News
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23-Sep-2008
Catholic Social Services Australia has called on the Federal Government to establish an independent commission to set and review pensions and support payments in order to avoid "politicising" the issue.
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24-Sep-2008
Local Chinese governments have known since 2005 of the problem of melamine tainted milk yet did nothing, according to a Catholic woman from Shijiazhuang where the Sanlu company at the centre of the scandal is based.
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22-Sep-2008
Melbourne Archbishop Denis Hart has declared a Day of Intercession calling on Catholics to mobilise against the passage by Victoria's Upper House of an abortion law reform bill that would "provide no protection to lives in the womb and no support for women with unplanned or difficult pregnancies".
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News - National
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23-Sep-2008
Catholic hospitals may be forced to close their maternity and emergency wings if Victoria's abortion law reform bill is passed in its present form, Melbourne Archbishop Denis Hart has said.
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26-Sep-2008
Describing them as an "invisible workforce", retired Melbourne Bishop Hilton Deakin has backed a campaign for wage increases by cleaners who are considering going on strike.
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26-Sep-2008
Plans by a fertility company to resume research to
obtain stem cells from cloned human embryos are "repulsive and futile", the organisation Australians for Ethical Stem Cell Research says.
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25-Sep-2008
A Schools Assistance Bill introduced by Federal Education Minister Julia Gillard this week will require Catholic and other independent schools to report on their finances and results in the same way as government schools.
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25-Sep-2008
Being in a relationship with the opposite sex boosts men's sense of self-esteem but hardly affects that of women, an Australian Catholic University researcher has found.
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24-Sep-2008
Government policy has neglected families with older children, Vinnies researcher, Dr Andy Marks said, after figures showed that families with teenage children are no better off than a decade earlier and if anything worse off.
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24-Sep-2008
Catholic hospitals will not offer referrals for abortion as required under the abortion law reform bill before Victoria's Upper House, Catholic Health Australia chief Martin Laverty said yesterday as commentators described the vote as "too close to call".
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22-Sep-2008
Victoria's Catholic teachers have won a pay rise that will place them among the highest paid of their peers while parents at Catholic schools launch a signature campaign to pressure the Brumby government to raise funding.
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24-Sep-2008
72 year old Dee Why parish priest Fr John Mello successfully fought off an armed intruder at his St Kevin's Church Monday but suffered knife wounds to his arm in the attack.
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23-Sep-2008
Hobart City Council is considering a recommendation to contribute $150,000 to the St Mary's Catholic Cathedral restoration appeal - only half the amount committed by Council to the Anglican St David's Cathedral.
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News - International
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25-Sep-2008
A Korean Catholic parish has donated over $100,000 or 15% of its annual income to build houses in Bangladesh and to provide food for people in Burundi.
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22-Sep-2008
An unmanned aerial vehicle tracked Pope Benedict's every move during his recent visit to Lourdes, reports say.
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26-Sep-2008
The only real growth registered in the current financial crisis has been "the commissions, profits of the banks and bonuses for the managers," Italian economist Ettore Gotti Tedeschi says in an article in Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano.
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25-Sep-2008
Israeli Rabbi Shear-Yashuv Cohen, co-chairman of the Israeli-Vatican dialogue commission and
chief rabbi of Haifa, will become the first non-Christian ever to
address a world Synod of Bishops.
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24-Sep-2008
In a bid to encourage American voters to visit their "Faithful Citizenship" website, US bishops are offering an iPod to a randomly selected visitors who register with the site.
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25-Sep-2008
UK Transport Minister, Ruth Kelly, a Catholic linked to Opus Dei, will resign after informing Prime Minister Gordon Brown of her religious objections to Government plans to liberalise stem cell research, reports say.
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23-Sep-2008
An Italian bishop has forgiven a priest discovered in bed with a parishioner saying that the woman had "led him astray".
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22-Sep-2008
Three Northern Ireland clergy, brothers Martin and Eugene O'Hagan and David Delargy, have landed a record deal with Sony BMG worth more than $A3 million.
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22-Sep-2008
In what is believed to be the biggest public protest since 1954, over 10,000 people have gathered in Hanoi to protest the demolition by the Vietnamese government of the former Vatican nunciature in order to turn it into a public park and community centre.
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23-Sep-2008
Ascetic priest Fr Samuel Francis better known as Swami Astheya has been found dead in the chapel of his ashram 400km south of New Delhi while the Catholic cathedral in Jabalpur in central India has been badly damaged in a fire lit by Hindu militants.
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24-Sep-2008
A former secret police commander and three agents who served under
Chile's Pinochet regime have been sentenced to seven years in prison
for the 1974 disappearance of a Spanish priest.
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22-Sep-2008
BREAKING NEWS: Former Foreign Minister Taro Aso has been chosen as Japan's Prime Minister becoming the first Catholic to occupy the position.
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Religion
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26-Sep-2008
St Paul did not invent Christianity, Pope Benedict said Wednesday in his General Audience talk, noting the Apostle's relationship with the Twelve and with Peter.
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25-Sep-2008
Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams yesterday made the first visit of a leader of the Church of England to the Catholic shrine at Lourdes.
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26-Sep-2008
The 300-year-old rule excluding Catholics from the British throne is set to be abolished under plans drawn up by Prime Minister Gordon Brown's office.
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19-Sep-2008
Naples Cardinal Crescenzio Sepe has reported that blood reputed to be that of martyred St Januarius turned to liquid on the Saint's feast day Friday.
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25-Sep-2008
Catholics can learn from the 16th-century Protestant reformer Martin Luther, Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity head, Cardinal Walter Kasper says.
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Regulars
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26-Sep-2008
This slim volume by Tracey Rowland is literally what its sub-title says it is, "the theology of
Pope Benedict XVI". We will not find, I suspect, a clearer or briefer
or more accurate presentation of this theology. "Ratzinger stresses
that Christians cannot prescind from the explicit theism of the first
tablet of the Ten Commandments which begins: 'I am the Lord your God,
you shall not have other gods before Me.' Christians 'cannot yield on
this point; without God, all the rest would no longer have any logical
coherence." The papacy of Benedict, as Tracey Rowland recounts it
so well, is nothing less than a careful reminder and explanation to us
of just that in which this "logical coherence" consists.- James V. Schall S.J., Ignatius Insight
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25-Sep-2008
The one-lane road through the thick Mannar jungle passes a "Dangerous
Area Do Not Enter" sign and the remains of a Tamil Tigers camp with
twisted metal and collapsed trenches. Beyond that, an improbable sight
appears in a clearing: a large Catholic Church with bright stained
glass windows, marble floors, Roman columns, arches and a rooftop cross
that rises above the palm tree jungle. - Stewart Bell, National Post
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24-Sep-2008
Marking the 40th anniversary of the death of Padre Pio, newly released documents have revealed that the young Italian priest experienced a vision of the crucified Christ who invited him to unite himself with His suffering so as to participate in the salvation of others.
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23-Sep-2008
Gianna's biological mother was 17 years old and seven and a half months
pregnant when she made the decision to have a saline abortion. After
being burned alive for 18 hours in the womb,
Gianna was delivered alive at the Los Angeles County abortion clinic at
6am on 6 April 1977. Calling herself 'God's little girl', she challenges all women never to accept
the abuse to which they are subject: "You are not made for abuse".- Jim O'Farrell, Kairos
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22-Sep-2008
In Rome this week, a blow was struck for the sane middle on the
most vexed issue in the modern relationship between faith and science:
the theory of evolution.
The man responsible was Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, President of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Culture. - John L. Allen, Jr., All Things Catholic, NCR
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26-Sep-2008
The rainbow and the dove in the logo of the Community of Sant Egidio already hint at its origins in that year of living dangerously 1968. Launched by then-students who met in the Rome parish of St Egidio the community developed around four focal points: prayer, gospel, service to the poor and working for peace. This website is an eloquent testimony to the achievements, the work and the growth of the community over the last 40 years.
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25-Sep-2008
The Melbourne Catholic Lawyers Association website is a useful site for
lawyers and other professionals with an interest in ethical reflection
on important issues, including the current debate on Victoria's
abortion law. It also hosts a some quality material including a recent address by former Chief Justice Sir Gerard Brennan.
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24-Sep-2008
Ireland's Catholic bishops have embraced the internet with a new website. "Many church people today are slow about IT. Some seem proud to say
that they will never master the techniques. But they have nothing to be
proud of," Dublin Archbishop Diarmuid Martin says in a video clip on the site.
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23-Sep-2008
The Diocese of Brisbane started with the colony of Queensland in 1859.
It then covered the whole of Queensland, a vast diocese with few
people. The first bishop, James Quinn, organised an immigration scheme
which brought thousands of Irish, establishing the style of the Church
for a century. This website has been created by the Brisbane Archdiocese to commemorate its forthcoming 150th anniversary.
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22-Sep-2008
Recently the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops
was granted the recognitio for the new English-language translation of
significant parts of the Ordo Missae. The changes include a return to the response "And with your spirit" in reply to the celebrants "The Lord be with you". The USCCB has now launched a mini-website to explain and introduce the new translation.
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26-Sep-2008
Sally Magnusson visits one of Britain's most captivating theatrical
spectacles, The Life of Christ, performed at the Wintershall Estate. She also meets some of the actors involved in the production, which has a
cast of almost 200 actors, together with 12 horses, a donkey and a
flock of sheep. - Songs Of Praise - Wintershall,
Sunday 28 September, 11.30am ABC1
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24-Sep-2008
They were a known as 'brown priests' - the small and relatively
marginalised group of Catholic priests who joined the Nazi party. Some
were personally close to Hitler, including the Benedictine abbot
Albanus Schachleiter, who preached at Nazi rallies flanked by members
of the SA, the Hitler youth, and swastika flags. Others left the Church
to join the SS. - The Religion Report, Radio National, Wednesday 24 September 8.30 am and 8.05 pm, and Thursday 25 September, 1.30 am.
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22-Sep-2008
Western moral philosophy is not doing too well at the moment. But
some brilliant modern scholars have breathed new life into an ancient
approach to morality. Contemporary Perspectives on Natural Law:
Natural Law as a Limiting Concept is a useful addition to contemporary
debate, given that, despite its pariah status in some universities,
natural law ethics is still one of the great traditions of ethical
thinking. - Martin Fitzgerald, Mercator.net
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26-Sep-2008
What is wrong with rights protagonists when they can detect every
genuine flaw in migration law, every undeniable botch in anti-terror
legislation, the slightest inadmissible restriction on freedom of
speech, and yet blithely deploy the most unconvincing legal sophistry
in defence of a provision (on abortion) that will require medical practitioners to
commit acts rendering their freedom of conscience as much a legal
fiction as the Australian monarchy? What we are facing is a state coercion of fundamental conscience on a scale undreamt of since the Vietnam War. -
Greg Craven, The Age
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24-Sep-2008
The same Thursday, September 18, on which Benedict XVI expressed
himself in favorable terms about Pius XII, an article was published in
"La Civiltà Cattolica" that draws Pacelli - secretary of state under
Pope Pius XI - in more muted tones. The author of the article, the Jesuit historian Giovanni Sale,
attributed to Pacelli in 1938 - the year of the promulgation of the
anti-Jewish racial laws in Italy - a diplomatic prudence that "today it
is embarrassing to defend." - Sandro Magister, www.chiesa
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24-Sep-2008
Catholic hospitals and conscientious health professionals opposed to
abortion on demand are well justified in taking their stand against an
unjust law which carries the hallmarks of totalitarianism. Any self
respecting civil libertarian should support them, regardless of their
views on the morality of abortion on demand. - Frank Brennan, Eureka Street
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23-Sep-2008
The attacks on the Christian community are not restricted only to
Mangalore or Orissa, but have spread to other states like Madhya
Pradesh, Kerala, Chhattisgarh and even the national
capital. They are military-like operations and are brutal - sparing, neither
clergy, women nor children. The objectives are manifold... - Joseph Dias, Catholic Secular Forum
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22-Sep-2008
In more than 21 years working as a reporter for The Times, with nearly
all of that time spent writing on religion, I have just once managed to
get through to the Vatican press office by telephone. So when the opportunity came to attend a seminar in Rome titled "The
Church Up Close: Covering Catholicism in the Age of Benedict XVI", I
uttered a quick Ave and leapt on a plane to Rome.
- Ruth Gledhill, The Times
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23-Sep-2008
Nearly a quarter century ago, defrocked Catholic priest Miguel
D'Escoto was a foreign minister on a hunger strike, a liberation
theologian protesting U.S. military aggression in Nicaragua. Now, the
longtime Sandinista Party stalwart begins a new era of politics in a
time of peace - as president of the United Nations 63rd General
Assembly.
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24-Sep-2008
"We have all witnessed with alarm many who profess to be Catholics
disavowing the Church's teaching authority... dismissing apostolic
traditions and the doctrines of the Fathers and giving the place of
honour to the fashionable opinions of society," writes British Bishop of Lancaster Patrick O'Donohue who has made available for download his new book "Fit for Mission? Church".
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