Nick Maxwell SECULAR FRANCE AND CATHOLIC FRANCE SET ASIDE THEIR DIFFERENCES AND ABLY USED RELIGION TO BENEFIT THEIR CAUSE DURING THE WAR By Oliver O’Hanlon One hundred years ago, in the middle of the First World War, a small group of French clergymen visited Ireland. News of their visit was reported in the Irish, British and French … Read more
When they returned to France, Fr Pierre Batiffol wrote an account of their trip in the Catholic daily newspaper La Croix. A longer description was recorded in a French Catholic magazine in November 1916. This was republished the following year in pamphlet form as Notre visite en Irlande. This 56-page pamphlet recounts the packed itinerary … Read more
The war had brought the French State and the French Catholic Church much closer than they had been for some time. Ever since the French Revolution of 1789, anti-clericalism had become an increasingly common feature in the country once referred to as ‘the Eldest Daughter of the Church’. This culminated in the 1905 law on … Read more
THE AUTHOR AND DERIVATION OF THE MOST WIDELY KNOWN SONG ABOUT IRELAND’S MOST MONUMENTAL CATASTROPHE HAVE REMAINED OBSCURE ALMOST SINCE ITS COMPOSITION By Dan Milner The first verse of the ballad ‘Old Skibbereen’ tells us that it was composed outside Ireland (‘Then why did you abandon it, the reason to me tell?’), and America stands … Read more
HUGH II DE LACY AND THE ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADE By Paul Duffy This year marks the 800th anniversary of the foundation of the Order of Preachers, also known as the Black Friars or, more commonly, the Dominicans. St Dominic is credited with popularising that most Irish of devotions the Rosary, and a multitude of towns in … Read more