An editorial in South Africa's Catholic weekly, the Southern Cross, states the SABC has reneged on a 2010 promise to broadcast the Pope's Christmas Mass live every year.

This can be seen as a contravention of the SABC's religious broadcasting policy, which is to ensure a fair and equitable representation of the nation's religious communities.

People who own a television set have to pay a license fee to fund the SABC, so it has an obligation to serve its communities, the editorial continued.

"To tolerate the SABC's disrespectful treatment is to accept the creeping marginalisation of the Catholic Church in South Africa's public life."

"South Africa's faithful should not accept it quietly", whatever the reason behind the papal Mass decision, the editorial argued.

"Catholics must in large numbers register their protest with the SABC, in letters and on social media."

The editorial hinted that the Church hierarchy in South Africa should lead a campaign against the SABC decision.

Continue reading

"That a cloistered nun with no experience was able to build a worldwide Catholic media network based in Irondale, Alabama, reaffirms my faith every day," said Michael Warsaw, president and chief executive officer of EWTN, in a birthday message. "It is nothing short of miraculous."

Mother Angelica was born in 1923 to an Italian-American family in Ohio and had a difficult childhood in a broken home during the Great Depression. As a child she suffered a severe stomach ailment, from which she believed she was miraculously cured.

She then decided to devote her life to God, joining the Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration, a contemplative Franciscan community. In 1962 she founded a monastery for the order in Irondale, Alabama.

In the 1970s Mother Angelica began making videotaped programmes for television, including a CBS affiliate station. When the CBS station scheduled a controversial movie, she refused to produce any more shows for that station and converted a garage behind the monastery into a television studio.

Her programmes aired on various Christian stations while she planned to buy satellite space to launch her own Catholic cable channel.

EWTN began in 1981, broadcasting for five hours a day and featuring a weekly televised Mass, re-runs of Bishop Fulton Sheen programmes, Lutheran dramas, some 1950s westerns, and a talk show called Mother Angelica Live.

EWTN is now available in over 150 million television households in more than 140 countries. It uses direct broadcast satellite television and radio services, AM and FM radio networks, worldwide short-wave radio, an internet website and a publishing arm.

As a voice for American conservative and traditional Catholics, Mother Angelica has had disagreements with some Catholic bishops, one of them over a pastoral letter by Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles on the Eucharist and liturgy. After this dispute, EWTN set up its own theology department.

Mother Angelica turned control of EWTN over to a board in 2000, and in 2001 suffered a stroke and ceased live TV appearances.

Sources:

Catholic News Agency

Mother Angelica (Wikipedia)

Image: Insite

There will be roaring levels of commercial testosterone at this auction, and the Treaty of Waitangi's protective intent comes into play immediately in this scenario.

The Treaty was highly protective of Maori and their position as tangata whenua in 1840, their wellbeing, ownership rights, and cultural survival.

We should not be surprised in the digital age that its protections, in respect of the assumed royal prerogative (the right of kings, queens and parliaments to assert ownership over raw resources and the right to own and sell) reaches into areas like the spectrum resource. The courts have accepted that the Treaty deliberately placed a fetter over the prerogative in New Zealand.

Maori should not be blamed for the length and sharpness of those guarantees. Maori didn't write the Treaty nor initiate the migration and colonisation which necessitated it. They are entitled to cling to the contract their ancestors signed.

It's useful to remember that in all the claims Maori have made for spectrum in both broadcasting and telecommunications, they have displayed a clear idea of what they would do with spectrum and why it is needed. All have faced fierce Crown opposition and produced bitter fights in the courts.

In 1985 the Maori Council surprised the Government of the day by launching a bid for the third channel TV warrants before the Broadcasting Tribunal. The last national VHF network was at stake. The bid failed. Conventional wisdom of the time framed the Maori channel as an impossibility. Look at Maori Television now. A burgeoning success, but started 20 years after the main body of native speakers of the language passed into the night, along with the rich resources they would have provided. Continue reading

Sources

• Piripi Walker in The Dominion Post
• Image: Delimiter
  

Piripi Walker, Ngati Raukawa, is spokesman for Nga Kaiwhakapumau i Te Reo, (The Wellington Maori Language Board).