Radio Maria Ireland

Eileen talks to boys and girls about the sights, sounds and smells of autumn, from crunchy leaves and blackberry picking to the smell of a wood fire, and what the changing seasons show us about the God who keeps all of creation moving. She reads a few autumn poems, including one where the leaves throw a party with Professor Wind leading the band, and Wordsworth's lines on a kitten chasing falling...

Naoimh is joined by Kimberlee Woo Ling, a young doctor from Trinidad and Tobago now working in Liverpool, who was a medical student in Belfast when a missionary rang her at ten o'clock one Thursday night with a free place on a women's retreat in Donegal the next day. She tells what a priest said to her in confession that weekend, and of something during the final Mass that her medical training sti...

Fr Adrian Crowley is joined by Deacon Don Devaney ahead of Freedom in Christ, a Eucharistic healing conference on addiction at the Great Northern Hotel in Bundoran from 16 to 18 October, and starts from the night an angel touched St Peter's chains in prison. Deacon Don asks Fr Adrian how a convinced atheist of twenty-two came to faith, and Fr Adrian tells how his community of former addicts in Lib...

Deacon Don Devaney talks with Aiden Gallagher, one of the leaders of the Cenacolo community house at Knock, Co. Mayo, a community run not by professional staff but by the brothers who have been there longest. Aiden grew up in a family that went to Mass every Sunday and said the Rosary, and he describes how drugs came to seem normal long before he ever tried them, and what he would tell parents wor...

Fr Eamonn McCarthy and Matthias Conroy work through paragraphs 118 to 126 of Pope Leo XIV's Magnifica Humanitas, where a document about artificial intelligence turns to illness, old age and the limits a technological culture treats as defects to be fixed. Fr Eamonn comes to the microphone straight from the bedside of a dying parishioner, and Matthias explains why "ambivalence" doesn't mean what mo...

Mary Hutton and Fr Eamonn McCarthy, recording for the first time from a small studio in Fr Eamonn's parochial house in Cork, take the parable of the wedding feast for the 28th Sunday of Ordinary Time. Fr Eamonn asks why indifference offends the king more than any excuse, while Mary draws on a fitness course and her sister's upcoming wedding to ask what preparing for this one should look like. Ther...

On the feast of St John Henry Newman, Fr Peter George Flynn looks at the stories Newman told, and at why he used to cut off anyone who called him a saint by pointing out that saints don't write tales. He traces how Newman's view of the Irish changed after his conversion, and reads from Loss and Gain, his novel about an Oxford student who reaches the Catholic Church without meeting a single Catholi...

Deacon Don Devaney talks with Patricia Friel, CEO of Mary's Meals Ireland, who this time is wearing a different hat as part of the music ministry for Freedom in Christ, a Eucharistic healing conference on addiction at the Great Northern Hotel in Bundoran from 16 to 18 October. They talk about what addiction does to a whole family, not only the person caught in it, and about a moment in the weekend...

In the week St Francis marked 800 years in heaven, Fr Peter George Flynn tells the story of San Damiano, the ruined church halfway down the hill from Assisi where Christ spoke to Francis from the cross. Francis went round begging for stones rather than bread, predicted a convent of holy ladies before he had thought of founding any friars, and later the Poor Clares had their first home there. Fr Pe...

Deacon Don Devaney and Aiden Bourne continue their slow walk through Genesis, this week taking just the first two verses and what it means that God made everything from nothing, with no materials and no tools. Aiden traces how the early Church found the Word and the Spirit in those lines, and why the ancient Israelites understood the earth itself as an altar. He also explains why he prays for the...

Fr Peter George Flynn explains why a Dominican wears fifteen decades at his side, a Franciscan seven, and certain Carmelites six, before turning to the question some people raised in 2002: if the rosary now has twenty decades, can five still be called a third of it? He finds the answer in an old Irish word for a province, and in how Tipperary is divided. He also tells of St George Preca of Malta,...

Carmela is joined by Luke from the Legion of Mary to preview the fourth annual Our Lady's Rosary Festival in Belfast, which runs from 12 to 18 October and ends with the rosary procession from St Malachy's to St Peter's Cathedral, on a new route that passes City Hall. Luke goes through the week, from a lecture on the penal times to a Night Fever evening of adoration and confession in the city centr...

Deacon Thady welcomes back Christine O'Hara, a religion teacher in Cork, to talk about the Fatima devotion of the Five First Saturdays and the third annual First Saturday conference at Knock on Saturday 28 November. Christine explains what the devotion asks for and why it's simpler than people think, and shares a detail she found in the book Carlo Acutis's mother wrote about her son, concerning a...

Nick Koeppel continues through Christopher West's Theology of the Body for Beginners with chapter seven and St John Paul II's idea of the language of the body: that we can speak the truth or tell a lie with our bodies just as we can with words. He turns to the two married couples John Paul II holds up from Scripture, the lovers of the Song of Songs and Tobias and Sarah, whose wedding night came af...

Relativism says there is no objective truth; Christianity says Truth has a name: Jesus Christ. Jesus does not say, “I have my truth”, but “I am the way, the truth and the life.”If all moral and religious truths are merely relative, Christ’s claim cannot be universally true. Christianity therefore cannot simply absorb relativism: one ultimately has to […] L'articolo Science, Religion, and the Moder...

Donal O'Sullivan Latchford and Fr Eamonn McCarthy return after a week's break, beginning with a tribute to Donal's sister Miriam Fitzgerald, who was warning school principals about social media in the days of Bebo. They turn to Pope Leo's words at Lourdes on assisted suicide, and Fr Eamonn tells of a woman who approached him after Mass there one year, and of what he learned at the same grotto year...

On the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, Fr Peter George Flynn asks whether the Hail Mary can be changed, and finds it has changed more than most people realise. He explains why, within living memory, Irish penitents would ask the priest whether they had to say the "Holy Marys" too, and why the story he was taught as a Franciscan about where that second half came from doesn't hold up. He also consi...

On the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, Rebecca talks with Fintan Burns, a retired firefighter and author of The Bible in a Week with the Blessed Virgin Mary, about the feast's origins at Lepanto and how Fatima first got him hooked on the rosary as a teenager. The book proposes new mysteries running from the Trinity and Creation, through the covenants of the Old Testament, to what Christ did betwe...

Fr Billy Swan presents the Breakfast Show from Rome on the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, returning to the third vineyard parable in a row and to the tenants who forgot they didn't own the place. He reads it through the three pillars of the synodal pathway and asks whether any of us has an absolute right to call anything our own. The second half marks 800 years since the death of St Francis of A...

Caroline Busher is joined by reviewers Emma Andrews and Breda Broderick to discuss Margarita Mooney Clayton's When Mary Calls: Surprising Encounters with the Mother of God, this month's Radio Maria Book Club pick (https://radiomaria.ie/bookclub/). The book gathers stories of Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox people who found their way to Mary, among them a young man from the Bible Belt healed at a...

Fr Maurice Colgan is joined by Raphael Lacken, recently home after six years in seminary in Italy, to continue the DoCat's opening section on the human person, from God's revelation to Israel through the Ten Commandments and the new law of Christ. Raphael explains how his parents arrived at a baptismal name meant to cover the whole Holy Family, while the two play a game of online chess on air that...

In the second episode of their series on Lorenzo Scupoli's The Spiritual Combat, Eoin and Fr Peter move on from distrust of self to its necessary partner, trust in God. Eoin reads from St John Bosco's dream of a smooth, rose-lined road and the nearly invisible traps laid along it, including the one the saint's guide calls "plain human respect." Fr Peter explains the old heresy of quietism, why cow...

Mary bakes golden buttermilk scones this week, and her reason goes back to the age of eleven, when an interview at the Gael Linn offices on Dame Street won her a month at a Gaeltacht in Inverin, Co. Galway. She tells of leaving Pearse Street station with a suitcase and a brave face that didn't last long, and of what was waiting on the kitchen table when she arrived. Along the way there's a little...

Margaret broadcasts from Dripsey in Co. Cork on a warm October afternoon, beginning with a walk across a freshly harvested maize field that brought the Book of Ruth to mind. She goes through the shrubs whose berries will feed the birds all winter, from berberis and cotoneaster to an ivy most gardeners overlook, and explains why the seed heads are worth leaving alone. Then she turns to autumn colou...

Deacon Don Devaney welcomes Fr John Keane for an hour of prayer for healing, with Marie and Bridget praying alongside them in the studio. Fr John prays over listeners for freedom from addiction of every kind, from alcohol, drugs and gambling to the phone, the internet and the shopping bag, and for the families watching someone they love locked in it. They also talk about Freedom in Christ, a three...