nuns died with only two women taking final vows to join a religious order.

ONE of the ironies of the career of John Charles McQuaid, Archbishop of Dublin from 1940 until 1972, and the towering figure of 20th century Irish Catholicism, was that for someone who had such presence and domination, he was a poor communicator.

In a concession to ultraconservatives, Pope Benedict XVI plans to loosen restrictions on the old Latin Mass, used by the Roman Catholic Church for centuries until the modernising reforms of the 1960s, a Vatican official said.

Pope Benedict XVI was leading a solemn ceremony today in St Peter’s Basilica marking the 40th anniversary of the end of Vatican Council II.

IT is proposed to make changes in the interior of the Augustinian Church in Galway.