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You are > Home > Just
A Thought: Fr Brendan Hoban
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The perils of moving house
02 February 2012
I’VE JUST completed – or almost completed – my seventh move in 38 years of priesting. Even though moving house is up there with the death of a loved one on the stress scale, priests are used to moving. But it’s getting more complicated.
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Building new walls around Maynooth
25 January 2012
YOU MAY remember that last year a number of Cardinals and Archbishops visited Ireland to investigate the Irish Catholic Church.
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Paying for ministerial laundry in austere times
18 January 2012
As Alice in Wonderland famously remarked, words mean what we want them to mean. In the Irish Times recently, Fintan O’Toole questioned the use of the word ‘austerity’, one of the buzz-words of the day.
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Television memories of old
11 January 2012
THE older I get the more that childhood memories seem to set. Like jelly, they can’t be rushed – they need time to coagulate, to harden into rich experiences that can be remembered but not relived.
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Why I owe Bishop Tommy
04 January 2012
THE last week of the year saw the deaths of Bishop Thomas Finnegan, retired bishop of Killala, and Fr Seán McHugh, chaplain to the nursing homes in Ballina.
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Hitchens will now find out if he was right
29 December 2011
ONCE upon a time there were two bishops of Cork – one Roman Catholic, the other Church of Ireland – and each of them regarded the other as an imposter. It was, I have to say, a very unecumenical age. In any event the Church of Ireland bishop died suddenly and when the Catholic bishop was informed of the terrible news his only comment was: “Now he knows who’s the bishop of Cork!”
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Christmas is, well, Christmas
21 December 2011
OF all years there’s little appetite around for Christmas cheer. It’s as if the atmosphere of doom and gloom has festered into a studied resentment against the sights and the sounds of Christmas.
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A high price for millionaires
14 December 2011
WHO wants to be a millionaire? Once it was a song. Now it’s a universal ambition.
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Politicians must pay their way
07 December 2011
OUR new president, Michael D Higgins, is taking a voluntary salary cut – from €325,000 to €250,000. The cut – almost 25 per cent – reflects government plans to reduce the current presidential salary.
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Familiarity and contentment
30 November 2011
THE older I get the fewer the jewels of wisdom I seem to have acquired. When we’re young and foolish we imagine that it would be quite the opposite. But no, it takes time and space and silence for the great truths of life to set.
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‘All priests are fair game’
23 November 2011
THIS is what happened. For over two weeks in May of this year RTE One advertised over and over again an upcoming Primetime programme, called Mission to Prey.
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With the greatest reluctance
16 November 2011
ONE of my favourite television programmes is Yes Minister and its later sequel, Yes Prime Minister. Even though they were first transmitted in the 1980s they are as relevant (and as funny) as ever.
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Blinking out from the bunker
09 November 2011
SOME commentators have suggested that soon Rome – in the response to the investigation of the Irish Church – will request the resignations of most of the Irish bishops.
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The critical angle of approach
26 October 2011
SOMETIMES you can be so close to something that you can’t see it properly. The wood from the trees syndrome. Stand back and you get a better view.
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The writing is on the wall
19 October 2011
I HAD a letter the other day from a friend of mine who left the Catholic priesthood in the early 1980s. He’s now living in America, lecturing in a third-level college, married and has two teenage sons.
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