Cardinal Edward Clancy, who has been described as one of the great archbishops of Sydney, has died aged 90 on August 2. Known as a workaholic, a moderating force and a conservative, without being reactionary, that didn’t stop Cardinal Clancy having his share of disagreements with Rome. In fact, he once told a young priest Read more
Pastoral Letter Most Rev Gerard J Holohan Bishop of Bunbury 29th September 2013 The Rural Financial Counselling Service reported recently that the number of rural people within Western Australia succumbing to internet pornography addiction, drug use and depression, is growing. Research shows internet pornography addiction to be a rapidly growing problem across Australia and overseas. Read more
A report by the Guardian said a body set up by the Catholic church in Australia to oversee its dealings with the royal commission into child sexual abuse is not the predominantly lay-run organisation it has been represented as. The report noted that the Truth, Justice and Healing Council was established last January by the Read more
The awful record of the institutional Catholic church’s leadership in dealing with the scandal of clerical sex abuse of minors has clearly, and rightly, been a trigger for the federal government’s Royal Commission into sexual abuse of children in Australia. This is a record that has already prompted other inquiries here and overseas. It would indeed be Read more
Australia’s Catholic bishops have decided to set up a special council — including bishops, religious and lay people — to work with the forthcoming royal commission into institutional responses to child sex abuse. At the end of their twice-yearly conference in Sydney, the bishops said they had formed a supervisory group of representatives from the Read more
Australia’s Catholic bishops are ready to step aside and let a special committee composed mainly of lay people, including some from outside the Church, handle sex abuse issues, according to the head of the national organisation for religious orders. “A committee is being formed — I don’t know all the details about it — but Read more
This year’s Australian Catholic Bishops Social Justice Statement focuses on the family. It is put into useful perspective by the publication the Bishops’ Pastoral Research Office September E-News Bulletin headlining the 2011 Census statistic that only 50 per cent of Catholics aged 15 and over are married. The often talked about nexus between marriage, the family, and the Catholic Read more
The family is the first and fundamental school of social living: as a community of love, it finds in self-giving the law that guides it and makes it grow. The self-giving that inspires the love of a husband and a wife for each other is the model and the norm for the self-giving that must be practiced in Read more
Distances and demographics combine to tell the story. Three-quarters the size of the United States, Australia is mainly uninhabited except along its coastline. While the U.S. shelters close to 313 million people, latest Australian census statistics report only 22 million persons on the continent’s nearly 3 million square miles. Australia’s Christians — mainly descendants of Read more
The Australian Government has indicated that Nauru is unlikely to be use for Asylum Seekers. The Immigration Minister Chris Bowen has released financial estimates that reveal it would cost just under a billion dollars to process asylum seekers on Nauru over the next four years. He’s labelled it an expensive and ineffective option Australia’s Government Read more