Sarah Mac Donald

After weekly protests over the threat posed by climate change, thousands of students are expected to assemble outside the Irish parliament March 15 as part of a global day of action.

The fear of busloads of protestors demonstrating against Josepha Madigan's position on abortion and divorce led the Sisters of Mercy to cancel the Irish minister's event from taking place on their grounds. 

Dublin Archbishop Diarmuid Martin warned there was "a danger of complacency or inertia or of slippage into false confidence" in the church's fight against clerical abuse.

Tiernan Brady of Equal Future, a coalition of 100 LGBT groups and Catholic religious from over 60 countries, said the youth synod is the "closest thing the church gets to a democratic process" and that it is an opportunity to discuss real challenges.

Marie Collins, a survivor of Irish clerical sex abuse, has given her backing to Boston Cardinal Sean O'Malley as president of the Vatican's Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors.

U.S. Jesuit Fr. James Martin set out a series of ways in which parishes can show welcome and respect to LGBT Catholics.

World Meeting of Families: Cardinal Kevin Farrell, head of the Vatican's Dicastery for Laity, the Family and Life, said the church needs God to help it build bridges, to communicate and to help it understand that "we need to speak to each other and accept each other as children of God."

Catholics gathered at "Voices Pope Francis Will Not Hear" to discuss topics and people excluded from the international gathering, including marginalization of women and LGBT persons, and the abuse scandal.

Despite Irish Catholics' many misgivings about the sexual abuse scandals in the church and the treatment of women and LGBT people, there is much enthusiasm for the ninth World Meeting of Families, scheduled to take place Aug. 21-26 in Dublin.

Ireland made history July 12 when it became the first country in the world to pass a bill committing the country to the divestment of all of its holdings in fossil fuel companies.

Ireland's Mary McAleese describes Francis as "a disappointment in relation to women," while Voices of Faith puts forth proposals to reform the Curia's hiring practices.

An Irish group campaigning for reform in the Catholic Church has launched a petition ahead of Pope Francis' papal visit in August to Ireland calling on the Vatican to change its "theological language that is gravely insulting to LGBTQI people."

Dublin - "We are living in a new time and a changed culture," said one archbishop, as the level of support for repeal, which exceeded expectations, began to sink in.

As the 20th anniversary of the historic Good Friday Agreement approaches, at least one Irish bishop worries that the United Kingdom's exit from the European Union could complicate life for Ireland.

DignityUSA responded to the World Meeting of Families office's reissue of the "Amoris" resource booklet without an image of a same-sex couple which was reproduced in the first edition on page 24. 

Dublin: Chantal Götz, managing director of Voices of Faith, said that Cardinal Kevin Farrell, the prefect of the Vatican's Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life, had objected to three speakers, including former Irish President Mary McAleese.

At the annual general meeting of the Association of Catholic Priests in Ireland, a new card outlining priests' rights was unveiled by the association's leadership, aimed primarily for abuse allegations.

Eminent Jesuit theologian Fr. Gerald O'Collins has appealed to every English-speaking episcopal conference in the church to seize the moment, dust off the 1998 English translation of the Roman Missal and substitute it for the contentious and clunky 2010 translation.

Marriage ministry needs to be done by married couples because priests have "no credibility in this area," Cardinal Farrell, prefect of the Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life, told a church gathering.

The priests believe that introducing male deacons at this time would add "another male clerical layer to ministry" which was "insensitive, disrespectful of women and counter-productive at this present critical time."