News
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14-Nov-2012
Politicians of all persuasions, from Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott down, say Catholic priests must not be exempt from having to report child abuse to police should they hear it in the confession of a colleague, reports The Sydney Morning Herald.
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13-Nov-2012
A man unleashed his ''deeply entrenched hatred'' for the Catholic order by burgling dozens of its churches across suburban Melbourne, reports The Age.
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11-Nov-2012
An 80-year-old retired priest allegedly bit an ear off another elderly clergyman in Perth during a violent brawl over a parking bay in their block of units, reports AdelaideNow.
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08-Nov-2012
A senior police investigator has publicly challenged NSW Premier Barry O'Farrell to launch a royal commission into child sex abuse by clergy, according to an AAP report in The Australian.
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12-Nov-2012
The Vatican has vowed to never stop insisting marriage must be between a man and a woman, reports news.com.au.
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11-Nov-2012
Vatican computer technician Claudio Sciarpelletti has been sentenced to two months in prison by the Vatican court for his role in the theft of confidential papal documents in the so-called Vatileaks case, reports the Catholic News Agency.
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11-Nov-2012
Pope Benedict XVI will start tweeting from a personal Twitter account, perhaps before the end of the year, the Vatican's spokesman says in an AP report published by The Sydney Morning Herald.
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13-Nov-2012
The window pane at a Malaysian hospital that throngs of Catholics believe has an image resembling the Virgin Mary will be moved to a church, reports AFP on PerthNow.
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12-Nov-2012
Hundreds of Catholics have gathered at a Malaysian hospital after seeing an image said to resemble the Virgin Mary, reports news.com.au.
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08-Nov-2012
The Northern Territory Catholic Education Office has confirmed that two of three people killed in a crash in Darwin were staff members, reports the ABC.
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13-Nov-2012
More than 100 staff at the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of San Diego in California, have threatened to call a vote of no confidence in the university's leadership if they do not reverse their decision to revoke an invitation to a leading liberal British Catholic theologian, reports The Tablet.
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15-Nov-2012
A female church worker was shot in the head and killed in the Philippines on Wednesday outside the main Catholic church in Bongao town, capital of the southwestern province of Tawi-Tawi, reports Ucanews.
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15-Nov-2012
The Principal of St Mary's University College, in south-west London, has dropped his legal action against a Catholic journalist who said she was prepared to go to prison rather than comply with a High Court order to name a source, reports The Tablet.
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14-Nov-2012
Brothers from the St John of God order fabricated a sex assault allegation about one of their own child-abuse victims to discredit him, confidential legal settlement documents allege, The Agereports.
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13-Nov-2012
Cardinal George Pell has blamed a media smear campaign against the Catholic Church for public pressure that led to a royal commission into child sex abuse, reports The Age. The Archbishop of Sydney said a commission into the Catholic Church was not needed, but he welcomed the broader inquiry announced by the Prime Minister as ''an opportunity to clear the air, to separate fact from fiction''.
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13-Nov-2012
The Bishop of Maitland-Newcastle, Bill Wright, said it was possible a pedophile ring once existed among clergy in the diocese, reports The Australian.
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12-Nov-2012
The newly appointed leader of the world's Anglicans is a former oil executive who said his spiritual director was a Catholic monk, reports the Catholic News Service.
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12-Nov-2012
The Australian Catholic Bishops Conference says it supports the announcement of a Royal Commission by Prime Minister Julia Gillard to investigate decades of child abuse in churches, schools and foster homes, reports The Sydney Morning Herald.
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12-Nov-2012
The Catholic Church has settled thousands of claims of child abuse outside of its internal complaints' system, Melbourne Response, in an attempt to silence them, a victims' group told the Victorian abuse inquiry yesterday, reports The Age.
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11-Nov-2012
Church officials will co-operate fully with the NSW Special Commission of Inquiry called by Premier Barry O'Farrell into claims of interference in police investigations of sexual abuse by priests in the Hunter region, the Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal Pell, said yesterday in The Sunday Telegraph.
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11-Nov-2012
A list of alleged paedophile priests who moved from parish to parish or further away, where they continued offending, will be presented today to the Victorian parliamentiry abuse inquiry, reports The Age.
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14-Nov-2012
Extra funding under the Gillard Government’s National Plan for School Improvement will enable Catholic schools to continue to deliver quality education in the spirit of social justice that is such a strong feature of Catholic education, says School Education Minister Peter Garrett, the Catholic Weekly reports.
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14-Nov-2012
As Iraq's first Catholic school in 40 years takes tentative steps into the future it will draw on the expertise of two religious sisters trained in educational administration at Brisbane's Australian Catholic University, reports The Catholic Leader.
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14-Nov-2012
Almost 100 faculty members at the University of San Diego have declared a loss of confidence in their president's leadership, saying her cancellation of a British theologian's visiting fellowship and her response to criticism of the move have shown her to be "ethically bankrupt," reports NCR Online.
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12-Nov-2012
Almost the entire council of Sydney University's St John's College has quit, saying the recent resignations of the college's six clerical fellows means they can no longer do their jobs, reports the ABC.
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11-Nov-2012
The Executive Director of Schools in the Diocese of Parramatta in western Sydney, Greg Whitby, received a Papal Knighthood on Friday at Catholic Education’s Silver Jubilee celebration, according to a media release by the Diocese of Parramatta.
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15-Nov-2012
Thousands of people rallied outside Ireland's parliament on Wednesday to demand strict abortion rules be eased after a pregnant Indian woman repeatedly denied a termination died in an Irish hospital, reports Reuters on Yahoo7.
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15-Nov-2012
Catholic Theological College (CTC) in East Melbourne is the new home for a restored set of stained-glass Stations of the Cross, reports the Catholic Archdiocese of Melbourne.
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14-Nov-2012
A young woman died of septicaemia in Ireland after Catholic doctors refused to terminate her miscarriage because abortion was against the country's law and religious beliefs, reports The Sydney Morning Herald.
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13-Nov-2012
An art work called Homage (detail pictured), which documents Korean-born artist Hyun-Hee Lee's conversion from Buddhism to Catholicism,, is the winner of the prestigious John Coburn Emerging Artist Award as part of the 2012 Blake Prizes for Religious and Spiritual Art, reports the Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney.
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Regulars
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15-Nov-2012
Openly gay, devoutly Catholic, left-wing and an enemy of the mafia, Rosario Crocetta broke the mould when he was elected governor of deeply conservative Sicily last month, reports Rdeuters on Yahoo7.
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14-Nov-2012
Building Bridges not Walls, the Social Justice Statement from the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference for 2011-2012, focuses on the plight of people in our prisons. Cessnock Correctional Centre, in the Hunter region of NSW, currently accommodates almost 500 inmates in minimum, maximum or segregated security. Two people involved in providing different services for inmates at Cessnock Correctional Centre tell their stories to Aurora.
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13-Nov-2012
The African Catholic Bishop of Yendi, Vincent Sowah Boi-Nai SVD, hailed for his peace-building efforts in Ghana, says violent protests against an anti-Islam film produced in the US would not be condoned by the large Muslim community in his homeland diocese of Yendi, reports The Southern Cross.
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12-Nov-2012
“Education is the soul of a society passed from one generation to another”, wrote the English intellectual GK Chesterton. He was referring to the bequeathing of literacy and numeracy to the young, yet his words apply even more to Christian faith formation where the soul is more than a literary metaphor. But what children absorb in the classroom, adults pursuing faith education must work hard to attain, reports Aurora magazine.
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11-Nov-2012
Mitt Romney failed in his bid to win the White House back for Republicans, but the biggest losers in last week's election may be Christian conservatives who put everything they had into denying President Barack Obama a second term and battling other threats to their agenda, reports NCR Online.
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11-Nov-2012
The Economist magazine has described René Brülhart, the director of Liechtenstein’s Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU), as the James Bond of the financial world. Brülhart is now the Vatican’s new financial advisor, whose job it will be to get the tiny State onto the “white list” of territories deemed to comply with international standards on combatting financial crime, reports Vatican Insider.
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15-Nov-2012
The Australian Catholic Bishops Conference Media Blog has a list of interesting and timely blogs on issues of contemporary relevance, from faith to politics and beyond.
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14-Nov-2012
The November edition of this website for Catholic educators is now available.
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13-Nov-2012
Good Grief is committed to relieving suffering and bringing hope to people affected by change, loss and grief.
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12-Nov-2012
This describes itself as a web site dedicated to assisting families in making the home the living heart of the church, CathFamily.org.
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11-Nov-2012
The Little Company of Mary is an international congregation of Catholic women Religious who have committed their lives to pray and care for the suffering and dying of the world. The congregation has a new attractive website which is easy to read, view and navigate. It features news, events and links to international affiliates.
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15-Nov-2012
This is a US film about a veteran, Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), who is traumatised by his Navy service in World War II, and is being assessed for psychiatric problems. The film is a disturbing, but fascinating, exposé of cult-fanaticism, and has been linked to the current controversy that surrounds Scientology.
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14-Nov-2012
This is a surprisingly good American drama about two US policemen, who work the suburban precincts of Los Angeles. The title of the movie takes its name from the way law enforcement in the US describes an officer, who is killed in the line of duty.
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11-Nov-2012
I Wish offers a lot of enjoyment for the audience. We open with Koichi, a 10-year-old, waking up and looking at the nearby volcano which was erupting. He cleans up the dust. This begins his day, breakfast with his mother and grandmother (father lives elsewhere), off to school with his friends, chatting as they walk up hill, a class and an essay on professions which they mostly get wrong.
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12-Nov-2012
In Episode 4 of Divine Women, Bettany Hughes heads to Ancient Rome where the fate of the civilisation lay in the hands of six sacred virgins and she returns to those crucial early years of Christianity where she finds evidence that overturns centuries of Church teaching and challenges the belief that women should not be priests.
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15-Nov-2012
When the bishops of the United States gather later this month in Baltimore for their autumn meeting, they ought to take some time to ponder a simple question: Were their words and actions during the recent election season the kind of discourse that informs and persuades or did they contribute to the partisan shrillness that we hope our teachers are educating youngsters to rise above as they mature into voting citizens, writes NCR Online in an editorial.
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14-Nov-2012
I welcome the fact that the Royal Commission's scope will be wider than the confines of the Catholic Church. The abuse of children is a much wider issue. At the same time, I believe it important that Catholics as a church face up to the particular factors that have contributed to sexual abuse among the ranks of clergy and religious, writes Pat Power in Eureka Street.
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13-Nov-2012
Why does it take an enormous tragedy like Hurricane Sandy to drive home the reality of climate change? The late Fr Thomas Berry, cultural historian and geologian, predicted this might be the case, asks Sharon Abercrombie in NCR Online.
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12-Nov-2012
My opposition to physician-assisted suicide goes “all the way down,” as the philosophers like to say. Because I view life as a gift and our own lives as implicated in the lives of others, I do not believe there is a right to kill oneself. Put another way, I don’t think we have any more right to kill ourselves than we do to kill other people. I also know that most people probably disagree with me on this, writes EJ Dionne in The Washington Post.
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13-Nov-2012
Friar Alessandro, who is a member of the Franciscan community in Assisi, works as a carpenter and guide for visitors, as well as assisting with the church choir. He is the first friar to land a major record deal. Hear him singing.
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