The Children’s Home in Tuam is perhaps the most notorious example of the depravities of Catholic Ireland, and the nuns who ran it have become a byword for cruelty. But the reality of what happened could turn out to be more complicated

In 2023, the government of Ireland offered three new postgraduate scholarships for research into childhood disadvantage. The scholarships were established “in memory of the children who died in Mother and Baby Institutions” and the scheme was named after a remarkable woman called Alice Litster (1894-1980).

A Call for a New Reformation by John S. Spong

In the 16th century the Christian Church, which had been the source of much of the stability of the western world, entered a period of internal and violent upheaval. In time this upheaval came to be called the Protestant Reformation, but during the violence itself, it was referred to by many less attractive adjectives. The institution that called itself the body of Christ broke first into debate, then acrimony, then violence and counter-violence and finally into open warfare between Protestant Christians and Catholic Christians.

My initial reaction to the statement from the Vatican ruling out the possibility of women being eligible for the diaconate in the Catholic Church was one of great sadness.

This development has something of the same feel for me as the papal document, Humanae Vitae, of 1968 declaring that the use of artificial means of contraception was a serious sin. One of the great problems with that document was that it emerged from a ‘shadowy’ group of male clerics in the Vatican — largely nameless – and that it went against what was then the developing consensus among the members of the Church.