Radio Maria Ireland

Sinéad Strong of Catholic Mothers Ireland looks ahead to the Abide in His Love women’s conference in Bundoran, Co. Donegal, from 20 to 22 November, with two of the women taking part. Keynote speaker Sarah Swafford, a mother of six whose children range from twenty down to three, is coming to Ireland for the first time with her father as her roadie, and she describes the lie she says the devil has told her all her life and what she has learned about families that only look good from the outside.

In the second half, musician Danielle Nun...

In this episode, Eileen celebrates the feast of All the Saints of Ireland with a quiz on which saints belong to which places, from the patron of Dublin to a Kerry sailor known as the Navigator, and a Clare-born saint with a story involving bees. There is also a litany of Irish saints, the Our Father and Hail Mary in Irish, a few lines from St Patrick’s Breastplate, and a challenge for the week to find out about a saint whose name is on a place near you.

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In this episode of Little Big Questions, Fr. Darren answered a question from Mary, who is seven and lives in Co. Armagh. She wanted to hear about Fr Darren Brennan’s parish pilgrimage to Assisi and what we can learn from St Francis. Fr Darren described the town as the story of five churches, one of them holding the cross that spoke to Francis, and another the tomb of a saint wearing jeans and Nike trainers.

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Fr Adrian Crowley devotes this Catechesis to Niall McDonough, the young Galway man whose recent death has moved so many people, and is joined by Niall’s close friend Colin. Fr Adrian never met Niall, but he has heard him speak of a day when he lay in his bedroom staring at the ceiling and picked up a small book. Colin describes what came after that day: mission in Brazil and the Bronx, three years in a New York seminary, a deep love of Our Lady at Medjugorje, and a peace through his illness that left visitors feeling that he...

Naoimh Barbieri is joined by Noreen, whom she first met over tea and tart at a kitchen table in Co. Tipperary. Noreen had stopped believing and gone to Medjugorje in 2010 only because a dying friend had no one else to go with her, and she describes what happened there at half past six one evening. Years later, working in addiction treatment, she found herself unable to help her own teenage son, and she tells how he came to enter Comunità Cenacolo and what she saw in his face when she visited him in Italy. Naoimh also invites listeners to t...

Mary and Fr Eamonn McCarthy turn to the parable of the ten bridesmaids for the 32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, and to the question most people quietly ask on hearing it: why are the sensible bridesmaids praised for refusing to share? Their answer has to do with what the oil stands for and why some things cannot be handed over. Mary shares a story she heard at a First Communion Mass in Rathkeale about a boy, a stained glass window and a definition of a saint, and Fr Eamonn finds an unexpected illustration in the oil delivery that arrived...

With Matthias Conroy away this week, Fr Eamonn McCarthy continues alone through Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas, paragraphs 135 to 144, on communication, the collective imagination and the central role of schools. He sets out what the document calls an ecology of communication, and a simple rule for using technology that he suggests is worth bringing into any conversation with young people. Drawing on his own time in classrooms, Fr Eamonn asks what short videos and instant answers are doing to children’s capacity to learn, and why Pope Leo turns to a line of Plato about flint to describe how...

John Carlin speaks with Pallottine priests Fr Charles Lafferty and Fr Liam O’Donovan about the mission of St Vincent Pallotti and his vision of a Church in which every baptised person has a part to play in evangelisation. With priests increasingly stretched across Ireland, they explain their plans to bring parish missions to communities, offering a week of Mass, adoration, confession and talks while giving parish priests some much-needed respite. They also discuss the legacy of Frank Duff, the hunger for faith among young people, and why the future of the Church depends on lay people recognising that th...

Matthias speaks with Irish folklorist and historian Michael Fortune about the Irish relationship with death, and why the wake and funeral remain such important expressions of community and remembrance. Michael shares unusual customs from across Ireland, from leaving crosses on roadside trees as a funeral passes to the practice of wearing a deceased loved one’s clothes for several Sundays after their death. He also explores the traditions that have survived in the Irish diaspora, and the importance of recording these beliefs before they disappear.

L'articolo New Guest Interviews – Michael Fortune: The Irish and Death prov...

Deacon Don Devaney speaks with Pat Kenny, chairman of the Father Willie Doyle Association, about the progress of the cause for the Irish Jesuit priest who gave his life rescuing wounded soldiers during the First World War. With the diocesan phase now complete and more than 3,100 pages of evidence heading to Rome, Pat explains what happens next and why the work of promoting Father Willie’s cause is only beginning. He also shares a remarkable story of sacrifice in the trenches, when Father Willie offered his own back as a bed for a sick doctor.

L...

Aoife Collins welcomes Pat Reynolds back for a second conversation, this time about the Holy Family Mission at Glencomeragh House, where young people spend nine months living in community and being formed in the faith. Before that, Pat picks up his story where it left off: a chance meeting with an ex-girlfriend the day before he left for Ireland, the first words spoken to him at Knock by the woman he would later marry, and a priest’s call he discovered was not his. He also describes the meeting with Bishop Alphonsus Cullinan that got the mission started, what it...

Fr Peter George Flynn tells how St Francis came to be buried on the hill outside Assisi where executed prisoners were once laid to rest, and the canonisation miracle involving a prisoner in Rome that helped decide it. He is then joined from Assisi by an Irish Conventual friar who lives at the Sacro Convento and guides visitors through the basilica, for a virtual tour from the lower church and the tomb up to Giotto’s frescoes. Along the way they discuss why the basilica went up so fast, what happened when Francis’s remains were put on public disp...

Aiden and Deacon Don continue through Genesis, turning this week to what Aiden calls the incommunicable attributes of God, the things about God that belong to him alone. Don raises a question many listeners will have carried for years, about loved ones who have died by suicide or suddenly, and Aiden answers from the Catechism and the story of a priest who found peace about his own grandmother. They also discuss why confession is not the end of the matter when something has been taken, and Don has a small, practical habit about paying for petrol. The hour closes...

Fr Peter George Flynn admits he would advise most people to spend their money on something other than a tattoo, then asks whether there is actually anything wrong with getting one. He looks at what Leviticus forbids and why, how the rabbis interpreted it, and why St Augustine found the tattoos of Roman soldiers a useful way of explaining baptism. He also tells the story of a cranky old Polish parish priest who always wore long sleeves, and of a tattoo parlour in Jerusalem that Coptic Christians have run for nearly three hundred years.

If you have...

In the week of All Saints and All Souls, Carmela is joined by Fr Aidan McCann, who was reminded on his drive to the studio of something a philosophy lecturer once said about autumn and death. Fr Aidan explains what makes a saint, why heaven will never be boring, and why some saints will have more glory than others. He recalls what the children of Fatima were told about a seventeen-year-old girl from their parish who had died, and what that answer does and does not mean, before Carmela asks about the Brown Scapular and Fr Aidan offers an...

Mary Stenson opens November with prayers for the holy souls, details of the 46th anniversary Mass for Frank Duff, and the life of St Martin de Porres, the Dominican brother from Lima whose feast falls on the day of the show. She returns to León Ó Broin’s biography of Frank Duff for the story of Celia Shaw, who swapped her evenings of bridge for a rescue home on Harcourt Street, and of the clerical dinner where one elderly priest warned what would happen if Duff was not stopped. The hour closes with Duff’s own advice on visiting people...

Deacon Thady presents the Breakfast Show from Charlotte, North Carolina, where a visit to the Billy Graham Library has left him thinking hard about Christian unity and what Catholics and evangelicals each have that the other needs. In the second half he shares an interview recorded in Houston with Sister Rachel O’Keeffe from Rathmore, who came out to Texas in 1955 to join the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word, the order his wife Carmel’s aunt joined ninety years ago. Thady also tells how the order’s founding bishop wrote a cheque he had no way of coveri...

Having finished Theology of the Body for Beginners, Nick Koeppel turns to Love and Responsibility, the book that grew out of lectures on sexual morality given by Karol Wojtyła as a young philosophy professor in Lublin, years before he became Pope. Chapter one starts a long way from the bedroom, with a question about what makes a person different from every other thing in the world, and arrives at what Wojtyła calls the personalistic norm. Nick also takes up the objection Wojtyła himself faced at the time: what can a celibate priest know about any of thi...

Ahead of the feast of All the Saints of Ireland on 6 November, Eileen opens with St Patrick’s Breastplate and a look at the Confessio, one of the oldest pieces of writing to survive from Ireland. She explains how most Irish saints came to be recognised long before there was any formal process of canonisation, and visits Clonmacnoise, Glendalough, the Book of Kells and the Ardagh Chalice, found by a young man digging for potatoes. There are also some lesser-known saints, including one said to be St Patrick’s sister, with a holy well on Valentia Island and somewhere betw...

Why do we laugh, and why would God create a world in which laughter exists?

From giggling babies to playful rats, science reveals the extraordinary origins of laughter and its effects on our brains, bodies and relationships.

But what does the Bible tell us about laughter, and did Jesus himself have a sense of humour?

We explore the wit of the saints, the wisdom of St Thomas Aquinas, and why laughter can survive even in the midst of suffering.

Ultimately, could laughter be one of God’s most remarkable gifts — a glim...

Donal O’Sullivan Latchford and Fr Eamonn McCarthy take up a word that has quietly become one of the most important in public life: consent. They start with the row over an advertisement that seemed to ask grandparents to think twice before hugging their grandchildren, and move to an All Souls’ Day debate about whether infants should be baptised before they can decide for themselves, along with a radio presenter’s comparison involving Hotel California. Is consent being made to bear more weight than it can? Fr Eamonn also explains how to gain the November indulgence for the holy souls...

Fr Peter George Flynn takes on censorship, a tricky subject anywhere and especially in Ireland, where the censors once cut Casablanca and banned a film made to honour a persecuted Hungarian cardinal. He then turns to the Church’s own Index of Forbidden Books: what it was for, who was allowed to read the books on it, and how Galileo, a founder of a religious order and a future saint all found themselves listed. Fr Peter also explains what the end of the Index in 1966 did and did not change, and admits to a childhood prejudice that one popular no...

Harry talks to the poet Sally Read, whose guide The Secrets to Reading Poetry: Unlocking the Language of God came out the day before the interview. In spring 2010 Sally was an atheist living near Rome, furious with the Church and arguing by email with a Byzantine Catholic priest, when a line in a novel she had read a dozen times suddenly stopped her. She describes the three experiences that followed and where they led, why she thinks contemporary poetry lost its music, and her children’s book Belle and the Joyful Mysteries, in which a bored ten-year-old falls into th...

Back in Rome after his annual retreat at home in Wexford, Fr Billy Swan presents the Breakfast Show and looks back on All Saints’ Day, which fell on a Sunday this year. Drawing on a year of writing a weekly column on the saints, he reflects on the communion of saints and what the saints had in common, and gives his view on what Halloween has become. The second half looks ahead to the feast of All the Saints of Ireland, and to a conversation Thomas Merton once had with a friend that changed his life, and why Fr Bi...

Caroline Busher is joined by Emma Andrews and Breda Broderick to discuss Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl’s account of surviving the Nazi concentration camps and the school of psychotherapy he built on what he saw there. Breda has wanted to read it since she was seventeen, and both reviewers find in it something close to the old Irish habit of offering it up. Breda, though, is not sure the book should be read on its own, and she has a suggestion for what to pair it with. The full reading list is at https://radiomaria.ie/book...

Eoin Brennan and Fr Peter George Flynn reach chapters 17 to 19 of Dom Lorenzo Scupoli’s The Spiritual Combat, where the advice is to pick one main attachment and plan for it in advance, and then, on the subject of lust, to do the opposite and run. Eoin asks why anyone should flee from something God created good, and why it is so rarely preached about from the pulpit, before sharing some of his own story. Fr Peter has a view on the old parish missions, and on the one way chastity most easily gets lost after it is won. Th...

Margaret broadcasts from the Lee Valley as the beech trees turn, with listener questions on a paddle plant in Bantry and a poinsettia that survived last Christmas and now needs to turn red again, which means keeping it in complete darkness for a very particular number of hours a day. November is the month for tulips, and she explains how to plant them so they look like they grew there. She finishes with a story she heard from a priest at a conference in Knock about why the apparition there was a silent one, though there isn’t time to...

Deacon Don Devaney marks the fourth anniversary of God’s Healing Power Hour with a prayer to the Holy Spirit for the gifts, fruits and charisms, and a reflection on what each of them looks like in ordinary life. He talks about the miracle that kept him alive six years ago, about a burial where the family asked for no prayers at all and what he said to them, and about a picture someone once saw of him on a narrow path by the sea. With November under way he also explains how to gain a plenary indulgence for th...

Fr Maurice Colgan and Rohan Healy reach part five of the DOCAT, on the family as the foundation of society. First, though, Fr Maurice asks Rohan, a musician and producer who was baptised as an adult only a few years ago, how he came to the Church, a story that begins with a question from a friend in a band and runs through a very Dominican set of encounters. From there they turn to Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers, why a person’s worth in a family can never depend on their usefulness, and what the housing cr...

At the start of the month that opens with All Saints’ Day, Paul McAree leads the Eucharistic Divine Mercy Holy Hour with a question: what actually makes a saint? He starts with a tongue-in-cheek report on the apostles, supposedly sent to Jesus by the Sanhedrin, and then gives seven things he says every saint has in common, some of them less flattering than might be expected. The hour then moves through the Passion in prayer, from the anointing at Bethany to the tomb.

For more reflections and lead prayer with Paul, click here.

L'articolo Eucharistic Di...

Caroline tells the story of Simon Peter, beginning in a small fishing boat caught in a storm before dawn, with a light coming towards it across the water. From there the story goes back to Simon as a boy who was born fighting and could never quite pay a compliment, and who once broke his little brother Andy’s nose. It is a story about a man who was sure he was not good enough, and what Jesus saw in him anyway.

Listen to more episodes and hear the stories of Adam and Eve, Noah and many mo...

Mary bakes Iranian barbari bread, shaped into individual rolls rather than one flatbread two feet long, and serves them the traditional way as part of an uncooked Persian breakfast of bread, cheese, herbs and nuts. She explains where her fascination with Persia began, with a family who came home to her town with illustrated stories, and asks what Our Lord and his first followers might have eaten first thing in the morning. There is also a theory about which kind of bush was burning when Moses saw it. The recipe card and step-by-step photos are on the Radio Maria...

With Halloween just past, Fr Peter George Flynn takes up the question of ghosts: do they exist, and if they do, what might they want from the living? He works through the ghost scene in Hamlet and the story of Saul and the medium of Endor, then turns to two sermons by St Augustine on that same passage, lost for centuries and rediscovered only two months ago. There is also the story of a priest’s filing cabinet that would not stop shaking.

If you have been affected by any issues raised in this episode, Samaritans can be...

Eoin and Fr Chris Garrett continue with the seventh commandment in the YouCat, taking in slavery, the environment, the treatment of animals and why the Church has a social teaching at all. Eoin describes what he saw on Halloween night at St Teresa’s Church on Clarendon Street, including a man dressed as SpongeBob SquarePants. Fr Chris explains why he stopped eating meat in the seminary, why Pope Leo XIV may be facing a turning point like the one Leo XIII faced, and whether a Catholic can in good conscience be a judge, a politician or an obstetrician.

John and Eoin take on approval addiction: the need to fit in, to be liked and to be told we are doing well, and how easily it can pass unnoticed as the thing steering our decisions. Eoin describes a 1970s experiment in which one person in a room of twenty was asked a very simple question, and what happened when everyone else gave the wrong answer. They also look at what the martyrs had that made them unafraid, and at a habit recommended by St Alphonsus Liguori that Eoin says will keep anyone in check.

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On All Souls’ Day, Fr Peter George Flynn explains the plenary indulgence the Church offers for the holy souls in November, and why those in purgatory can do nothing to shorten their own time there. Along the way he answers a listener’s question about whether the Pope’s Urbi et Orbi blessing amounts to general absolution, and recalls what St Teresa of Avila was shown about one ordinary sister in her convent. He also considers how broadly the Church defines a cemetery, from Glasnevin to a crossroads near his own parish in Fairview.

If you have been a...

Naoimh Barbieri welcomes Fr Marius O’Reilly back to the Breakfast Show to talk about the First Saturdays devotion asked for at Fatima, and the national First Saturdays conference coming to Knock on 28 November. Fr Marius tells of a boy Sister Lucia met while taking out the rubbish at her convent in Spain, and of a Japanese man who told a Catholic priest that war in the world was his fault. Naoimh, who grew up going to Mass with her mother on first Saturdays without ever quite knowing why, asks what the devotion really involves, and whether children can ma...

On the eve of All Saints, Matthias Conroy talks to Bishop Denis Nulty of Kildare and Leighlin about the saints who have walked with him through his life, from the namesake his family has passed down for generations to the Hill of Slane a few kilometres from where he grew up. The bishop explains why he chose the feast of St John Vianney for his own ordination, which saint came out on top when Ireland voted for its favourite at the Ploughing, and which uncanonised people he still talks to every morning and evening. He closes with a litany...

Fr Adrian Crowley continues his series on the saints as teachers, asking what each one has to show us about ordinary life. He moves from St Ignatius, bedbound for six months after a cannonball broke his leg, to St Thérèse and her little way, and on to Matt Talbot, whose turning point came on the night his friends refused to stand him a drink. Along the way come a soldier’s tearful encounter with St Jacinta of Fatima, the advice St Philip Neri gave his priests about choosing what to read, and Fr Adrian’s own memories of mak...

Matthias and Father Eamonn finish chapter three of Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas and open chapter four, paragraphs 127 to 134. The discussion turns on the document’s claim that we become fully human only by becoming more than human, and on the suggestion that the trouble with transhumanist dreams may be that they don’t go far enough. From St Augustine’s two cities the conversation moves to truth as a common good, Hannah Arendt on the ideal subjects of totalitarian regimes, and what an AI-driven election campaign in the United States and a student movement in Serbia reveal about wh...