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08-Nov-2012
This weekend is the last of CathNews' special coverage to mark the 50th anniversary of Vatican II. Tomorrow's edition of CathNews Perspectives will include a feature on how the Council changed the landscape for Mission, and a reflection on how the political differences over its impact emphasise the depth of its legacy. In these special editions, CathNews Perspectives will be delivered on Saturday mornings instead of the regular Friday afternoon timeslot. We hope you have enjoyed our special coverage.
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News
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08-Nov-2012
Instability and increasing violence in Syria have prompted Pope Benedict XVI to cancel the planned visit to the war-torn nation by a delegation of cardinals and bishops, the Catholic Herald reports.
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07-Nov-2012
Pope Benedict XVI has congratulated US President Barack Obama on his re-election, saying that he prayed the ideals of freedom and justice that guided America's founders might continue to flourish, reportds the Catholic News Service.
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05-Nov-2012
A Vatican computer technician, Claudio Sciarpelletti (pictured), charged with aiding and abetting the papal butler in stealing confidential documents, went on trial yesterday amid legal arguments over the definition of the charge and questions about the "anonymous source" who reported him to officials, reports the Catholic News Service on NCR Online.
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04-Nov-2012
A holy fire sale has landed more than 16 Melbourne churches on the property market in the past year, and mum and dad investors are among those keen to convert sacred ground into heavenly homes, reports AdelaideNow.
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08-Nov-2012
The University of San Diego cancelled a British theologian's fellowship after an influential alumnus and a conservative watchdog group backed by a high-ranking Vatican official protested the appointment to the university's board of trustees, reports NCR Online.
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08-Nov-2012
Lawyers for the principal of a Catholic university college are to apply for a court order in an attempt to force the editor of the website Independent Catholic News to reveal the identity of an anonymous source, reports The Tablet.
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07-Nov-2012
A former Armidale priest accused of sexually abusing three girls during the 1970s and 1980s has been granted bail, reports The Armidale Express.
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07-Nov-2012
The Catholic church has sought to bypass Cessnock Council over a controversial plan to rezone rural land at Black Hil, reports The Newcastle Herald.
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07-Nov-2012
Spain's highest court upheld the country's gay marriage law on Tuesday, rejecting an appeal lodged by the ruling People's Party seven years ago and confirming the legality of same-sex unions, reports Reuters on Yahoo7.
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06-Nov-2012
The Catholic Church in France has taken a fresh swing at the Socialist government's plan to authorise gay marriage and adoption, which is to be presented as a draft law this week, reports Bigpond News.
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05-Nov-2012
Gay rights campaigners have accused the Queensland premier Campbell Newman (pictured) of playing favourites after learning the premier met with Brisbane's Catholic archbishop the day before introducing changes to civil union laws, according to an AAP report in the Courier-Mail.
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05-Nov-2012
Most of the evidence given to a state inquiry into child abuse has not been published more than a month after the deadline for submissions closed, The Age reports.
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05-Nov-2012
Egypt's Coptic Orthodox church chose a new pope, Tawadros II, in a sumptuous service on Sunday and Christians hope he will lead them through an Islamist-dominated landscape and protect what is the Middle East's biggest Christian community, according to a Reuters report in The West Australian.
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04-Nov-2012
Queensland Premier Campbell Newman held a private meeting with the Archbishop of Brisbane Mark Coleridge the day before tabling surprise legislation to abolish state-sanctioned civil unions, reports The Australian.
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04-Nov-2012
Two leading Catholic social justice groups have condemned the Federal government's new changes to excisse the Australian mainland for asylum seekers who arrive by boat. The Australian Catholic Migrant and Refugee Office said it is "gravely concerned" and the Josephite Justice Office said the changes "shame us as Australians".
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04-Nov-2012
Six men who were holding a ceremony before a Goddess of Death altar were slain in a town in northern Mexico, according to an AFP report on news.com.au.
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04-Nov-2012
The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem has warned that it may shut its doors to pilgrims in protest at a dispute with an Israeli water company, reports the BBC.
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01-Nov-2012
The Catholic Church will need state intervention to resolve the crisis surrounding sexual abuse of children by priests, according to noted jurist and Jesuit priest Frank Brennan, reports the Bendigo Advertiser.
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07-Nov-2012
Professor Christine Bennett, Dean of the School of Medicine on the Sydney campus of the University of Notre Dame, has been named an Australian of the Year finalist for NSW, reports The Catholic Weekly.
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06-Nov-2012
Five Catholic priests quit the council of St John's College at the University of Sydney last night as the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal Pell, and the NSW Premier, Barry O'Farrell, voiced their disgust over the initiation ritual scandal, reports the Sydney Morning Herald.
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06-Nov-2012
Falling church attendances in Australia may have plateaued, churchgoers are considerably happier than 10 years ago, and half of all church attenders are Catholics, according to the five-yearly church ''census'', reports The Age.
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06-Nov-2012
A pedophile at the centre of a South Australian State Government controversy worked at an Adelaide Catholic school for almost five years before he was convicted, it has emerged, reports Adelaidenow.
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05-Nov-2012
The University of Sydney vice-chancellor, Michael Spence, has called on the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal Pell, who is the figurehead of St John's College, to ''do all he can to sort out" the culture of loutish behaviour by its resident students, reports The Sydney Morning Herald.
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05-Nov-2012
A senior figure at a prestigious Perth Catholic school has launched a scathing attack on high school balls for sending teens the message that materialism and debauched behaviour are the values they should be living up to, reports The West Australian on Yahoo7.
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04-Nov-2012
The Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal Pell, has directly intervened in the serious behavioural problems at St John's College at the University of Sydney, saying the culture of loutish behaviour must stop. He has not ruled out involving the police, reports the Sydney Morning Herald.
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01-Nov-2012
No pumpkins, monsters or skulls, just saints: the Catholic Church has launched its own alternative to Halloween. In Rome, Turin, Genoa, Benevento, Poland and the Philippines, Catholics and Church leaders has organised initiatives so that the night between October 31 and November 1 was a celebration of All Saints night, reports Vatican Insider.
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07-Nov-2012
St Vincent’s Private Hospital Sydney and the Mater Hospital have been rated among Australia’s best following results from the HCF Customer Satisfaction Survey which canvassed more than 8000 of its members, reports The Catholic Weekly.
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06-Nov-2012
The UK adoption agency Catholic Care has lost its five-year fight to reserve its services for heterosexual couples only, in a landmark court ruling, reports the Catholic Herald.
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08-Nov-2012
Catholic-raised Sydney artist, Fabian Astore, has been named a joint winner of the 2012 Blake Prize for Religious Art for his video of a ittle girl runing carefree in concentric circles past 20 men worshipping in Istanbul's Suleymaniye Mosque, reports The Sydney Morning Herald.
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06-Nov-2012
The damning review given by the Holy See’s official newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, to British author J.K Rowling’s latest publication - “The Vacancy Casual”- has not gone down well in English speaking countries, reports Vatican Insider.
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Regulars
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08-Nov-2012
A Benedictine monk and former drug abuser is now working with addicts to break their habit – with the help of the rosary. Every day at 2pm, a group of 20 people with drug problems join Benedictine Father Francis Xavier Tran An to say the rosary in the chapel of the Huong Thien Centre for Drug Rehabilitation, reports Ucanews.
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07-Nov-2012
The work of Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963), creator of The Chronicles of Narnia, has been gaining popularity for his vision of an open, non-denominational Christianity. As the 50th anniversary of his death approaches, NCR Online talks to Walter Hooper, who lived with Lewis at the end of his life and is literary adviser to his estate.
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06-Nov-2012
Vatican II was a council unlike any preceding one. It was a special event for many reasons. Even though it stands in a long line of councils: it was in many respects a new kind of council, says Cardinal Godfried Danneels in a speech at Southwark Cathedral in England, reported in The Tablet.
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05-Nov-2012
It’s not every day that you meet someone who is about to represent their country at the United Nations, especially when that person is only 18 and still in high school. In January, Chloe Kelly, a college captain at St Francis Xavier, Florey, will travel to The Hague in the Netherlands as a representative of UN Youth Australia to take part in the model United Nations, reports the Catholic Voice.
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04-Nov-2012
Among my favourite Pax Christi memories is one of Nancy Small leading a few hundred of us in a prayerful protest against the first war in Iraq from the steps of Brooklyn's St James Cathedral, which barred our entry, to Assumption Church, which welcomed us, writes Sr Camille D'Arienzo in NCR Online, as she talks to Nancy Small about what makes her tick.
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08-Nov-2012
Cyber Sin is an eight-minute film that has been screened in Sydney’s Catholic schools as part of a major resource in the war on cyber-bullying. The website has details of the film and a link that allows viewers to watch it.
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07-Nov-2012
The Franciscans of the Immaculate were founded by the two Franciscan friars, Fr Stefano Maria Manelli and Fr Gabriel Maria Pellettieri.
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06-Nov-2012
Compass is the Australian review of topical theology published quarterly by the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart.
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05-Nov-2012
While everyone frets about the new twists in the global financial crisis, Washington Catholic think tank the Centre of Concern has been studying reform of the world's financial institutions since 1995 - Rethinking Bretton Woods
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04-Nov-2012
The Pontifical Council for Migrants and Travelers is the latest Vatican agency to launch its own website.
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08-Nov-2012
Three young women are asked to be bridesmaids at a wedding of a woman they didn’t like a lot at high school. The film has elements that are similar to The Hangover (2009) and Bridesmaids (20011), where young adults spend a night before the big day, swearing, drinking, having sex, taking drugs, and slicing at one another verbally.
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07-Nov-2012
Writer, producer, editor Amiel Courtin-Wilson has said that his film has polarised audiences and the director’s statement from the Media Kit explains the intentions.“Hail is the culmination of my intensely personal six-year collaboration with Daniel P. Jones. "I first met Danny in mid 2005 while shooting a documentary about a theatre company founded to rehabilitate ex-prison inmates."
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05-Nov-2012
This romantic comedy is written and directed by Woody Allen. Four sub-stories are in the same film: an obscure office worker wakes up one morning to find that he is a celebrity, an architect (with Alec Baldwin as actor-commentator) goes back to a city street where he lived as a student, a young couple get separated on their honeymoon with unexpected results, and an ageing opera director spots a special talent for singing in unusual circumstances.
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06-Nov-2012
The Vatican City is a landlocked nation state consisting of 110 acres and a population of just a couple of hundred, yet it has its own police force, army, legal system and economy. It’s also one of the last nations in Europe where political power resides in the hands of one man. Rear Vision, on ABC Radio National, asks how and when did it come into existence and how does it survive?
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08-Nov-2012
What is the best way to help the poor? This question is older than the Church, and probably as old as human society. But in modern conditions it has arguably become harder than ever to give a satisfactory answer, writes JM Shaw in the Catholic Herald.
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07-Nov-2012
Twenty years on from the High Court's Mabo decision, I want to focus on three anniversaries which help to put the case into perspective for me, writes Fr Fank Brennan in an edited version of an address he gave to the Central Queensland Law Association Conference last month, and published in Eureka Street.
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06-Nov-2012
Just prior to his opening of the final session of the Second Vatican Council, Pope Paul VI, in his encyclical Ecclesiam Suam, complained of a rising tide of secularism within the Church and he was critical of those who thought that the "reform of the Church should consist principally in adapting its way of thinking and acting to the customs and temper of the modern secular world," writes Tracey Rowland in ABC Online.
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05-Nov-2012
Whatever happens in the US Presidential election later today, the Catholic Church in America has been changed, likely in irreversible ways, by the experience of this campaign year, writes George Weigel in Ethics and Public Policy Centre.
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04-Nov-2012
Being a Catholic priest during public enquiries into sexual abuse within the Church is a bracing experience. Infinitely less hurtful than being the victim of abuse, of course. But it prompts musing about the ways in which evil actions work out in a group and affect the individual members of the group and its perception by others, writes Andrew Hamilton in Eureka Street.
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04-Nov-2012
The statue of Madonna will visit Sydney Fish Market this coming Sunday for the Blessing of the fleet. A flotilla of boats from the local Sydney fishing fleet and other areas of NSW will make their way with the statue Madonna around to Blackwattle Bay. During their journey to Blackwattle Bay the flotilla will be sprayed with water to symbolise the blessing.
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