I like stories. Whether it’s a program on EWTN, or a homily, or an article, I like the saga of how some Catholic figure dealt with a challenge. It could be a story about converting the barbarians, or some primitive people, or of a modern man being thrown into prison while facing a seemingly impossible situation. Regardless, I will remember Read more
How much would you pay to save a life? Not necessarily your life, nor the life of someone you know or love. Just a life: Joe Bloggs, Jane Doe, the guy from the bus, the high school friend you don’t speak to any more. Think of a figure, round it to the nearest hundred thousand, Read more
It’s what they talk about in movies and soap operas; 15-years-old, Catholic and pregnant. The daughter of a well known policeman, to the son of a well known Catholic school principal. The shame. The embarrassment. The scandal. Well, that was me, the 15-year-old girl, and from the moment I snuck to the doctors to have Read more
If there’s one thing that will remind a woman she is, at her core, no different from the rest of humanity, it is childbirth. From the second that first ‘is-it-real-or-is-it-a-phantom?’ contraction set in until the exhilarating moment when her son was urged and cajoled and squeezed from her weary body, Kate Middleton would have understood Read more
Sam Parnia MD has a highly sought after medical speciality: resurrection. His patients can be dead for several hours before they are restored to their former selves, with decades of life ahead of them. Parnia is head of intensive care at the Stony Brook University Hospital in New York. If you’d had a cardiac arrest at Read more
I was thinking about questions in the census concerning religious belief and began wondering how we identify ourselves. Many brought up in traditional faiths now no longer want to identify with these belief systems. Neither do they want to dismiss these systems as they recognise them as pivotal in shaping their worldview. So they tick Read more
I read with great interest, and I hope empathy, the story about Beverley Broadbent ending her life. I think I can appreciate her choice to end her life while still able to enjoy living. But it is not a choice that I intend to make. It is, nevertheless, a choice that confronts me. I was Read more
A bunch of blokes were gathered in a holy huddle at the back of a cathedral, worried that no one seemed to be listening to their good news anymore. Par for the course now but this was Paris during the Second World War. A world in turmoil meant people were thinking for themselves, taking up Read more
The undersecretary of Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Flaminia Giovanelli, told Vatican Radio that the council is preparing a new document on the right to water.
“The right to food, like the right to water, has an important place within the pursuit of other rights, beginning with the fundamental right to life,” Pope Benedict taught in his 2009 encyclical Caritas in Veritate.
“It is therefore necessary to cultivate a public conscience that considers food and access to water as universal rights of all human beings, without distinction or discrimination.”
The document will be called: Water, and essential element for life.”
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A woman died from a heart attack after waking up at her own funeral. Fagilyu Mukhametzyanov, 49, had been wrongly diagnosed as “brain dead” by doctors, but as mourners passed by her open coffin they were stunned when the supposedly dead woman suddenly woke up and started screaming. “Her eyes were moving and we immediately Read more