Radio Maria Ireland

Deacon Thady O'Connor shares about the Legion of Mary examining the Legionary Promise and how this "army of prayer" work for conversion in Ireland and across the world.

Fr Peter George Flynn talks to Dr John McCafferty of the Catholic Historical Society of Ireland ahead of its annual conference on Irish Catholic church buildings, past and future, marking 800 years since the death of St Francis. Dr McCafferty explains why pre-emancipation churches were built to be inconspicuous, and what changed the moment Catholics were finally free to build spires again. Along the way: a disconcerting portrait hidden inside a Belfast church, and why a young Irish Franciscan once found himself playing football under a motto about the honour of Ireland, in California.

A ten-year-old from County Antrim asks Fr Darren Brennan how to pick a confirmation saint, and he suggests it might work the other way around, that the saints choose us first. He shares why St Jude, St Patrick and St Louis de Montfort have each stayed close to him since childhood, and what picking a saint's name is actually supposed to commit you to.

Fr Adrian Crowley reflects on the Holy Spirit as helper, counsellor, comforter and advocate, and tells the story of a young Karol Wojtyla spending six hours prostrate before the tabernacle in an unfamiliar convent chapel the night before he was made a bishop. He closes with love poured out for Mary in the words of Padre Pio and the Curé of Ars, and a meditation on the kind of faith Jesus called great enough to work miracles.

Steve Barberieri talks to Fr Mark Wharton, an English convert whose path to the priesthood began by accident, sitting through two hours of Eucharistic Adoration because he didn't realise he was allowed to leave, ahead of the Abide women's conference in Bundoran this November. They trade stories of saints who spoke to God with startling familiarity, St Therese telling Jesus he owed her tenderness, Mother Elvira refusing to leave a chapel until she got her convent, and what it means to simply put people in front of the Blessed Sacrament and get out of the way.

Fr Eamon McCarthy and Matthias Conneely continue their close reading of Pope Leo XIV's encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, working through its warnings on AI: the environmental cost of data centres, algorithms that quietly decide who is worthy of a loan, a job, or mercy, and why the Church insists no such system can ever be morally neutral. They land on the question of who actually answers for an AI's mistakes, from a self-driving car's crash to a chatbot's bias, and why the Pope is calling for a deliberate slowdown rather than a ban.

Mary Houton and Fr Eamon McCarthy read the parable of the labourers in the vineyard, the workers hired at dawn who grumble when latecomers are paid the same, and ask which worker in the story we'd honestly admit to being. Fr Eamon brings in an open AA meeting he'd attended that same evening, and what it means to hear someone testify to a mercy they know they didn't earn.

Deacon Don Devaney talks to Fr Mark Goring ahead of Walk the Cross, a 33-mile pilgrimage, a mile for each year of Christ's life, that will end this year for the first time inside Croke Park, where Ireland will be consecrated to the Sacred Heart. Fr Mark, a Canadian priest and prominent YouTube evangelist, talks about signs of revival he's spotted among young people, and why he sees the stadium's place in Irish life as part of the point.

Fr Peter George Flynn tells the story of St Joseph of Cupertino, a disaster in the monastery kitchen who became, almost against the odds, a priest, and then a levitating one at that, witnessed by sceptics, visiting princes, and at least one future king. Fr Peter explains why the Church canonised him for his holiness rather than his flying, and how this obscure patron saint of exam students quietly shaped his own path to the Franciscan order.

Carmella talks to Gary Wade about his book on Seamus Heaney's Catholicism, and a discovery in Heaney's own archives that changes how you read his most famous poem: an early draft line, later cut, comparing potato peelings falling into a bucket to a brimming ciborium. Gary also tells the story of a letter Heaney faxed to theologian Eamon Duffy in 2001 that sat unread for twenty years, and what it reveals about a faith Heaney described not as lost outright but as an ache that never let go.

Deacon Thady talks to Marguerite Hamilton of the Columba Community in Derry about 45 years of a lay community built on waiting for direction rather than forcing it, from a prison ministry during the Troubles to the White Oaks addiction treatment centre and a Celtic Prayer Garden that only found its site after they'd given up looking. Marguerite describes the community's weekly prayer meeting as its powerhouse, and makes the case for what she calls the Church's sleeping giant, the laity, waking up.

Mary Stenson previews the Legion of Mary's pilgrimage to Knock and the arrival of the relics of St Therese of Lisieux and her parents in October, then reads a 1965 letter from Pope Paul VI to Frank Duff and a passage from Duff's biography about the toughness required to run a homeless hostel on Dublin's Morning Star Lane. Along the way: the daily quote from Frank Duff himself, and how a Legion presidium in West Africa once made it to daily Mass by canoe, bicycle, and an eighteen-mile fast.

Liz talks to Brother John of the Cross, a Brother of St John a few months into his diaconate, about the order's charism built around St John the Apostle and the three wisdoms, and the unlikely path that led him there: a conversion late in high school, a stalled music career, and one offhand comment from a Franciscan on pilgrimage in Spain that he couldn't shake. He also shares how his YouTube channel of scripture-inspired songs took shape, and a tentative plan that could bring the Brothers of St John to Knock, the one place St John himself is said to have appeared.

Donal O'Sullivan-Latchford and Fr Eamon McCarthy mark 25 years since 9/11 with stories the mainstream coverage missed: an agnostic janitor who prayed for help mid-collapse, a trapped woman convinced a stranger's hand in the dark belonged to an angel, and a rescuer's private reckoning with what he survived. From there the conversation turns to a missionary soldier's public struggle against the pull of revenge, and what Pope Leo's recent teaching on AI says about the difference between a machine that imitates intelligence and a person who actually grows in wisdom.

Fr Billy Swan broadcasts from Rome on forgiveness, reading listener feedback on fraternal correction before turning to the 25th anniversary of 9/11, a disaster he narrowly missed witnessing in person ten days earlier, and the cross that emerged from the wreckage at Ground Zero. The second half turns to St Hildegard of Bingen, a visionary, composer and theologian whose feast falls this week, and a quote from James Joyce that Fr Billy finds surprisingly close to her own words.

Relativism promises freedom by allowing each person to define their own truth, but it can leave us increasingly isolated and insecure. When there is no shared understanding of good and evil, life can lose the larger story that once connected us to God, family and community. Relationships risk becoming more conditional and utilitarian, making marriage, […]

Fr Peter George Flynn talks to Dr John McCafferty of the Catholic Historical Society of Ireland ahead of its annual conference on Irish Catholic church buildings, past and future, marking 800 years since the death of St Francis. Dr McCafferty explains why pre-emancipation churches were built to be inconspicuous, and what changed the moment Catholics were finally free to build spires again. Along the way: a disconcerting portrait hidden inside a Belfast church, and why a young Irish Franciscan once found himself playing football under a motto about the honour of Ireland, in California.

Fr Morris Colgan continues the DoCat series on the Church's social doctrine with guest Thomas Starkey of Net Ministries, tracing it from Pope Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum through to questions of solidarity, loneliness, and the dignity of the unborn. Thomas recalls a street conversation about abortion he expected to be hostile that turned into something else entirely, and a friendship built letter by letter in Irish Sign Language. The conversation ends on a sharp line from Carol Houselander about legislating the brotherhood of man without the fatherhood of God.

Caroline Busher and reviewers Monica Riley and Anna Healy take on Kate Hennessy's biography of her grandmother, Dorothy Day, tracing a path from bohemian New York and a devastating personal loss to a newspaper that reshaped Catholic social action in America. One reviewer, who grew up under a priest who personally defended Day against Hoover-era suspicion, gives the book a near-perfect score; the other wanted more of what was going on inside Day's head. Between them, a question worth sitting with: whether a woman surrounded by anarchists and unbelievers makes a more useful model of sanctity than a plaster saint.

Deacon Don Devaney sits down with Fr Oisin Martin, whose road to the priesthood ran through backpacking in Asia, a near-fatal brush that turned into an encounter with mercy, and a locked friary gate in London he decided to climb after asking himself what St Francis would do. The pair trade healing stories: a mother's persistent prayer over her young daughter's autism diagnosis, a teenager's ankle mended on a hillside in Medjugorje, and Deacon Don's own mother's advice on intercession, so simple it sounds like it shouldn't work. It builds to a shared prayer of declaration listeners are invited to pray along with at home.

Margaret takes listeners through the late-summer garden at Lee Valley, Cork, and answers a listener's question about propagating hydrangeas from semi-hardwood cuttings, including the honey, cinnamon, and even saliva that can stand in for rooting powder, and why leaving a cutting in the sun for even an hour can undo the whole job. She closes on the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows with a wish that every cross might become, as she puts it, a stream of grace.

Mary tells the story of the summer she spent babysitting a family from St Lucia who'd come to Skerries so one of their children could recover in a milder climate, and the trick she found for getting a sleepless little boy to finally nod off, listening for the tinkling of halyards on the harbour boats. The visit left her with a taste for a rich Caribbean rum fruit cake, brushed with rum even after it comes out of the oven, which she bakes in full this week.

John is joined again by Liz for a Catholic look at healing the inner child, weaving the psychology of reparenting together with surrender to the Lord and the Novena to Our Lady Undoer of Knots. John shares how a leaflet, tucked into a drawer and forgotten for months, is what eventually brought him to the Radio Maria microphone. The conversation turns to what keeps people clinging to false control, from perfectionism to phone-scrolling, and what a particular verse from the Psalms has to say about it.

Fr Paul Glennon steps in for Fr Chris to keep the YouCat series moving from the fifth commandment into the sixth: just war theory, the ban on Israel's enemies in the Old Testament, and whether the Church actually asks Christians to be pacifists. Before the theology, a detour through the Oasis reunion documentary and what Liam Gallagher's return to Mass has to do with two brothers ending a fifteen-year feud. The back half turns to sexuality and complementarity, and a definition of love that has nothing to do with being nice.

Cora Sherlock opens up the fast-moving question of artificial intelligence and the law, tracing what GDPR already protects and what the newly enforced EU Artificial Intelligence Act does and doesn't allow. She flags a detail from the week's news, employees inside major AI companies resigning over concerns about where the technology is heading, and promises a longer episode digging into why. Along the way: deepfakes, facial recognition, and the loan and job applications an algorithm still isn't allowed to decide alone.

Nine-year-old Maria from County Kerry sends in one of the oldest questions there is: if God loves us, why does he let bad things happen to us? Fr Darren Brennan takes it back to the Garden of Eden to work out an answer for this week's Little Big Questions.

Feedback and questions: info@radiomaria.ie, or by text or WhatsApp to +353-89467-2000.

Naoimh Barbieri is joined by Fr John Keane, with Katie Taylor's night in Croke Park still fresh and eighty-two thousand people singing her walk-on song. Fr John was ten when a tumour put him in hospital in Cork for eleven months, and he spent the first several of them angry about it; he now says he can thank God for it. He tells the story of a morning in adoration when he was told to park an empty forty-foot truck outside a church he had no hope of filling, and what happened when he rang his bishop about it.

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Fr Eamonn McCarthy and Matthias Conroy reach chapter three of Magnifica Humanitas, and the paragraph where Pope Leo XIV observes that these systems are more cultivated than built, and that nobody, the people who make them included, quite knows how they work. Matthias tells what happened when a model built for cybersecurity was set twenty targets and worked out that the shortest route was to attack the company holding the answers. If you take one paragraph away from the hour, Fr Eamonn says, take 99.

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Mary Hutton and Fr Raymond McCarthy read the parable of the unforgiving servant, the man whose ten thousand talents were written off before he took a fellow servant by the throat over a hundred denarii. Fr Raymond's worry is how few people come to confession while so many come forward for communion, and whether that is his own fault for not preaching more stridently. Mary offers something more practical for anyone carrying a wound they cannot put down: three steps, the last of which is to say the words long before you can mean them.

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Liz Whyte talks to Joseph Campo, who has run the St Francis House since Fr Benedict Groeschel handed it to him in 1992, and who has now moved the work out of a gentrified Brooklyn to upstate New York. Joe went to Fr Benedict convinced he was going mad after something that happened to him at Medjugorje, in one minute, on the Feast of the Assumption, and was told he was indeed crazy, but batting for the right team. Most of the young men who reach him have never had a father, and in America the state's care of them ends on their eighteenth birthday. He says more gets settled at the dinner table than anywhere else in the house.

Aoife Collins talks to Eileen Bowden, national coordinator of the Flame of Love movement in Ireland, about a private revelation that began in Hungary in the 1960s through a widowed mother of six and has since reached nine countries. Eileen traces the movement's path from lockdown prayer calls to a papal blessing, and what a candle in a dark room has to do with blinding Satan. She also previews October's national conference in Knock, and a hundred-day prayer sequence for the souls in purgatory begun after an unusual inspiration at the shrine.

Belfast City Hall is to be lit up on 28 September to mark International Safe Abortion Day, despite a Belfast Telegraph poll running 98 per cent against it and twenty thousand signatures gathered in a week and a half. Carmela is joined by Barry of Guardians of the Faith, who was at the rosary outside the City Hall and then decided a novena was the answer. It was meant to be a national one. Inside forty-eight hours it had reached six continents.

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Deacon Thady takes his cue from Katie Taylor, who carried Psalm 18 into the ring, to make the case for praying scripture directly, the oldest form of prayer in the Church and, he argues, the one Catholics were quietly left out of. That opens onto the harder question underneath the programme: how will Ireland practise its faith when there are no priests left, and where does he think a new priesthood will have to come from? The hymn is The Nazarene, introduced by his daughter Evelyn, with the story of a Connemara fisherman and the gates of hell behind it.

Mary Stenson goes back to Fr Thomas O'Flynn's life of Frank Duff for a chapter on where Duff's spirituality came from: a man who read a book on the dangers of mystical experience and then prayed, with absolute fervour, that nothing of the kind would ever come his way. The discovery of de Montfort happened on a trip to Mount Melleray with a friend who drank, and the Legion itself began on the eve of Our Lady's birthday in 1921 with fifteen young women in Myra House. The second half is a recording of Venerable Fulton Sheen on parents whose children have left the Church, and on the difference between speaking to your children about God and speaking to God about your children.

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Deacon Don Devaney brings Aiden Bourne a problem from his own doorstep: his eight-year-old grandson finds Mass boring, the thirty-year-olds find the homilies worse, and two hundred people pack a prayer group down the road every week because things happen there. Aiden's answer begins with the flat claim that a family is not a democracy, and moves to beauty, which he thinks the Church has largely stopped offering. A priest once wrote to ask him how to stop children reading Harry Potter, and Aiden told him not to try.

When discussing relativism, Christians must remember that we are speaking not merely about ideas, but to people—people who may carry deep wounds, disappointments and painful experiences. These people live in a relativistic culture. So, the first thing we need to keep in mind when dealing with relativism, is to lead with mercy. Jesus shows us the […]

Deacon Don talks to former Tyrone football manager Mickey Harte and evangelist Anthony Crossley about Walk the Cross, the pilgrimage culminating in Croke Park on 27 September with Bishop Paul Dempsey and Fr Mark O'Rourke. Anthony traces the event back to a vision he received during adoration in Derry in 2023, and to a mystical encounter with Christ years earlier that changed the course of his life. Mickey explains how a stadium once filled for All-Ireland finals came to host something else entirely, and there's a story involving Pope Leo and a Tyrone jersey that neither man can quite explain.

Fr Billy Swan returns to the Breakfast Show from Rome after his three-week summer break, working through last Sunday's readings on fraternal correction, the tricky business of challenging someone you love without driving them away. He offers three rules for getting it right, tested against Thomas Becket and a line from the Book of Genesis. The second half turns to the coming feast of Our Lady of Sorrows, and a memory from his first visit to the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem that changed how he reads it.

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Thomas grew up Anglican in England, the son of a vicar, and in 2011 his whole family came into the Catholic Church through the Ordinariate, none of them having raised it with the others first. He now works with NET Ministries Ireland. In the first episode of Faith in Action he and Father Maurice open […]

Eoin and Fr Chris Garrett continue their run through the Fifth Commandment, moving from organ harvesting and forced sterilization into a real disagreement between the two of them over COVID-era vaccine mandates, neither one giving much ground. The conversation turns to dying well, treating the dead, and what actually counts as righteous anger before Fr Chris admits he's thought through what he'd do if a Sunday Mass ever turned violent.

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Fr Peter George Flynn returns to the confessional and to Canon 983: the seal is inviolable, and no circumstance lifts it. He explains why a priest questioned by police can truthfully say he knows nothing, what happens to a priest who breaks the seal and why only the Vatican can absolve him, and the cases in which a woman or a layman is bound by the same silence. Martin Luther, who rejected the sacrament outright, said that in getting rid of confession he had kicked the bottom rung out of the ladder to heaven.

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Fr Adrian Crowley and Naoimh Barbieri talk about the Holy Spirit in ordinary life: journaling at dawn, teaching children honesty through small things like an unpaid-for bottle of shower gel, and why an architect cousin insists AI will never replace a designer's heart. Two conversion stories anchor the conversation, a farmer who mended a bitter feud and a foul-mouthed policeman whose language changed overnight, alongside a case for praying the Novena to the Holy Spirit outside of Pentecost.

Fr Peter George Flynn is joined by Brother Ronan Sharpley from the Franciscan Abbey in Galway on Euphra, the Franciscan Youth, which is not simply another youth group and which exists properly in only one place in Ireland. Brother Ronan explains what the members actually promise, and why the second group's promise was a pact with each other rather than a devotion. Fr Peter tells how a group of young Italian Franciscans brought him to see the Shroud of Turin, where he found the tomb of a young man none of them had heard of, and whose name he now carries.

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Nick Koeppel reaches chapter four of Christopher West's Theology of the Body for Beginners, on the resurrection of the body and what heaven will actually be like. If there is no marriage there, what becomes of our being male and female, and of the desire for union that marriage was pointing at all along? At the centre of it is West's line about his own wife, that she is not his ultimate fulfilment, and that we must not hang our hats on a hook that cannot bear the weight.

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Donal O'Sullivan Latchford and Fr Eamonn McCarthy open with a listener's point they cannot easily dismiss: why does an evangelical church so often feel more welcoming than a Catholic one? From there it is Songs of Praise on faith and the senses, a children's minister in south London who tells Bible stories with sand, water and uncooked rice for children who find words a barrier, and the BBC's slow radio, which Fr Eamonn suspects is reaching for something real without knowing what. They also return to Fr Cyril Axelrod, a priest who is both deaf and blind, and to the nine months that sit between the Immaculate Conception and Our Lady's birthday.

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Fr Peter George Flynn hands the programme over to John Carlin, president of Radio Maria Ireland, for an unusually plain conversation about money. The station takes no advertising and no sponsorship, and sits down every January, John says, with a blank sheet against running costs of around fifty thousand euro a month. He explains why they keep it that way, and why he has come to think of being dragged along the bottom every few months as a happy fault.

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Margaret comes from the Lee Valley on Our Lady's birthday, with flowers for the grotto and a garden that wants a light hand in September. She stopped watering her roses altogether and they have never done better, and she buries cloves of garlic beside them against black spot. There is hot composting to keep you warm through the winter, what to divide and what to take cuttings from now, and what to use when you have no rooting powder.

Feedback and questions: info@radiomaria.ie, or by text or WhatsApp to +353-89467-2000.

Caroline Busher is joined by Emma Andrews and Breda Broderick on Chiara Corbello Petrillo: A Witness to Joy, the story of an Italian woman whose first two children lived half an hour each, who delayed cancer treatment to protect a third, and who died at 28 and was laid out in her wedding dress. Breda gives it ten out of ten for a Catholic reader and four for anyone else, and explains the gap. Emma says starting it was like wading into a cold sea.

The full book club reading list is at radiomaria.ie/bookclub (https://radiomaria.ie/bookclub/).

Feedback and questions: info@radiomaria.ie, or by text or WhatsApp to +353-89467-2000.

Deacon Don Devaney is joined by Peter McCann from Craigavon, a former professional footballer and, at 45, the youngest guest the programme has had in healing ministry. Peter's way in began with an alarm set an hour early, a Bible he did not know how to read, and three days of getting nothing at all from it. What follows are accounts from his own parish: a referee's back the night before a county quarter-final, a plumber facing a nine-thousand-pound ankle reconstruction, and a twenty-one-year-old whose spine realigned vertebra by vertebra in Peter's sitting room.

Mary makes a whisked strawberry sponge from three ingredients that bakes in twenty-two minutes, the cake her mother made for racing day at home. Between the folding and the filling she remembers running the bets down to the bookie with her brother, the coppers and sixpences they were given for it, and Miss Dorothea, the neighbour's racehorse she learned to ride on the strand, whom Michael O'Hehir once described on air as the never-failing last finishing filly. The recipe card and step-by-step photos are in the latest news section at radiomaria.ie.

Feedback and questions: info@radiomaria.ie, or by text or WhatsApp to +353-89467-2000.

A listener's text puts a question to Fr Peter George Flynn that canon law does answer, though not in any way most of us would guess: how does a deaf person make their confession? The answer runs through written confessions, interpreters bound by the same seal as the priest, and the fact that Irish Sign Language has one form for men and another for women. It ends in the sixteenth century with St Francis de Sales and a deaf servant named Martin, whose confessions contained no words at all.

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John is joined by Sandra, back on the programme after months of illness, for an hour on caring and the 624,000 family carers in Ireland doing it at home. Sandra talks about her own diagnosis of secondary cancer, the month of waiting that followed, and what a nurse once said to a woman who had gone very low. John admits on air that he is not a natural carer and would make a far better patient.

Feedback and questions: info@radiomaria.ie, or by text or WhatsApp to +353-89467-2000.

Eileen explains the Feast of the Assumption to this week's boys and girls: what a solemnity is, why the Church has always believed Mary was taken body and soul into heaven, and what that mystery says about our own bodies and the resurrection still to come. There's a visit to Elizabeth, a woman clothed in the sun, and the Hail Holy Queen to learn together.

This month, Sinéad talks to Julie O’Donnell, Mission Team Manager with Alpha Ireland, about their work in Ireland. Julie shares how Alpha is helping parishes, schools and communities across Ireland open honest conversations about Christianity, and reflects on the power of hospitality, small-group conversation and a renewed culture of faith and community. In the second […]

Fr Adrian Crowley and Naoimh Barbieri talk about the Holy Spirit in ordinary life: journaling at dawn, teaching children honesty through small things like an unpaid-for bottle of shower gel, and why an architect cousin insists AI will never replace a designer's heart. Two conversion stories anchor the conversation, a farmer who mended a bitter feud and a foul-mouthed policeman whose language changed overnight, alongside a case for praying the Novena to the Holy Spirit outside of Pentecost.

Nine-year-old Maria from County Kerry sends in one of the oldest questions there is: if God loves us, why does he let bad things happen to us? Fr Darren Brennan takes it back to the Garden of Eden to work out an answer for this week's Little Big Questions.

Feedback and questions: info@radiomaria.ie, or by text or WhatsApp to +353-89467-2000.

Fr Eamonn McCarthy and Matthias Conroy continue their read-through of Pope Leo XIV's Magnifica Humanitas, moving from integral human development into the document's blunt test for any new technology: does it make us more human, or less? The conversation turns to a very practical case, whether a priest should ever let AI draft his homily, and to what Cardinal Ratzinger used to do before letting anyone senior speak in a room. They close chapter two on ecclesial accountability and open chapter three on the technocratic paradigm, the logic of efficiency that Pope Francis warned turns people into cogs.

Mary Hutton and Fr Raymond McCarty read the Gospel for the 23rd Sunday of Ordinary Time, Matthew's instructions for confronting a brother who has done wrong and the escalating steps that follow if he won't listen. Fr Raymond traces where that road can lead, as far as canon law and excommunication, while Mary turns to the finding of Jesus in the temple for a very different way of approaching someone in the wrong. They close with Psalm 94 and a word on confession, and on what it means for two or three to agree in prayer.

Feedback and questions: info@radiomaria.ie, or by text or WhatsApp to +353-89467-2000.

Eileen talks to Áine Blake of the Legion of Mary about this year's Young Adult Conference, Embrace the Grace, held at the Legion's Dublin headquarters, where Frank Duff's old rooms, prayer books and bicycle are still kept. Áine traces her own path into the Legion back to a ski trip that turned out to be more evangelisation than skiing, and describes the street evangelisation projects, including a recent one on the Falls Road in Belfast, that have shaped her faith since.

Fr Robert shares reflections for September 2026 and interviews Liam about recent Pioneer developments. Click here to listen back to previous Pioneer Hours.

Aoife Collins talks with Luke McCann of Human Life International Ireland about the 32-county mission the charity has just completed, and the theology behind his insistence that Ireland isn't really wrestling with politicians or referenda at all. He traces what he calls a three-legged stool, from the decriminalisation of contraception in 1991 through divorce, abortion and euthanasia, and closes with a novena organised against Belfast City Hall's plan to light up in celebration of what it's calling "safe abortion day."

Carmela is joined by Joanne Cotter, who traces her family's return to faith back to her son's darkest year at school and the prayer group that found him there, and then to a nagging call during adoration to help the worker that she spent months trying to talk St Joseph out of. That call became a WhatsApp group of over 400 Catholic tradespeople and business owners who deliberately stay off social media, and is now growing into a magazine meant to fund its own members' equipment and training.

Naoimh talks to a Poor Clare sister from Galway about the pull toward contemplative life that took hold during a Mass in Medjugorje, and the night she told her family, when her father cried and told her he was proud of her anyway. The conversation turns to a retreat she's hosting for women aged eighteen to forty, Cherished Daughters, with her own sister Louise as keynote speaker.

Mary Stenson opens All Things Legion with Fr Colm Manion's account of Frank Duff's vision of an apostolate that refuses to settle for being a mere chaplaincy, then returns to Catherine Labouré's growing frustration as her confessor doubts her visions of Our Lady and the medal she has been told to have struck. The show closes with a tribute to Fr Des Broderick, the Legion's spiritual director in Scotland for thirty years, who died just days short of his hundredth birthday.

Deacon Don Devaney and Aiden Bourne open with a photograph from Guatemala that stopped a Galway audience cold: a family's entire food supply laid out on a dirt floor beneath a galvanized roof. From there the conversation turns to a harder question closer to home, what's actually driving Ireland's rates of depression, self-harm and suicide, and why Aiden keeps landing on the same word: fatherlessness. Scripture readings on grief and gratitude follow, along with why Aiden believes unresolved grief is often mistaken for something else entirely.

If you have been affected by any issues raised in this episode, Samaritans can be contacted free, anytime, on 116 123.

Eileen welcomes back Fr Eamon Roche, fresh from his fifth annual young-adult pilgrimage to a community of Augustinian canons in the south of France, and from an overnight detour to Lourdes that left him, unexpectedly, saying the English Mass at the grotto. He describes the rhythm of a week built around seven daily offices, hikes, and swimming in the river, and what brought him back to Lourdes fifteen years after his first visit there as a seminarian.

Nick Koeppel continues his walk through Christopher West's "Theology of the Body for Beginners," moving to the chapter on the redemption of the body: what Jesus actually meant by adultery of the heart, and why lust and love aren't simply matters of degree. He works through John Paul II's account of eros and agape, and closes with a story of two bishops passing a prostitute on the street, and what each one's reaction reveals about the difference between the two.

Eileen talks to Áine Blake of the Legion of Mary about this year's Young Adult Conference, Embrace the Grace, held at the Legion's Dublin headquarters, where Frank Duff's old rooms, prayer books and bicycle are still kept. Áine traces her own path into the Legion back to a ski trip that turned out to be more evangelisation than skiing, and describes the street evangelisation projects, including a recent one on the Falls Road in Belfast, that have shaped her faith since.

Michael Flanagan and Gerard McReavy continue their series on relativism and its impact on Western society, exploring why belief in objective right and wrong has become increasingly difficult and how Christians can engage in meaningful conversations about moral truth. Drawing on Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Pope John Paul II, and the story of Adam and Eve, […]

Donal O'Sullivan Latchford and Fr Eamonn McCarthy work through a week of media stories: a US surrogacy dispute that turned uglier once a baby's heart condition wasn't the death sentence the contract assumed, a UK campaign against "tradwives", and a growing trend of turning cinema screens into churches, weighed against the Eucharist as the true source and summit of faith. There's also an update on Fr Willie Doyle's path to sainthood and a look at a new piece on the Tuam mother-and-baby home.

Fr Billy Swan presents the Breakfast Show from a drought-stricken Rome, opening with Peter's walk across a stormy Sea of Galilee and a fishing trip off the Saltee Islands that left him wondering if he'd make it back to Kilmore Quay. The second half turns to St John Vianney's feast day, and why confession, more than any other sacrament, is the one Fr Billy thinks the Irish Church most needs to recover.

Margaret swaps her usual base for a few days in Kerry with her husband John, and uses the trip to talk apple trees: old Irish varieties rescued from forgotten orchards by the Seed Savers in Clare, which ones need a pollination partner, and what to underplant them with to keep bees and beneficial insects coming. A listener's question about clover in the lawn gets answered along the way.

Caroline Busher and reviewers Anna Healy and Monica Riley take on Flannery O'Connor's The Violent Bear It Away, a dark, Gothic novel about a teenage boy fighting the prophetic vocation thrust upon him. The panel weighs the book's unflinching violence, and its child abuse and arson, against O'Connor's own conviction that grace does not arrive gently.

Deacon Don Devaney is joined by his friend Marie Mongan to share powerful stories from a recent pilgrimage to Medjugorje, including testimonies of faith, suffering and healing. They reflect on unanswered prayer, the loss of young lives on Irish roads, and the importance of parents and grandparents praying for and with their children. Deacon Don […]

What happens when a mother never stops praying for her wild son? In this episode of The Children's Show on Radio Maria Ireland, host Eileen tells the remarkable story of Saint Monica and Saint Augustine from Northern Africa. Born around 331 AD, Monica married a pagan official named Patricius with a fiery temper, endured ridicule for her faith, yet prayed daily for her son Augustine—who was gifted but wild and unreligious. Even when Augustine tricked her and fled to Rome, Monica followed him to Milan, where he eventually encountered Bishop Ambrose. Through a mysterious voice chanting "take up and read," Augustine discovered St. Paul's letter to the Romans and experienced conversion. He became a brilliant writer, priest, and bishop whose famous quote declares, "God loves each of us as if there were only one of us." Eileen includes a prayer by Augustine to the Holy Spirit, shares his restatement "You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you," and assigns listeners a fact file activity. Monica and Augustine's feast days fall consecutively on August 27th and 28th.

Fr Adrian is joined by Shanade Forest to talk about the person of the Trinity many people find hardest to relate to: God the Father. Shanade shares what shifted for her on a recent trip to Medjugorje, and the two trade stories, from a five-year-old who felt God between his parents in bed to St Teresa of Ávila's vision of a crystal palace, about what it means to be loved without having to earn it.

Naoimh is joined by Brian, whose wife Kathy shared her own story on the Breakfast Show a few weeks ago, for the other half of an extraordinary account: a near-fatal car crash five months before their wedding, years of chronic pain, and a search for relief that led the couple into mediums, Reiki and shamanic practice before everything changed. Brian talks about the warnings that came to him along the way, the encounter that turned him back to Christ, and what he tells people now who are still looking for answers in the wrong places.

Fr Eamonn McCarthy continues alone through Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV's encyclical on the human person in the age of artificial intelligence, working through paragraphs 73 to 83 on solidarity, social justice and integral development. He tests the document's principles against very local questions: the right to pay in cash, the electricity bill run up by Ireland's data centres, and what a just, unafraid response to migration actually looks like. There's a blunter worry underneath it all, too, about what constant screen time is doing to a generation's capacity to cope with loss.

Feedback and questions: info@radiomaria.ie, or by text or WhatsApp to +353-89467-2000.

Mary Hooten and Fr Eamonn McCarthy sit down with the Gospel for the 22nd Sunday of Ordinary Time, where Peter earns a rare rebuke from Jesus for trying to talk him out of the road to Jerusalem. Before they get there, Fr Eamonn corrects an earlier mix-up over a listener's detailed research into what exactly made up the loaves and fish at the feeding of the five thousand. The reflection turns to what it actually costs to stop thinking the way Peter did.

Feedback and questions: info@radiomaria.ie, or by text or WhatsApp to +353-89467-2000.

Rebecca is joined by Eddie McNally and Fr Morris Colgan OP to talk through St Joseph's Men's Camino: a 25-kilometre day of walking, silence, and confession along the Boyne Valley Camino route on September 12th, recognised as an official stage of the Camino de Santiago. They get into what "spiritual authority" means for a husband and father, ahead of an evening talk on the subject from Fr Mark Quinn, and why the men who turn up keep coming back.

Mary Stenson tells the story of Joseph Pearce, a National Front street activist twice imprisoned for inciting racial hatred, whose way out of the movement ran through a set of rosary beads and the writings of G.K. Chesterton. There's also a return to the story of Catherine Labouré and the Miraculous Medal, an archived Frank Duff interview recalling how the Legion first found Edel Quinn, and an appeal for the funds Radio Maria needs to keep broadcasting.

Deacon Thady broadcasts live from Medjugorje, on his 27th pilgrimage, alongside Fr Sheamus Kelly of Cork's Western Road, who spent decades as a missionary in Maracaibo, Venezuela. Fr Sheamus recounts the healing ministry that grew out of his charismatic prayer group there, including the story of a severely disabled child he prayed over after Mass, and what happened when the boy's mother stood up years later with a testimony. Deacon Thady also shares the story behind a hymn written on Apparition Hill during his first pilgrimage in 2003.

Aoife Collins marks her 100th episode of Life Matters with Fr Fergal Cummins, a Tullamore priest working on a book about habits and discipline called Protect Your Joy and Train Like a Monk. The conversation moves from his path into the priesthood and the prayer groups he has built in his parish into blunter territory: righteous anger, the widening gap between young men returning to faith and young women drifting from it, and his frank views on when a man should propose. Along the way, Mike Tyson's old training routine turns out to be exactly the kind of discipline he thinks Christians are missing.

If you have been affected by any issues raised in this episode, Samaritans can be contacted free, anytime, on 116 123.

Deacon Don Devaney presents Healing Power of the Sacraments alone this week, with Aidan away ministering in Galway. He draws on decades of prayer ministry, from a childhood of poverty and answered prayers in Ballyfermot to cases where inherited family wounds surfaced generations later as physical and psychological illness. The hour closes, as always, with a prayer for healing that runs from head to toe.

Feedback and questions: info@radiomaria.ie, or by text or WhatsApp to +353-89467-2000.

Carmela is joined by Fr Joe Tedesco, a Trappist monk sent from Mepkin Abbey in South Carolina to help grow the small community at Bethlehem Abbey in Northern Ireland. He talks through the rhythm of the divine office, sung seven times a day from four in the morning, and the moment on retreat when he heard the words that ended twenty-eight years as a parish priest. There's also the one part of his old life he still hasn't quite gotten over giving up.

Feedback and questions: info@radiomaria.ie, or by text or WhatsApp to +353-89467-2000.

Eileen continues her tour of Ireland's lighthouse coast, moving further west to Bear Island: a place the size of Manhattan, with graffiti cut into roadside stone by American sailors stationed there in 1918, and a Holy Year cross the islanders hauled to the summit by hand in 1950 with no machinery to help them. She closes out at the Bull Rock, a rock too small to land a boat on, and the engineering feat it took to give it a working lighthouse by 1889. Traditional music, including two reels from her own album, threads through the hour.

Mary and Fr Eamonn read and reflect on the Canaanite woman's exchange with Jesus in Matthew 15, a passage that sounds abrupt until the two draw out what her persistence, and her quick answer to his testing, actually reveal about faith. There's also a lighter aside on whether the fish in the loaves-and-fishes miracle were served hot.

Deacon Don and Aidan Byrne catch up after a few weeks off air: chess lessons from a seven-year-old grandson, home-made wine, and the news out of Carlow of a spate of fatal road accidents involving teenagers. That leads into a wider conversation on mortal sin, the vices named in the Catechism, and why so few people, in the saints' own reckoning, choose the narrow gate. Aidan closes with the story of a doctor once behind one of America's most consequential abortion rulings, and what changed his mind.

Eileen marks National Heritage Week with a tour of some of Ireland's most storied sites: the medieval cluster atop the Rock of Cashel, the ancient pilgrim path of St Declan's Way, and the lighthouse built on a rock with barely room to stand, out at Fastnet. She traces how that lighthouse became one of the tallest ever built on open sea, and what its keepers endured to keep it lit through Atlantic storms. Music from Rita Connolly and Sharon Shannon threads through the hour.

Eoin is joined again by Father Aiden, standing in for Father Chris, for a Fifth Commandment episode of YouCat. They open with a detour into diocesan priesthood versus religious life, then work through self-defence, the ethics of Hiroshima, and the slippery-slope arguments behind assisted dying laws abroad. The sharpest exchange comes at the end, when Eoin presses Father Aiden on what automatic excommunication for abortion actually means, and whether the Church really lets it be undone by walking into a confessional.

Fr Peter George Flynn presents Catechesis, opening with an afternoon spent handing out miraculous medals outside the GAA finals at Croke Park, and what the reactions, from a curious young Lutheran to the man who carries the John 3:7 sign, taught him about how grace meets people where they are. From there he turns to a question sent in by a listener heading to Knock: what does it mean to call Mary "mother," and why might some ways of saying it offend a Protestant relative while others don't? An old letter from John Wesley turns out to have more in common with Catholic teaching than either side usually admits.

Fr Peter George Flynn continues his course on the sacrament of confession, turning this week to its least understood form: general absolution given without individual confession beforehand. He traces its use through the sinking of the Titanic and the trenches of the First World War, and asks why it still turns up at Irish penitential services despite the bishops having ruled decades ago that the conditions for it don't exist here.

Fr Peter George Flynn continues the story of Pedro Ballester, the Manchester student whose cause for beatification has recently opened, this time in conversation with his younger brother Javier. Javier traces the steps that shaped Pedro's short life, from a childhood suggestion to pray the rosary in the car to the diagnosis that ended his university studies, and the trust that carried him through what followed. He is only now beginning to see the fruit of that suffering.

What do we actually enjoy doing, and when was the last time we made time for it? John and Eoin explore why identifying what brings us genuine joy can be surprisingly difficult, and how our desires can change when faith becomes central to our lives. Drawing on St Augustine’s famous words that our hearts are […]

Did Jesus share in the bread and chalice at the Last Supper? A listener’s handwritten question opens this episode of YouChat, where Eoin is joined by Fr Chris Garrett to continue their series on the Fifth Commandment, “Thou shalt not kill.” Working through the YouCat catechism, they explore how we should treat our bodies as […]

Donal O'Sullivan Latchford and Fr Eamonn McCarthy work through a week of media stories: a US surrogacy dispute that turned uglier once a baby's heart condition wasn't the death sentence the contract assumed, a UK campaign against "tradwives", and a growing trend of turning cinema screens into churches, weighed against the Eucharist as the true source and summit of faith. There's also an update on Fr Willie Doyle's path to sainthood and a look at a new piece on the Tuam mother-and-baby home.

Fr Peter George Flynn tells the story of the Crozier Fathers, a medieval order of crusader-veterans who deliberately destroyed two centuries of their own records during a 1410 reform, and very nearly finished the job themselves: by 1840 only four elderly friars remained. From there the order rebuilt itself onto five continents, guided along the way by a saint whose relics were found under a pear tree in Cologne.

Fr Billy Swan presents the Breakfast Show from a drought-stricken Rome, opening with Peter's walk across a stormy Sea of Galilee and a fishing trip off the Saltee Islands that left him wondering if he'd make it back to Kilmore Quay. The second half turns to St John Vianney's feast day, and why confession, more than any other sacrament, is the one Fr Billy thinks the Irish Church most needs to recover.

Mary takes inspiration from a memorable 1974 au pair adventure in Madrid for this delicious Spanish Empanada. She shares the story of discovering the pastry during her first visit to the Spanish capital, then guides listeners through making a family-sized version using ready-made rough puff pastry and a creamy almond filling. Glazed with egg and […]