News
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15-Jan-2009
Pope Benedict has instructed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to draft a new handbook on procedures for dealing with apparition claims with visionaries required to remain silent pending assessment of their experiences.
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14-Jan-2009
On the 40th anniversary of the founding of the Neocatechumenal Way, Pope Benedict has thanked God for the fruits of the group's evangelical efforts but also emphasised "docile adherence to the directives" of the bishops.
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13-Jan-2009
The Vatican's Apostolic Penitentiary is holding a Rome conference on the five "ultimate crimes" of abortion, using the Eucharistic host in Satanic rites, clergy pedophile offences, violation of the confessional, and "offences against the person of the Pope."
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12-Jan-2009
Longtime Vatican diplomat, Cardinal Pio Laghi, who delivered an appeal from Pope John Paul II to US President George W. Bush not to go to war in Iraq, has died.
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12-Jan-2009
Ashish Miranda, 24, and his brother, Akshay, 22, who were both killed by falling ice on New Zealand's Fox Glacier last week, were World Youth Day pilgrims from Melbourne's St Peter's parish, East Bentleigh.
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16-Jan-2009
Toowoomba Bishop William Morris says that debate on euthanasia is important but that people should not let emotions cloud the issue and make up their minds based on facts.
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16-Jan-2009
Vinnies Queensland will not appeal the award of $27,500 in compensation to volunteer Linda Walsh who was asked to resign as a local conference leader because she was not Catholic.
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12-Jan-2009
Student preferences directed to the Australian Catholic University's Ballarat campus in western Victoria have almost doubled this year.
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News - National
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16-Jan-2009
Unemployed people need education, retraining and financial and family counselling, Catholic Social Services Australia CEO Frank Quinlan says.
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12-Jan-2009
Young Catholic mum, Veronica Brooks, from the NSW Murray River town of Barooga, died after allegedly waiting for two hours for an ambulance to transport her to hospital across the Victorian border in Cobram.
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12-Jan-2009
St Mary's South Brisbane administrator, Fr Peter Kennedy, says that if the parish is excluded from the Catholic Church, it will move to another site offered by the Queensland Trades and Labour Council.
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12-Jan-2009
Sunshine Coast parish, Stella Maris, has launched a petition addressed to Israeli President Shimon Perez calling for a halt to what parish priest, Fr Joe Duffy describes as a "sin against humanity".
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16-Jan-2009
Author Brendan Whiting whose book "The Shroud Story" rebutted scientific tests dating the Shroud of Turin to the 14th century has died in Sydney.
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14-Jan-2009
Fathers Albert D'Souza and Maurice Mascarenhas, the first two of eight overseas priests recruited for Maitland-Newcastle diocese, have arrived in the Hunter Valley from India as part of the diocese's Harvest Initiative.
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13-Jan-2009
A Kiama convent built in 1889 at the urging of Mother Mary MacKillop is being pulled down to make way for school expansion.
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15-Jan-2009
Brisbane priest, Fr Leo Burke, has described as disgraceful the holiday closure of the Redland cemetery preventing a woman who died on Christmas Eve from being buried until January 7.
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14-Jan-2009
Thieves have robbed five St Vincent de Paul shops in Perth in the past eight days, leaving a trail of destruction behind them.
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15-Jan-2009
Catholic Education Tasmania is the first private sector educator to agree to send pre-vocational students to Launceston's Australian Technical College which will move to a new site this month.
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News - International
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15-Jan-2009
A British scientist has discovered that it is possible to extract DNA samples from medieval parchment which may make it possible to identify the origins of ancient manuscripts including bibles and prayer books.
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14-Jan-2009
Maltese university lecturer, Dr Patrick Attard, who contested the last general election as the first openly gay candidate, has officially "excommunicated" himself from the Catholic Church.
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13-Jan-2009
In possibly the first such event in Britain since Pope Gregory VII imposed mandatory priestly celibacy in the Latin Church, a British man, Dominic Cosslett, has been ordained a Catholic priest - like his father, Ron.
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13-Jan-2009
A British Catholic woman, who is pregnant with rare dicephalous twins, and her husband have refused to contemplate an abortion despite medical advice to do so.
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13-Jan-2009
Eight Vietnamese Catholics who were convicted recently over protests concerning the demolition and confiscation of Church property are appealing their cases to the Hanoi Appellate Court.
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14-Jan-2009
The Australian government "needs to act decisively to bring about a cessation of hostilities in Gaza," Caritas Australia CEO, Jack de Groot said, after an Israeli missile destroyed a Caritas Jerusalem clinic in Gaza.
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13-Jan-2009
An Israeli airstrike has destroyed a clinic operated by Caritas Jerusalem, reports say.
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16-Jan-2009
Opening the 6th World Meeting of Families in Mexico, Pontifical Council for the Family president, Cardinal Ennio Antonelli, said the traditional family must be given "decisive priority" for the future in a culture sick with individualism.
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15-Jan-2009
Spain's National Court has opened an official investigation into 14 former El Salvador military officers over the 1989 torture and killing of six Jesuits, their housekeeper and her daughter during the central American nation's civil war.
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14-Jan-2009
Leaving on a visit to Mexico, Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone has suggested excommunication as a punishment for drug traffickers.
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Religion
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15-Jan-2009
Venice Rabbi Elia Enrico Richetti has accused Pope Benedict of wiping out 50 years of progress in Catholic-Jewish dialogue by allowing the reintroduction last year of a Holy Week prayer for the conversion of the Jews.
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16-Jan-2009
Lisbon Cardinal Jose Policarpo has warned Portuguese women that marrying a Muslim man can bring "a whole lot of trouble" because Christian women become subject to Muslim conventions.
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Regulars
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16-Jan-2009
With the death of Father Richard John Neuhaus on Jan. 8, the Catholic Church lost one of its greatest public intellectuals, a theologian who brought the light of the Gospel to the world of public life. More than that, though, Father Neuhaus made possible a new world of intellectual engagement with the culture. - Fr Raymond J De Souza, National Catholic Register
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15-Jan-2009
Fr Raymond Helmick is a copious correspondent. For the past three years, the Jesuit priest has written nearly 20 letters to Khalid Mishal, founder and political leader of the Palestinian movement Hamas, urging him to abandon militancy, unify with Fatah, Hamas' political rival, and organise the Palestinians in a disciplined campaign of nonviolent resistance to the Israeli occupation. - Claire Schaeffer-Duffy, National Catholic Reporter
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14-Jan-2009
Some priests consider that the best sermon they will preach is the one they give when they are lying, dead, in their coffin before the altar of the parish church. A coffin poses ultimate questions: What's life all about? Why are we here? What does it all mean? Like a good sermon, a coffin asks questions without easy answers; you have to answer its questions for yourself. - Fr Edmund Campion
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13-Jan-2009
Before World War II, it was the policy of the Catholic Church to invite priests from Ireland to manage parishes throughout Australia. Many were colourful men who had a fearless desire to succeed after their long journey to Australia but none more so than Father John O'Brien, who took over the parish of St Aloysius in Caulfield. - Patrick Bartley, The Age
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12-Jan-2009
Monasteries and convents are advertising "try being a monk/nun" weekends as a way of encouraging men and women into religious orders. The number of monks and nuns is falling so quickly that very soon there could be none left. - Gareth Rubin, The Observer
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16-Jan-2009
Georgetown University in Washington DC is America's oldest Catholic university celebrating 220 years of higher learning in 2009. It was founded by the nation's first Catholic bishop, the Jesuit John Carroll. In the emerging tradition of American religious tolerance, is was to be open to every class of citizens and students of every religious profession.
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15-Jan-2009
Despite still being under attack for axing several religious and faith based programs, including the highly regarded The Religion Report, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, at least for now, still has a dedicated "religion and ethics" website on its web portal.
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14-Jan-2009
University of Notre Dame is another one of the giants of Catholic tertiary education in the United States. Established in 1842 by a priest of the Congregation of the Holy Cross, Fr Edward F. Sorin, it is located 150 kilometres east of Chicago.
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13-Jan-2009
menAlive is a National Catholic Ministry to Men. Founded in 2003 it has run more than 30 events for 2,500 men. The purpose of menAlive is to bring men together, to renew their faith in God and to encourage them become an active force of renewal in the Church.
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12-Jan-2009
Considered to be the "King of Clubs" in NSW, the Campbelltown Catholic Club is in the mega status of licensed clubs. It has come a long way since its formation by a group of local parishioners in the mid-1960s keen to find another way, than through their own labour, for developing their local Catholic school.
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15-Jan-2009
The people involved in this film obviously love dogs and the movie captures very well the special relationships that can exist between dogs and children. It is refreshing to see that the film is not animated; it is a live action movie and will appeal for just that reason. - Peter W. Sheehan, Australian Catholic Office for Film and Broadcasting
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13-Jan-2009
Adult horror fans will immediately respond to the name, Igor. He's the hunched one who helps mad scientists or vampires get their work done. Not sure what a children's audience will make of him. They will miss the Frankenstein parallels. Perhaps they will just enjoy the bizarre settings, characters and plot. - Fr Peter Malone, Australian Catholic Office for Film and Broadcasting
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14-Jan-2009
St Mary's parish at South Brisbane has again made the media in this overview of events featured on The 7.30 Report. It contains an exchange between parish administrator, Fr Peter Kennedy and a church visitor attempting to record a baptism at the church.
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16-Jan-2009
Fifteen years ago I knew practically nothing of the Dominicans, all I knew of Aquinas was the caricature of the desiccated scholastic wondering about angels and pins, and what little theology I had studied at university I found eye-wateringly dull. Thus I was ill-prepared for the sense of exhilaration I felt reading God Matters for the first time. It was so different in style to what I had read before that it seemed almost like a new language. - Fr Tim Gardner, The Catholic Herald
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12-Jan-2009
Neither the atheist nor the believer sees God. Both must live in darkness and both must try to figure out from clues gathered here and there who they are, in the vast cosmos. Atheists and believers who share a longing for justice, realise that if everything were meaningless, injustices would be no anomaly. So why should atheist and believer not set aside a culture of mistrust and begin to converse like serious human beings? - Christopher Howse, The Tablet
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16-Jan-2009
Within Catholic circles, the only people I've seen quarrelling are the kind of Jew-hating kooks one finds in the fever swamps of sedevacantism and other outposts of lunacy. In circles beyond the Church, of course, the situation is much more volatile, with various Muslims and secular enthusiasts for fashionable violence chanting, "Jews go back to the ovens." The irony of all this is that the people who most need to hear what the Church says are the people least likely to listen to her for one second. - Mark P. Shea, Catholic Online
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15-Jan-2009
The Philippines like Korea is a country where major empires fight their battles, add erupting volcanoes and massive earthquakes and you have a country that knows the violence of man and nature. Malate parish has many poor people. Through the phases of its history, it has been a genteel area, a red light area and now a poor area. - Fr Gary Walker, Columban Missionary Society E-News
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14-Jan-2009
The bombing and invasion of Gaza should stop now. It is immoral and impractical; the indiscriminate wounding of children and civilians makes the heart sick. And as is often the case, here is bloodshed and mayhem funded and aided by the United States. Joining my voice to those of friends around the world, I say: Stop the killings, end the occupation and pursue nonviolent methods of dialogue and cooperation toward a just, peaceful co-existence. - Fr John Dear, National Catholic Reporter
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13-Jan-2009
Truth be told, I've been down lately. I have the post-Christmas blues. My New Year’s energy has evaporated and left me dull and sad. I want Christmas back! The days ahead now seem so ordinary. This Advent and Christmas season was the richest, most joyful, most meaningful I have ever known, and I so desperately didn’t want it to end. I don’t want to lose it. I crave perpetual Advent and endless Christmas. - Jennifer Hartline, Catholic Online
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12-Jan-2009
Like a religion, the whole donor conception industry is undergirded by a central creation myth. The industry cannot stand without faith in this central tenet: that biological parenthood is irrelevant, and that "social" parenthood is what matters for children's full emotional and psychological development. The theme of every sperm bank and egg donor agency is effectively the Beatles song "All you need is love." - Lea Singh, MercatorNet
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