This year is the 40th anniversary of the release of Monty Python’s Life of Brian. The film met with instant controversy in 1979 and was banned in Ireland, Norway and parts of Britain. In the US, protesters gathered outside cinemas where it aired.

AN UNREFORMED and unreforming papacy will serve only to extend and exacerbate the crisis that has blighted the Catholic Church since the second half of the pontificate of Pope Paul VI, who died in 1978.

A Vatican researcher rekindled the age-old debate over the Shroud of Turin, saying that faint writing on the linen proves it was the burial cloth of Jesus.

ROGER COTTRELL’S critique of “flawed Marxism” (Irish Examiner letters, April 24), especially in relation to the Rising of 1916, was as good an example of pure farce as we are likely to read in any of the national dailies.