The Aotearoa Catholic Youth Festival is taking place in Auckland next weekend, on 2-3 December 2017. Hosted by the New Zealand Catholic Bishops Conference, it is aimed at young people aged 15-29. Over 500 young people are expected to attend. The aim of the Festival is to invite and challenge people to actively participate in Read more
“I often thought if a visitor from Mars came to New Zealand and looked at our care and protection system [for children], they would say there’s no sign of intelligent life on Earth – because it is a Pākeha system with Māori add-ons, sadly for a clientele – 63 per cent – who are Māori, Read more
A Kiwi Christmas movie is due for release at the end of November. Fed up with the materialism of Christmas, Santa runs away to New Zealand for a summer holiday. When two Kiwi kids figure out who he is, they have to find a way to get him back to the North Pole in time Read more
A church minister from Gisborne is one of two men to be fined more than $10,000 after pleading guilty to several crimes involving crayfish. The Gisborne Herald has reported the pastor has lost his job and would return to Auckland in January. Read More
Parliament will open with a new prayer on Tuesday after the Speaker of the House listened to criticism about him removing mention of the Queen and Jesus Christ. While the Queen is back in the new version to be read ahead of Question Time next week, references to Jesus Christ are still on the chopping Read more
A former Catholic priest has been extradited from New Zealand to Sydney and charged with historic child sex offences. Detectives travelled to New Zealand on Wednesday to bring the 58-year-old man back to Mascot Police Station where he was charged with sexual and indecent assaults in the late 1980s against seven teenage boys aged between Read more
The hijacking of Christmas by the forces of commercialism could be changing Christmas into humbug – “a fraud or impostor, implying an element of unjustified publicity and spectacle.” A priest in Ireland has come up with a radical solution – “Stop using the word Christmas because it has been hijacked by ‘Santa and reindeer’. “We’ve lost Christmas, Read more
Sister Tui Cadigan says being Catholic and being Māori are two sides of identity but many younger Māori haven’t found ways to reconcile the two. Cadigan is the chair of Te Rūnanga o te Hāhi Katorika ki Aotearoa (National Catholic Māori Council of New Zealand). Te Rūnanga is an advisory council to the New Zealand Catholic Bishops’ Conference. Read more
Brother Mark McKeon FSC has been appointed as the new pastoral director of the Holy Cross Seminary in Ponsonby, Auckland. Recently returned from Palestine, Br Mark has been a De La Salle Brother for 35 years. He has been engaged in teaching ministry in Australia, Papua New Guinea and New Zealand. NZCBC President, Bishop Patrick Dunn, Read more
A Wellington op shop is taking the classic “reduce, reuse and recycle” message one step further in an effort to bring its textile waste down to zero. Caroline O’Reilly, the new textile recycling coordinator at St Vincent de Paul in Kilbirnie, is helping reduce the amount of waste the store sends to landfill by repurposing Read more