Pope Leo sends blessing to parishioners at Knock Shrine
The Catholic Church in Ireland decided to make the renewal this year, which has been designated the Jubilee Year of Hope.
The Mass, which took place at the Basilica of Our Lady in Knock on Sunday, June 22, was celebrated by Archbishop Eamon Martin.
Archbishop Eamon Martin consecrated Ireland to the Sacred Heart of Jesus at Knock Shrine on Sunday, June 22 (Pic: Sean Flynn)
It is one of a number of events which took place across Ireland this month in the lead up to the feast day of the Sacred Heart on June 27.
In honour of the Mass, Pope Leo sent a blessing to those who attended.
Archbishop Eamon Martin celebrates the Mass at Knock Shrine (Pic: Sean Flynn)
'His Holiness Pope Leo XIV sends cordial good wishes to all gathered for the Sacred Heart Crusade at Knock Shrine, on 22 June 2025, as Archbishop Eamon Martin renews Ireland's consecration to the Sacred Heart of Jesus,' the message read.
'His Holiness prays that this solemn occasion will provide a grace-filled opportunity for all participating to deepen their devotion to the merciful heart of Christ, and to grow in zeal for spreading the saving message of the Gospel and promoting Christian charity among their brothers and sisters.'
Pope Leo sent a special blessing for all those who attended the Mass (Pic: Sean Flynn)
It added: 'Entrusting all present to the loving protection of Mary, Mother of the Church, the Holy Father imparts his Apostolic Blessing as a pledge of joy and peace in our Lord Jesus Christ.'
See More: Ireland, Knock Shrine, Pope Leo, Sacred Heart Of Jesus
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Irish Times
6 days ago
- Irish Times
Ireland is in an adolescent stage where everything that smacks of Old Ireland is embarrassing
John Henry Newman has been declared a Doctor of the Church by Pope Leo XIV. The title has been given to only 38 saints, each recognised for their intellectual and spiritual contribution to the life of the Catholic Church. There is a certain symmetry in that Leo XIII declared Newman a cardinal in 1879. This acknowledgment by Leo XIII was an immense relief to Newman. Formerly lauded as one of Anglicanism's most brilliant minds, his reception into the Catholic Church required him to renounce his Oxford academic career. He was shunned by most of his social circle, including his sister Harriet, who never spoke to him again. Despite this enormous sacrifice, he still faced a lack of acceptance from some prominent Catholics. He wept on being made cardinal, declaring that 'the cloud is lifted forever'. Perhaps one cloud was lifted then, but Ireland remains curiously uninclined to acknowledge Newman's Irish links. Secular UCD seems more than mildly embarrassed that the founder of the forerunner of the college was not only a Catholic but now also a saint and doctor. READ MORE For example, UCD originally had no plans to send an official representative to Newman's canonisation in 2019. [ Unthinkable: Has John Henry Newman's vision for universities died? Opens in new window ] The then lord mayor of Birmingham, Mohammed Azim, a Muslim Labour councillor, was delighted to participate in the canonisation to honour Newman's long association with the city. Prince Charles and 13 Westminster cross-party MPs and peers were also attending. UCD eventually bowed to pressure from former staff and alumni, including Prof John Kelly. It was a stark contrast to 55 years earlier. Dr Michael Tierney, sometimes called the second founder of UCD because he oversaw the move to Belfield, celebrated the centenary of the Catholic University in 1854 with 'much splendour', as Jeremiah Hogan later wrote in Studies. Representatives from 70 universities worldwide attended, honorary degrees were awarded, 900 guests enjoyed a garden party, and a banquet was held at the Gresham. Newman faces the same modern Irish attitudes toward Catholicism as Daniel O'Connell. People rightly are falling over themselves to applaud the Liberator's commitment to civil rights, especially his abhorrence of slavery. However, there is a palpable reluctance to confront the fact that Catholics were the prime focus of his activism. In an Ireland where the Catholic Church is routinely portrayed as the enemy of all progress, what are we to do with the fact that one of our greatest statesmen sought to uplift the battered, broken and demoralised papists and release them from the yoke of the Penal Laws? Of course, the church brought much of this current disdain upon itself through misuse of power, but there is now little desire to acknowledge any good at all in Catholicism. Yet after a brief flirtation with Deism in his student days, O'Connell's Catholic faith fuelled his activism. [ UCD fails founder and itself in handling of Newman canonisation Opens in new window ] It is progress that we are acknowledging O'Connell at all, even if tiptoeing around his inconvenient Catholicism. His legacy has been subject to attack from the very beginning, and not just by the British satirists who routinely portrayed him as the devil. For example, although initially in agreement with his decision to call off the monster meeting in Clontarf in 1843 after Robert Peel threatened the participants with troops and gunships, the Young Irelanders then denounced him as a failure and a coward. During the long years when the physical force tradition held sway, O'Connell's non-violence led to him being ignored. Éamon de Valera's 1967 speech at the reopening of Derrynane House, admitting that his generation had never given O'Connell the credit he was due, marked a turning point. Although they probably never met, there is an intriguing link between Newman and O'Connell, recorded by Patrick Manning in The Furrow. Initially, Newman despised O'Connell, referring to him as a 'vile human' for his Catholic emancipation campaign. Nicholas Wiseman was the first cardinal resident in England after the Reformation and the first Catholic archbishop of Westminster. Along with Michael Quin and O'Connell, he founded a Catholic periodical called the Dublin Review (confusingly published in London). It aimed to present an intellectually coherent Catholicism. Newman writes in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua that one article in the Dublin Review by Wiseman convinced him that by remaining an Anglican, he would be like the Monophysite schismatics in the church's early centuries. Without O'Connell's financial backing, there would have been no Dublin Review and no moment of clarity for Newman while reading Wiseman's article. (Incidentally, O'Connell was terrible with money, so he probably backed it with money he did not have.) Without Catholic emancipation, there would have been no Catholic University, and no establishment of UCD in 1908. When the medical school Newman founded was absorbed into UCD in 1909, it was the largest Irish medical college in Ireland. The first name entered on the roll of the Catholic University in 1854 was Daniel O'Connell, grandson of the Liberator. Ireland is still in a kind of adolescent stage, where everything that smacks of Old Ireland is embarrassing unless it can be presented as something in tune with current ideologies. Thankfully, both Newman and O'Connell are far too complex to be co-opted.
RTÉ News
07-08-2025
- RTÉ News
Pray For Our Sinners: Sinead O'Shea's tale from the resistance
The most-watched documentary at Irish cinemas in 2023, Pray for Our Sinners documents filmmaker Sinéad O'Shea's return to her hometown, Navan, to explore the impact of the Catholic Church on the community in decades past - watch it now via RTÉ Player. As Pray For Our Sinners makes its RTÉ debut, Sinéad O'Shea revisits her film and explores how she 'wanted to show how Ireland had worked as I was growing up'. For some Irish people there has been enough said already about the activities of the Catholic Church. I understand. I grew up in the countryside outside Navan, then a small town in the midlands, in the 1980s and 1990s. By the time I was in secondary school, the scandals involving the Catholic Church had begun to emerge, and later I worked on some of them for The Guardian, BBC Newsnight, The New York Times and Al Jazeera English. It was this familiarity which inspired me to make Pray for Our Sinners. An old schoolfriend, Sinéad Burke, had told me about some of the work undertaken by a husband and wife doctor team in Navan. I knew this could be a different film. Watch the trailer for Pray For Our Sinners Over decades, I would later discover, Dr. Paddy and Dr. Mary Randles had fought against corporal punishment, rescued young women from mother and baby homes and opened a family planning clinic. Along the way they faced opposition from within the town, led by a beloved local priest, Fr. Farrell. A story of resistance from Ireland in this era is novel in itself but there was more to it than that. I wanted to show how Ireland had worked as I was growing up; how the informal hierarchies operated, how the threat of marginalisation was so frightening for us all. We began development filming in lockdown. Dr. Paddy had passed away in 2017 and I had spent time chatting with Dr. Mary about her husband's work. The release of the mother and baby home report in 2021 prompted her to discuss her own memories too and we decided to find some of the people she had helped. This became our film. From a logistical point of view, production was difficult but our participants; Dr. Mary, Betty, Edna and Norman were exceptional. I wanted to honour the quietness and modesty of life then. As I say in the film, it was considered American to complain when I was growing up, and to be honest, I'm still a bit conflicted about this. At its best, Catholicism suggests there are bigger forces at work than one's own concerns and there is sanctuary, I think, in this belief. A story of resistance from Ireland in this era is novel in itself but there was more to it than that. In practice of course, it often meant that vulnerable voices were overwhelmed by the fears and desires of more powerful individuals but times were not always all bad. It felt important to achieve a balance, to ensure the film didn't feel anti-Catholic and to acknowledge the sense of community provided by the Church. my friend @SineadEOShea has made a film, 'pray for our sinners', about some people in her home town of navan who stood up against the social control of the catholic church at a time when most of us still felt it prudent to keep our heads down. — Ken Early (@kenearlys) May 7, 2023 Many of the real harms caused by Catholicism were also facilitated by the State and I wanted to emphasise that some big questions are still unanswered. At Sean Ross mother and baby home, for instance, 1090 babies died but nearly all their remains are "missing." It was important to me that people in Navan did not feel undermined. Urban middle classes tend to condescend to those from rural or religious backgrounds. There was great nuance and humour in small town life as I was growing up and I wanted to celebrate that. We finally finished the edit in May 2022 and I sent it off to the Toronto Film Festival. It had already been rejected as a rough cut from other much less high profile festivals so I was astonished when it was selected. Our world premiere was held in September, three weeks after I gave birth. We then embarked on a tour of US festivals after that, winning Best Documentary at the Hamptons International Film Festival and were nominated for awards in Chicago and Washington DC. The big test though, would be our screenings at home. We had our Irish premiere in the Dublin Film Festival with Dr. Mary, Ethna, Norman and Betty in attendance. I think everyone there will remember it. The cinema was so crowded that some sat on the floor. There was weeping but also laughter. At one point, as Mary gave vent to her feelings onscreen, the audience burst into spontaneous applause. Afterwards there were two standing ovations for our stars. It was so genuine, people just wanted to express their admiration. Listen: Dr. Mary Randles and Sinead O'Shea talk to Dearbhail McDonald Our distributors, Break Out, scheduled a cinema release for late April. We were a little concerned that people might not want to see another film about our Catholic past but we hoped the emotion of our Dublin screening might inspire new audiences to come. We showed first in Navan and this too was an event with great meaning, I think, for both locals and our participants in particular. Their stories, they said, had been told properly, and now they felt seen and affirmed by their community. As Dr. Mary observed of Norman, "he seems to walk a little taller around the town." Despite all our worries, there has been an overwhelming response to the film. It is the most attended documentary in Ireland this year and is continuing to screen at festivals around the world. It will soon be broadcast on television around Europe. Dr. Mary and I were even invited to the Oireachtas for a screening there. This left us both feeling a little strange afterwards. Politicians had their photos taken with us but some of them subsequently voted for the deeply flawed mother and baby home redress scheme which has omitted nearly 50% of the survivors. Now the film will be released on digital platforms in Ireland and the UK, and will find a new audience there. I hope it inspires some reflection on where we came from, and where we are now. It's not hard to join a fashionable cause when that's what everyone else is doing but Mary, Betty, Ethna and Norman took real risks in a much less forgiving context. As the film concludes, there is always a way to resist.
Irish Examiner
03-08-2025
- Irish Examiner
Pope urges crowd of one million young Catholics to ‘spread enthusiasm and faith'
Pope Leo has urged more than a million Catholic youths to 'spread your enthusiasm and the witness of your faith' when they return home to some 150 countries, during a Mass ending a week-long encounter with the next generation of faithful. 'Aspire to great things, to holiness, wherever you are,' Leo urged them. 'Do not settle for less. You will then see the light of the Gospel growing every day, in you and around you.' The young people camped in sprawling fields south-east of Rome overnight after attending a vigil service for the Jubilee of Youth on Saturday, also presided by Leo – who has been ferried to and from Vatican City by helicopter. Young people wake up after spending the night at the Tor Vergata field in Rome as part of the event (Andrew Medichini/AP) The Vatican said more than one million young people were present, along with 7,000 priests and 450 bishops. The special Jubilee celebration is part of the Holy Year that is expected to draw 32 million people to the Vatican for the centuries-old pilgrimage to the seat of Catholicism. The week has been a joyous gathering marked by bands of youths singing hymns as they move down cobblestoned streets, praying rosaries in piazzas and standing for hours at the Circus Maximus to confess their sins to priests offering the sacrament in a dozen languages. Leo led Mass with an estimated one million people (Andrew Medichini/AP) Leo also shared tragic news on Saturday. Two young people who had made the pilgrimage to Rome had died, one reportedly of cardiac arrest, while a third was in hospital. Rain overnight awakened the faithful but did not dampen their spirits. Soemil Rios, 20, from Puerto Rico, said: 'At least we were a little covered, but we still got a bit wet. We lost our voices a little. It was cold, but we woke up to a beautiful sun and view. 'Despite the difficulties, it was very nice and very special to have been part of this historic moment.'
