Radio Maria Ireland

Carmela talks to Danielle and John Connors, the pair behind the weekly podcast Reclaim the Faith, about the very different roads that brought them to it. Danielle lost her mother at 11 and found God alone in her bedroom through prayer and poetry, and later through Sr Clare Crockett, whom she was introduced to by an uncle who burst in one Christmas with news he couldn't keep. John grew up among 52...

Why does an all-powerful and loving God permit a universe governed by natural laws, chance and uncertainty? We explore how suffering, disease and even the death of a child can occur without being directly intended by God. Drawing on St Thomas Aquinas, we distinguish between God’s providence and the natural processes through which creation unfolds. We consider how […] L'articolo Science, Religion,...

Caroline Bussher is joined by Kiran Lawler and, for the first time, Connor Marin to discuss The Rosary: Your Weapon for Spiritual Warfare by Johnnette S. Benkovic and Thomas K. Sullivan, which runs from the Battle of Lepanto to a plan for starting a Rosary crusade at home or in a parish. Connor, who has been praying the Rosary for about three years and can't imagine life without it, explains what...

Eoin Brennan and Fr Peter reach chapters 12 and 13 of Lorenzo Scupoli's The Spiritual Combat, which places the whole of the spiritual struggle in the conflict between the reasonable will and the will of the senses. They begin with St Teresa of Ávila's own account of her vision of hell, which Fr Peter first heard as a frightened child at a parish mission. Then Eoin asks the question that has frustr...

Margaret broadcasts from Dripsey in Co. Cork on a bright autumn afternoon, and turns to planning winter containers while the summer bedding is still going strong. She goes through the evergreen ferns, ivies and berrying shrubs worth collecting now while the garden centres are well stocked, why plants should spill over the edge of a pot rather than stand to attention in it, and the all-white contai...

Deacon Don Devaney and Marie, with Bridget praying in the background, are both just back from Medjugorje, and Don describes a morning rosary there when something happened in the room that the whole group only understood afterwards. They talk about why praying for one family can mean praying for many, and Don tells how he woke yesterday to four urgent problems and one very short prayer. Marie recal...

Fr Maurice Colgan is joined by Rowan Healy and Raphael for the fourth part of the DOCAT and the principles of the Church's social teaching. A vegan advertisement on the side of a Dublin bus sets the question for the episode, though it takes a while to get back to it, by way of Christmas turkey sandwiches, burritos in Drogheda and the differences between Italian, Australian and Irish culture. Once...

Paul McAree leads the Eucharistic Divine Mercy Holy Hour, praying for Northern Ireland at a time when old questions many thought were settled 30 years ago are being raised again. Before the prayer begins he recalls travelling North America at 19, when Belfast was a byword for division between Christians, and asks why God looked down on the North and gave it the measure of peace it has, an answer h...

Caroline retells the parable of the Good Samaritan, beginning not with the traveller but with a frightened boy hiding among the rocks above the road from Jerusalem to Jericho, waiting with the men of his family for someone to come round the bend. The priest and the Levite pass by as they do in the Gospel, but this version asks the man left on the road a question, and his answer changes the ending....

Rebecca is joined by relic expert Sean Pilcher to look at St Teresa of Ávila, the Carmelite reformer and first woman named a Doctor of the Church, whose incorrupt body lies in a silver coffin that takes ten keys to open. Sean explains why so many locks were thought necessary, and traces the strange journey of her left hand, which ended up on the desk of General Franco and later turned up, in a fas...

John and Eoin take on living in the present, and the habits of worry, regret and old grievances that keep pulling us out of it. Eoin brings in St Alphonsus Liguori on the solitude of the heart, along with something God once told St Teresa of Avila about the noise in people's hearts. He also explains what a dog leaping into a river has to say about God, and tells the story of a homeless man outside...

Cora Sherlock picks out the parts of this week's budget that touch on property and inheritance, from the Help to Buy scheme to the new inheritance tax thresholds, and flags one group of people who are often caught out by the rules without realising it. In the second half she turns to social media and defamation: whether calling something "just my opinion" protects you, whether sharing a post is an...

Eileen tells the traditional tale of an old king with no son, who invites every young man in the country to an interview to choose the next ruler, and of the poor young man who saves for weeks to buy clothes for the journey to the palace. What happens on the road decides everything. Eileen then connects the story to the Good Samaritan and to Jesus washing his disciples' feet. There's also a prayer...

Naoimh is joined from Paris by Glenn, a sports television producer, and from Belfast by Fr Aidan, the Passionist priest who was his parish priest at St Joseph's church near the Arc de Triomphe, to talk about Holy Land 2022, the film Glenn made on his third attempt at the pilgrimage his mother had dreamed of all her life. Glenn explains why he turned down offers to stream it and put it on YouTube f...

Fr Adrian Crowley presents the saints as friends in heaven and teachers on earth, each with a particular lesson to pass on, from St Maria Goretti and St Francis of Assisi to St Teresa of Ávila's way of praying with the eyes closed and St Carlo Acutis. He tells the story of the dream that changed Maria Goretti's murderer in prison, and what her mother said when he came to her door on Christmas Eve....

Mary Hutton and Fr Eamonn McCarthy take the Gospel for the 30th Sunday of Ordinary Time, in which Jesus is asked which is the greatest commandment of the law. Fr Eamonn explains why the question was another attempt to catch him out, and how his answer turns into a practical examination of conscience. Mary looks at why nearly every encounter between Jesus and the Pharisees ends in confrontation, wi...

Eileen chats to James Bradshaw of Evangelium Ireland about their upcoming Youth Conference, a day filled with inspiring talks, faith and the opportunity to come together, with a social in the evening. For more interviews, click here! L'articolo Evangelium Ireland Youth Conference – James Bradshaw with Eileen proviene da Radio Maria .

Carmela talks to Danielle and John Connors, the pair behind the weekly podcast Reclaim the Faith, about the very different roads that brought them to it. Danielle lost her mother at 11 and found God alone in her bedroom through prayer and poetry, and later through Sr Clare Crockett, whom she was introduced to by an uncle who burst in one Christmas with news he couldn't keep. John grew up among 52...

Mary Stenson is joined by Sister Anne Neelan, a Daughter of Charity, to trace the links between the Vincentian family and the Legion of Mary, from Frank Duff's years in the Society of St Vincent de Paul to the 25th of March, a date both share. Sister Anne describes the late vocation that began with student visits to the Ballymun flats, and the apparitions in 1830 to a 24-year-old novice in Paris,...

If God is all-powerful and infinitely loving, why does He allow chance, suffering and evil to exist? Does the apparent randomness of nature challenge God’s authority, or reveal something deeper about His creation? Why would a loving God create a universe governed by natural laws that can produce both extraordinary beauty and terrible suffering? How […] L'articolo Science, Religion, and the Modern...

For the feast of St John Paul II, Eileen returns to the saint who inspired this programme when it began eight years ago, and to the young Karol Wojtyła, who had lost his mother, father and brother by the age of twenty. She tells the story of the underground theatre group he led in occupied Kraków, where its members could have been arrested for reciting Polish poetry, and of the papal aides on a tr...

Donal O'Sullivan Latchford and Fr Eamonn McCarthy present a full-length interview with John Pridmore, the former East End gangster whose conversion has taken his testimony into schools, prisons and studios around the world. John recalls a television debate with Ann Widdecombe on whether the media glamorises gangsterism, the five weeks Cardinal Pell kept him in Sydney doing interviews before World...

Fr Glenn Sudano CFR, one of the eight founding members of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal, talks about Holy Family Farm in Monticello, New York, where young men aged 18 to 30 spend six months or a year living a life of prayer and work among sheep, bees and maple trees. He explains what he began to notice in the young men coming to the friars in recent years, and the quote from Cardinal Robert...

Fr Billy Swan presents the Breakfast Show from Rome, just recovering from a heavy dose of flu, and looks back on the centenary of Mission Sunday through a book by his friend Mike Aquilina, Seven Revolutions, which argues that the early Christians changed the Roman world in seven ways that sound remarkably familiar today. The second half turns to the feast of Pope Saint John Paul II, whom Fr Billy...

Caroline Bussher is joined by Kiran Lawler and, for the first time, Connor Marin to discuss The Rosary: Your Weapon for Spiritual Warfare by Johnnette S. Benkovic and Thomas K. Sullivan, which runs from the Battle of Lepanto to a plan for starting a Rosary crusade at home or in a parish. Connor, who has been praying the Rosary for about three years and can't imagine life without it, explains what...