The presbytery of St. Alipius is a redbrick gothic bungalow built when gold money was still washing through Ballarat. It sits in a Catholic compound of brick and granite schools and convents where the road from Melbourne reaches town. White crosses stand on the gables of the house as if to ward off evil from Read more
Tom Leopold is a very funny guy. He’s also a Catholic. He has been funny longer than he has been a Catholic. But being a Catholic doesn’t stop him from being funny. “I can’t go more than two lines without getting a laugh,” Leopold told Catholic News Service in a telephone interview from New York. Read more
If you’re looking for a two-parent, man-and-wife, never-divorced kind of family, head to one of those citizenship ceremonies. If you want to find traditional American family values—a man and a woman officially married to one of their “own kind,” no plans for divorce, an older dad who is the breadwinner, a stay-at-home mom—the best place Read more
On the day that Durga Mala was rescued, she lay crying on the stone floor, where she was attempting to cool her back. She was 11 years old and her skin was covered with blisters, from her shoulder blades to her buttocks. A few days earlier, her owners had poured hot oil over her because Read more
When I was a child in the 1950s, my friends and I had two educations. We had school (which was not the big deal it is today), and we also had what I call a hunter-gather education. We played in mixed-age neighbourhood groups almost every day after school, often until dark. We played all weekend Read more
This is not a particularly successful season for converts to Christianity. Often more respect is shown to those who “dialogue” from outside of the Church than to those who embrace the Christian faith and ask for baptism. But it is also true that conversions to Catholicism are more numerous than one might think. Departing from Read more
On 15 October 1970, Anwar El Sadat succeeded Gamal Abdel Nasser as President of Egypt. Viewed as a mediocre man, Sadat’s true qualities were not realized by Nasser’s old guard until it was too late. Having crushed his internal opponents in May 1971, Sadat faced the overwhelming challenge of trying to find a way out Read more
The little-known story of the murder of 33 Trappist monks by Chinese Communists in 1947: “The body of Christ which is the Church, like the human body, was first young, but at the end of the world it will have an appearance of decline.” — St. Augustine As I sat with Brother Marcel Zhang, OCSO Read more
We all know what’s coming. Everywhere in the developed world, populations are greying. The media are full of stories about the surge in the numbers of the elderly within the next 20 years, while governments have been pushing the age of retirement entitlements upward. Most of the spotlight has been on the new greybeards themselves—the Read more
With the Australasian Catholic and Australasian Religious Press Associations hosting their annual gatherings in Melbourne last week, September is the month of religious media conferences. Perhaps because hope springs eternal. This year church media, particularly Catholic media, face a growing challenge: how to deal with bad news about the church. At stake is their credibility. Read more