NZ Catholic’s new editor is the newspaper’s former associate editor Michael Otto, Bishop Patrick Dunn has announced. Dr Otto has been acting editor at NZ Catholic since early July. A former student of St Patrick’s School in Panmure, in 1981 Otto was Dux of St Peter’s College, Epsom, and went on to study electrical engineering at the University of Auckland, graduating Read more
On Saturday 30th September three honorary Doctorates were conferred at Te Wānanga o Raukawa, Ōtaki. They were presented by the World Indigenous Nations University (WINU). For the people of Ōtaki, of particular interest was their own whānau member, Oriwia Raureti (Ngati Raukawa). She is currently the Executive Director of Operations at Te Wānanga. Oriwia has Read more
Catholic Bishops in the US support the Comprehensive [Nuclear Weapons] Test Ban Treaty. Their stance echoes Vatican statements about North Korea’s nuclear capabilities and Pope Francis’s concerns. The U.S. bishops’ conference “welcomes the action of the U.N. Security Council …,” Bishop Oscar Cantú of Las Cruces, N.M. said. He says the Conference encourages “this important Read more
Tony Kokshoorn, mayor of the Grey District since 2004 credits his success as a businessman and politician to family, his community and lessons learnt in his Catholic upbringing. “I went to a Marist Brothers school. I was Catholic, I had good morals instilled by my parents and my school and they have stuck with me.” Read more
For the next two weeks Cardinal John Dew will be away on an IARCCUM (Anglican Roman Catholic Commission for Unity and Mission) Pilgrimage. Cardinal John will first go to Canterbury, in England where he will join the IARCCUM Pilgrims; 36 Anglican and Catholic bishops, representing 19 different regions. The bishops will begin the first leg Read more
The Reverend Gretta Vosper, a self described atheist minister and author, will be a keynote speaker at this year’s Sea of Faith Conference at Silverstream, near Wellington next month. She will also be speaking also at St Luke’s, Remuera and at St Andrew’s on The Terrace in Wellington. Vosper is the minister of the West Read more
Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI has revealed that while he agreed with the conclusion Pope Paul VI drew in his encyclical letter (Humanae Vitae) on artificial contraception, he struggled with the reasoning Pope Paul used to arrive at his conclusion. “In the situation I was then in, and in the context of theological thinking in which Read more
The Pope’s Astronomer and director of the Vatican Observatory, Brother Guy Consolmagno, believes there is no conflict between science and religion. Consolmagno is in New Zealand to take part in a panel discussion on extraterrestrial life at a festival on Great Barrier Island. In an interview with Jamie Moreton in the New Zealand Herald Consolmagno Read more
A college and community leader from Harewood in Christchurch has been awarded the prestigious runner-up prize of this year’s Cochlear Graeme Clark Scholarship for Australia and New Zealand. Nineteen-year-old Lachlan Bartlett will benefit from the financial assistance from Cochlear to help fund his double degree of law and criminal justice at the University of Canterbury. Read more
Pope Francis has asked his fellow Jesuits involved in priestly formation to help seminarians understand that in the real world. “Decisions Catholics make in their everyday lives are rarely ethically clear-cut, but rather exist on a spectrum between good and evil,” the pope said. “We need to form future priests not to general and abstract ideas, Read more