News
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26-Feb-2009
Pope Benedict will canonise Blessed Jeanne Jugan, the founder of the Little Sisters of the Poor, and Hawaii's Leper Priest, Fr Damien de Veuster are among ten new saints to be canonised this year.
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26-Feb-2009
When Pope Benedict proposed that Catholics should renew with the traditional Lenten practice of fasting he probably wasn't thinking of the carbon and Facebook fasts that enterprising Christians have come up with.
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24-Feb-2009
A Filipino Benedictine nun has accused government soldiers of harassing herself and other environmental activists after they held a forum on mining and sustainable agriculture in a southern Mindanao village.
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27-Feb-2009
National human rights consultation chair Fr Frank Brennan has warned against an "evangelical fervour" for a human rights charter saying the Victorian state model was "a device for the delivery of a soft-Left sectarian agenda".
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26-Feb-2009
Banning schools $42 billion stimulus package funds on airconditioners and buildings used for religious teaching is political correctness gone mad, Coalition education spokesman Christopher Pyne says.
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24-Feb-2009
Catholic Health Australia says there will be a deficit of 200,000 aged care places in 2039 unless the Federal Government adopts an alternative model for aged care planning.
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26-Feb-2009
Ireland's Caritas agency, Trocaire has joined Catholic missionary orders and other development organisations in an attack on U2 and singer Bono over the rock group's bid to shift its affairs to the Netherlands to avoid Irish tax.
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24-Feb-2009
Oscar winning Slumdog Millionaire director Danny Boyle "seriously contemplated" becoming a priest when he was younger, it has been revealed.
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News - National
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27-Feb-2009
Caritas Australia is offering hungry Sydney workers a simple meal of fish and rice at lunchtime today in return for a donation to Project Compassion.
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27-Feb-2009
Lawyers for sacked St Mary's administrator Fr Peter Kennedy have responded positively to Archbishop John Bathersby's offer to enter into mediation, the Brisbane archdiocese has announced.
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26-Feb-2009
"We are most truly Australian, most truly Christian, and most truly Catholic when we reach out across borders of nation states and churches, giving of ourselves," Jesuit Fr Frank Brennan told the 2009 Project Compassion appeal launch.
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25-Feb-2009
A member of the Refugee Review Tribunal has told a Senate estimates hearing that 90 appeal cases on the tribunal's books were related to World Youth Day.
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25-Feb-2009
Sacked St Mary's administrator Fr Peter Kennedy says that a move by Brisbane Archbishop John Bathersby to retain retired High Court Justice Ian Callinan to mediate is "bullying" not mediation.
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25-Feb-2009
Parramatta Bishop Kevin Manning has joined members of the Filipino community and the CFMEU at the unveiling of a plaque commemorating the lives of five Filipino guest workers killed in Australia.
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25-Feb-2009
Caritas Australia's Project Compassion, the largest fundraising event for aid and development in the country, is underway for 2009 focusing on the theme "an environment to grow in".
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24-Feb-2009
In a new parish kit released by the ACBC Office for the Participation of Women for this year's International Women's Day, Bishop Michael Malone says that "deep injustice" against women is still continuing in the Church.
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23-Feb-2009
Marysville visiting priest, Fr Vince Jewell, has offered hope to Victorian bushfire victims as state and national leaders gathered in Melbourne for a national day of mourning yesterday.
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23-Feb-2009
Sacked St Mary's South Brisbane administrator, Fr Peter Kennedy says his lawyers will this week challenge his dismissal in the civil courts unless Brisbane Archbishop John Bathersby, who had earlier received a bomb threat, reverses his decision.
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27-Feb-2009
Catholic primary and secondary schools as well as state schools in the bushfire affected areas of Victoria will close today because of the forecast extreme weather conditions.
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23-Feb-2009
In a move that has surprised many, Marina Dickson, who played Mary in the World Youth Day re-enactment of the passion of Jesus now worships at Sydney's Hillsong evangelical church.
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25-Feb-2009
Gladstone father Peter Firth is concerned at the risk for children at a local Catholic school after receiving treatment for scratch wounds inflicted by flying foxes.
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25-Feb-2009
Queensland Bible Society members are aiming to promote "true love" and to hand out 5,000 copies of the originally titled "Jesus Loves Porn Stars" Bible at this year's Sexpo event.
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24-Feb-2009
The restoration of Perth's St Mary's Cathedral presbytery has uncovered a goldmine of artefacts, including a ticket to its opening in 1865, archaeologist Fr Robert Cross says.
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News - International
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27-Feb-2009
British teacher Keith Park was struggling to get his pupils interested in the Bible stories so he translated them into Cockney rhyming slang with amazing results.
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25-Feb-2009
Most Polish priests favour an end to celibacy and twelve percent say they are already in a relationship with a woman, a survey has found.
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27-Feb-2009
Malaysian Home Minister Syed Hamid Albar has issued an order allowing Christian publications to use the word "Allah" to refer to God as long as they specify the material is not for the majority Muslims.
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24-Feb-2009
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert says he feels "regret, sorrow and disapproval" for a comedy show that mocked Christian theology after the Vatican denounced its portrayal of Jesus and Mary as "offensive".
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23-Feb-2009
A former nun has rocked the Church in the South Indian state of Kerala with an autobiography in which she details illicit relationships, sexual harassment and bullying that she says occurred in the convent where she spent 30 years.
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23-Feb-2009
Two Italian nuns working in Kenya who were kidnapped last year by Somali gunmen have been released after 102 days in captivity.
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23-Feb-2009
Holocaust denying SSPX Bishop Richard Williamson, who has been asked by the Argentine government to leave the country or face expulsion, says he will leave voluntarily before the March deadline for his departure.
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Regulars
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27-Feb-2009
In an increasingly secular society, the churches recognise the value in solidarity and togetherness. But more than this, we are motivated by a desire to be obedient to Jesus who prayed "that they may all be one ... so that the world may believe that you have sent me". As we stand at the beginning of Lent, a season inviting us to special recollection and reflection, we also recognise the shadows that have sometimes fallen over ecumenical cooperation. - Archbishop John Bathersby and Archbishop Phillip Aspinall, The Catholic Leader
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26-Feb-2009
Since Archbishop Bathersby tried to pull him into line last August, Fr Kennedy and his supporters have waged a canny public relations war against the Church, with protest banners, press conferences, blogs and the archbishop's pleading letters posted on the web. It doesn't matter which dupes the left uses to destroy organised religion, or how they commandeer the social justice work of well-meaning church people, the aim is never to foster religious practice or nourish a love of God. - Miranda Devine, Sydney Morning Herald
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25-Feb-2009
If we compare the Church with a family, and it is more akin to a family than a business or a corporation, the most bitter and intractable divisions occur within families between spouses, among siblings, between parents and children. In religious organisations there's the added ingredient of deeply held personal beliefs and values at stake. Given that dynamic, if this dispute seems amazing, perhaps it's even more amazing that bitter fights such as this aren't more common. - Peter Kirkwood, The Australian
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24-Feb-2009
Timothy Radcliffe is perhaps the best known British priest on the international stage and a renowned conciliator. While some conservatives hazard that he has displayed a characteristic Dominican flair for subverting Left-Right theological distinctions, if faith really discloses the truth, he explains, then the Church should encourage greater freedom of thought as a way of elucidating that truth. - Rupert Shortt, Times Online
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23-Feb-2009
The readings for Ash Wednesday remind us that "for everything there is a season", a ‘kairos'. Lent is the ‘kairos' for repentance. It is a time when we, like the Emperor Theodosius, must heed the Church's call to conversion and to reconciliation with God. - Archbishop Denis Hart, Kairos Catholic Journal
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27-Feb-2009
The Legion of Mary is a Catholic lay movement founded in Ireland in troubled times in the early 1920's. Its objective is the glory of God through the holiness of its members developed by prayer and active cooperation in Mary's and the Church's work.
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26-Feb-2009
The Catholic Association of Music (CAM) is a private not-for-profit associational community in full service to the Catholic Church, formed to provide religious, artistic, and professional support to both non-liturgical and liturgical Catholic musicians and their respective support systems.
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25-Feb-2009
The Understanding Faith website focuses on a multimedia religious education resource for secondary schools. The resource supports the various diocesan curriculums. It is designed to support and enrich learning through the ICT medium and to assist religious educators engage students in a meaningful way.
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24-Feb-2009
Faith Doing Justice is a web project of the Australian Jesuits aiming to provide the public with easy access to the growing resources in the field of social justice and to provide users with plain explanations of Catholic social teaching.
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23-Feb-2009
Mercy Health and Aged Care is a Central Queensland icon and one of the largest employers in the region. It operates five private hospitals in Rockhampton, Mackay, Gladstone, Bundaberg and Yeppoon in addition to aged care and retirement villas in Rockhampton.
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27-Feb-2009
This is a dark and complicated film that attempts to weave its way broodingly among multiple plot lines and characters and contains some very brutal aggression. Human ears are chewed off, limbs are severed, there are explicitly violent attacks against women, and blood spills occur everywhere. - Peter W. Sheehan, Australian Catholic Offfice for Film and Broadcasting
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23-Feb-2009
A useful ingredient for a thriller is an element with which the audience can easily identify. Tom Twyker's expensive, impressive looking escapade The International wins hands down in that department, the villains are bankers. In these days of global economic meltdown, who would not eagerly embrace the proposition that a bank could be up to its neck in fiscal tricks? - Jim Murphy, Australian Catholic Office for Film and Broadcasting
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26-Feb-2009
In a world where talk about AIDS is dominated by medical and sociological theories, many Africans have found that this discourse reduces them to objects of scientific study and social analysis, all with the noble intention of helping. But none of these theories have actually sought to articulate a dialogue that is rooted in the African worldview, until now. - Fr Matsepane Morare, Thinking Faith
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27-Feb-2009
What we are facing is a post Christian culture which is completely illiterate when it comes to the language of the Judeo-Christian tradition. - Leonie Caldecott, The Catholic Herald
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26-Feb-2009
So what possessed the maverick and now sacked Brisbane priest Peter Kennedy to even think the Church would bless his decision to allow women to take part in a Mass? Did he really expect it to turn a blind eye? Any former Catholic schoolgirl could have told him that hell will freeze over before a woman will be able to carry out any priestly duties. It's the way of the Catholic world and is so ingrained that generations just accept it. - Jane Richards, Sydney Morning Herald
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25-Feb-2009
However well meaning his focus on social justice, peace and love, Father Peter Kennedy, like all Catholic priests, is required to follow Church teachings and rules in celebrating Mass in a Catholic Church. The Church can insist that priests and Masses conform to Church teachings. Liturgy has evolved over the centuries, but it is the Church's prerogative to set the rules. - The Australian
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24-Feb-2009
That night, I knew in the deepest recesses of my heart that our God is a God of love who is always faithful and who leads us in ways we least expect. Throughout the night, passages of Scripture and vivid images passed through my mind and, as the sun began to rise above the mountains, I found myself offering one simple prayer: Thank you, God! Thank you, Lord! - Sr Georgeanne Donovan, Marist Messenger
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23-Feb-2009
While all must take the Church's social teaching very seriously, the Church asks Catholics to make personal, prudential judgments about the detail of such matters. But this opportunity for judgment does not stretch to the choice of whether to buy Fairtrade products. The purchase of Fairtrade products is often promoted as an obligation. The purchase of non-Fairtrade products has been described by one priest as a sin worse than theft and by another as a deliberate choice to take from the poor. - Philip Booth, The Catholic Herald
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25-Feb-2009
The first St Thomas More's Parish Forum for 2009 will feature the head of the Department of Foreign Affiars and Trade, Michael L'Estrange on the topic of "Foreign Policy and Interfaith Dialogue".
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24-Feb-2009
A Mass will be held in Rome tonight to commemorate victims of the Victorian bushfires.
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