The Vatican’s cricket team has honoured Australia’s Phillip Hughes with a memorial Mass in Rome on the eve of his funeral in Australia. Team captain, the Rev. Anthony Currer, presided over the Tuesday evening service at the Venerable English College, the main English seminary in Rome. He said the team wanted to show its closeness Read more
Tracing your Irish roots just got a whole lot easier as the National Library of Ireland is to give free online access to its Catholic Church records collection online, from summer 2015. This will enable millions of people around the world to trace their roots in Ireland. Genealogy expert John Grenham wrote in The Irish Read more
Kiwi Christmas traditions such as putting up a real pine tree and sending festive cards via post are becoming ghosts of Christmas past, a survey says. The Colmar Bruton research found that while 93 per cent of New Zealanders celebrated Christmas, many of the traditions associated with the festive season were disappearing. Two out of Read more
Thousands of dollars strewn across the stage at Destiny Church has drawn the ire of critics on social media. Photos tweeted by Bishop Brian Tamaki show a floor littered with $50 and $100 bills accompanied with the verse, “A Sweet Smelling Fragrance that is Acceptable to God (Phil 4:15-19) My God shall Supply all your Read more
A kayaking Anglican bishop is about halfway through a 250km water pilgrimage from Auckland to the Bay of Islands. Jim White, Assistant Anglican Bishop of Auckland, today embarks on the fifth day of his kayak trip to Oihi in the Bay of Islands – the location of the first Christmas service in New Zealand 200 Read more
Thailand’s parliament has voted to ban commercial surrogacy after outrage erupted over the unregulated industry following a series of scandals including the case of an Australian couple accused of abandoning a baby with Down’s syndrome. A draft bill — which would see those caught profiting from surrogacy punished with up to ten years in prison Read more
The EU and its member states urgently need to implement the legal framework already in place and to intensify cooperation with civil society and church organisations that work with victims of human trafficking at the grassroots level. This was one of the main messages of the Dialogue Seminar organised by COMECE and the Church and Read more
German bishops have, for now, tabled a reform of Church labour law that would allow homosexual employees in a relationship and remarried Catholics to work in Church-run institutions. The bishops postponed the decision until April 2015 after a minority of conservative bishops resisted the change. They were also impeded by a federal court ruling that Read more
Justice Cameron Mander has reserved his decision on an appeal by Kevin McGrath to the High Court in Christchurch. He has been fighting extradition to Australia for some years and was ordered by New Zealand’s Justice Minister to surrender to Australia in August. The judgement will be handed down in writing at a later date. Read more
Invariably journalists write about Oxfam’s goats whenever charity Christmas gifts come up. A goat will give a family seven litres of fresh milk a week to drink and sell. But I don’t get paid to repeat the same message every Christmas. Just when I was mulling the “what can I give other than a goat” Read more