Pearls and Irritations

Category: Religion

  • DENIS FITZGERALD. Non-violence is the key to peace, and it starts at home.

    For Pope Francis, peace has been a constant theme, as it was for his name-sake, St Francis of Assisi.   His message for 1 January 2017, his fourth such message, draws on the major documents of his pontificate as it focuses on the role of nonviolence in building peace.   (more…)

  • ERIC HODGENS. Epiphany – A Supernova In Full Eruption.

    Love is a many splendored thing. So, too is a diamond. The more skilled the diamond cutter, the more brilliant the diamond’s sparkle. Love and diamonds pair perfectly.  (more…)

  • ANDREW AILES. Peace on earth – the children of Aleppo.

    Peace on Earth

    Peace on earth. Goodwill to men,
    Echoes like Sullivan’s Great Amen:
    The chord he lost when sitting by,
    His brother as he watched him die. (more…)

  • JOHN MENADUE. Seasonal favourites.

    I would like to share with you some of my favourites at Christmas, a time of hope.  

    (more…)

  • PETER DAY. Grandpa’s favourite Shepherd

    This Christmas child won’t give you discounted goods … rather he’ll invite you to be humble, other-centred.
    (more…)

  • GERALDINE DOOGUE. Connections in our lives.

    Underneath the jollity and frantic end-of-year scurrying, I detect a wistfulness about the lack of certainty of connections in people’s lives these days.  (more…)

  • MICHAEL KELLY SJ. 2017 for Pope Francis: what to expect.

    At the heart of what Arrupe sought to do was get Jesuits out of their comfort zone, engaged with the real world and most especially reconverted to Jesus Christ by their encounter with the poor.  Pope Francis would agree.  (more…)

  • ERIC HODGENS. Christmas – An Epiphany.

    What he stands for is the real object of our celebration – love of family and friends; love of enemies, too. He stands for peace, for fair consideration of everyone we deal with, for a world in which we work not only for our own good but for the good of others too.  
    (more…)

  • MICHAEL KELLY SJ. Understanding challenges the church in Asia faces.

    The Church in Asia can absorb and replicate its hierarchical, tiered cultural surrounds, or leave behind the clericalist conception of the Church, as a tightly run top-down organisation.

    It lies at the intersection of local hierarchical cultures and the culture of the church fostered by Rome before Vatican II.

    The calm confidence of Cardinal Oswald Gracias that the church in Asia will avoid or at least manage a Left-Right divide in the church’s hierarchy is an optimistic political review of our prospects.

    (more…)

  • PETER JOHNSTONE. The Royal Commission and the Catholic Church’s Dysfunctional Governance

     

    In May 2016, the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse released Issues Paper 11 – Catholic Church Final Hearing, inviting submissions for its final Catholic Church hearing scheduled for three weeks 6-24 February 2017. That hearing will review the horror of clerical child sexual abuse and the Church’s cover-up and protection of abusing clergy, including “factors that may have affected the institutional response of the Catholic Church to child sexual abuse.” The hearing will doubtless attempt to answer the question asked by many Catholics: How could the leadership of our Church behave in this way whilst continuing to espouse and teach Christian values? (more…)

  • PETER DAY. Is western civilisation bored?

     

    Religion. The mob. Capitalism. Fundamentalism. Bad parenting. Racism. Materialism. Youth unemployment. Poverty. Thugs. Multiculturalism. Rich vs poor …

    Take your pick; even add to the list, as we collectively grapple to decipher the root causes of the violence and the mental illness that pervades our world – be it terrorism, random shootings, war, suicide.

    ‘Man’s inhumanity to man’ shakes us to the core. We start to question what it means to be human. We apportion blame. We want answers. ‘Gosh’, we ask, ‘what just happened?’ (more…)

  • Catholic Bishops – It Is Time To Bring Them Here

    Statement in support of offshore detainees
    By Archbishop Denis Hart, President, Australian Catholic Bishops Conference

    One of the greatest crises of our day is the plight of people forced from their own countries by war, persecution or poverty and forced to live without a home, without safety and often separated from their families.

    Pope Francis has called on Catholics to welcome such vulnerable people as our brothers and sisters. In Australia, we do not have to directly meet the responsibilities that many other nations bear. But we do bear the shame of the expulsion and harsh treatment of the people who sought our protection only to be detained on Nauru and Manus Island. (more…)

  • LYNDSAY CONNORS. Cometh the hour, cometh the man?

     

    Is the Hon. Simon Birmingham, Federal Minister for Education and Training, the man?

    In his recent appearance on the ABC’s Q&A, Senator Birmingham announced that there are private schools that are ‘over-funded’.

    This came as the Turnbull Government is under pressure to commit the Commonwealth to meeting its share of the funding required to achieve the Gonski resource standards. The Coalition Government will have, reluctantly, funded only one-third of the transition towards those standards by 2017. For schools that are yet to reach the appropriate standards under the formula developed by the Gonski Review in 2012 the Commonwealth bucks will stop there. The Coalition budget commitment of only $1.2 billion over four years will not do much more than cover the effects of inflation. It falls far short of the $3 billion needed to bring all schools to the Gonski standards in 2019 according to the timetable foreshadowed by the previous Labor Government. (more…)

  • KIERAN TAPSELL. The Royal Commission and Religious Liberty

     

    Three law professors, Michael Quinlan and Keith Thompson (Notre Dame) and Frank Brennan (ACU) have criticized any attempt by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse to discuss the doctrines and canon law of the Catholic Church on the grounds that such a discussion would breach religious liberty and the separation of church and state. (more…)

  • MICHAEL KELLY S.J. Making saints.

     

    In our dreary world full of incredible people making claims to leadership, finding the occasional hero or heroine can’t be a bad thing. So why begrudge the Catholic Church its idiosyncratic ways of creating people for believers to admire – the saints?

    Mother Teresa of Calcutta – that’s what it was called when she lived there but let’s call it Kolkata to bring the city’s name up to the present – was canonized by the Pope last weekend. The media around the world found their way to the woman “cured” of her tumor, a cure that was the first of the two miracles attributed to her intercession.

    Well some do take exception to the miraculous and with good reason. The saint making process entails something offensive to post-Enlightenment ears: miracles. The mere mention of the word evokes goose bumps born of a hostility to clerical claptrap, to anti-scientific superstition or to Protestant fear of a manipulation of the Divine. (more…)

  • BRUCE DUNCAN. Don’t blame welfare for budget woes

     

    Prime Minister Turnbull promised us more centrist and fairer policies, but the Treasurer Mr Morrison appears to be playing a politics of resentment against people on income supports. On 25 August he declared: ‘There is a new divide – the taxed and the taxed-nots.’

    This sounds suspiciously like ‘lifters’ versus ‘leaners’, and implicitly blames those on benefits, particularly the poor, for the country’s debt. Dr Helen Szoke, chief executive of Oxfam Australia, was alarmed that the government seemed to be demonising the poor, while saying nothing about large companies avoiding taxes of billions of dollars. (more…)

  • MILTON MOON. Waiting for Godness -a narrative poem

    by Milton Moon.©

    I’m due to die sooner rather than later.
    My wife of sixty-seven years has already gone,
    her mortal remains,
    in ashes waiting for mine.
    Together they’ll go, somewhere
    as part of the seasons
    or the tides ebb or flow.
    She is still with me,
    I talk to her often,
    burning incense twice a day
    and telling her
    “incense is dispersed for the soul
    of the young girl.” (more…)

  • FRANK BRENNAN. Why Turnbull has no option other than a plebiscite on Same Sex Marriage

     

    In The Australian Paul Kelly writing on the same sex marriage plebiscite said (23/8), ‘Lawyer and priest Frank Brennan, who has always argued the issue should properly be decided by parliament, told this column: “Contrary to Justice Kirby I have urged proponents of same-sex marriage to support legislation for a plebiscite because there is no other way that the matter can be resolved during the life of this parliament with Malcolm Turnbull remaining as Prime Minister.”’ Let me explain. (more…)

  • PETER JOHNSTONE. A Plenary Synod in 2020 for the Australian Catholic Church

     

    The Australian Catholic Church is planning a national/plenary synod of the Church in Australia. Archbishop Mark Coleridge of Brisbane has announced that the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference (ACBC) has decided to conduct a plenary council/synod in 2020. Few Australian Catholics would be aware that synods have been an integral part of church governance since the time of the Apostles. That’s not surprising as no plenary or provincial (roughly State-wide) synods have been held in Australia since the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), despite that Council calling for synods to “flourish with fresh vigour” (Christus Dominus, n.36), and insisting that the laity have an active role in them. (more…)

  • PAUL COLLINS. Sniffing the Ecclesiastical Wind

     

    There’s one thing you have to concede to Archbishop Mark Coleridge of Brisbane: he can unerringly sniff the direction of the wind in the Vatican; mind you, he’s a frequent visitor to Rome. He’s spotted that Pope Francis is big on synods or gatherings of bishops, clergy and laity to set policy for the church, so he told his diocesan newspaper, the Catholic Leader (17 August 2016) that he’s persuaded the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference to hold a national synod of the Australian Catholic Church in 2020.

    Unlike the Anglican and Protestant churches, Australian Catholicism is not big on synods. The last one was in 1937 and the three before that (1885, 1895 and 1905) were only attended by bishops, senior priests and theologians. The present bishops are not really enthusiastic about a synod either. The danger is you get people together and you never know what might come-up. (more…)

  • DALLY MESSENGER. A letter to Malcolm Turnbull and Bill Shorten concerning refugees.

     

     

    There is some talk of cooperation so, living in hope, I am emboldened to write to both of you. Only by you both working together can this criminal behaviour cease. There are far better ways to stop people smuggling than imprisoning people in third world jails without charge or trial.  (more…)

  • DEAN ASHENDEN. State aide, the ALP and the ‘needs policy’.

    When Labor decided to support public funding of non-government schools fifty years ago, it created a legacy that is still misunderstood. (more…)

  • PETER DAY. The Lord’s Prayer: beyond lip service

    Diego’s phone rang, said the voice in Spanish ‘I am Pope Francis’. 

    “Our Father in heaven; hallowed be your name …”

    How well we know these words – perhaps too well as they slip off our tongues like a perfunctory “How are you going?” (more…)

  • ALLAN PATIENCE. Why the debates about Islam have gone off the rails

     

    One of the persistent conceits of modern history has been the growing conviction that rational scientific enquiry will completely remove religious thinking from human consciousness for all time. Positivist fundamentalists like Stephen Hawking or so-called “New Atheists” like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins have triumphantly echoed the Nietzschean declaration “God is dead” without understanding that this was Nietzsche’s anguished cry in response to modernity’s mindless stampede into what he believed was a ghastly post-mythic abyss. A similar despair engulfed one of the very greatest sociological theorists of modernity, Max Weber, who accused its protagonists of “disenchanting” the human experience by locking it up in an “iron cage of rationality.” (more…)

  • FRANCIS SULLIVAN. Economic Inequality is a Wound on our Nation: Can It be Healed?

     

    The wash up from the Federal election echoes that from after the Brexit vote in the UK – voter disenchantment and protest.

    Commentators suggest this comes from electorates where the “old economy” still holds sway. Where jobs are tenuous and basic concerns on health and education are front of mind.

    Others say that the two major parties are too similar and appear unresponsive to the concerns of those who are struggling to keep up with the demands of a “globalised economy” or who have completely missed out on its benefits. (more…)

  • ROBERT MICKENS. Pope Francis clips Cardinal Pell’s wings.

    In the space of a week, Pope Francis reduced the responsibilities of Cardinal George Pell and rebuffed an initiative by Cardinal Robert Sarah. …

    Pope Francis [also] did a pretty good number on Australian Cardinal George Pell by once more drastically reducing his powers as prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy (SFE).

    The pope issued a new “motu proprio” last Saturday that essentially reverses a 2014 law that had given Pell’s office managing control over the Holy See’s real estate and investments portfolios. (more…)

  • PAUL COLLINS. How powerful is Pell in Australia?

     

    The papacy only gained complete power over the appointment of bishops in the mid-19th century; it’s that recent. Previously many different systems operated, but the key issue was that the local church had a major say in who was appointed bishop, even if it was only the local lord or king. Nowadays episcopal appointments result from a closed, opaque process in which all power is held by the Vatican and hardly any by the local church. The result: some very poor appointments. (more…)

  • PETER DAY. The Parable of the Good Muslim

     

    Some right leaning Christian politicians and commentators were not satisfied when a wise man told them you should love your neighbour as yourself. “And who is my neighbour,” they asked. The wise man replied:

    A conservative Member of Parliament was walking back home from church and fell into the hands of brigands; they took all he had, and then began beating him to within an inch of his life. Now it happened that a fellow conservative was travelling nearby, but when he saw the man and the brigands he pretended as if not to see and drove straight by. Then another devout church-goer came upon the commotion, but he too ‘turned the other cheek’ and continued on his way. But a Muslim man – a doctor – who came upon the scene was moved with compassion. He stopped his car causing the brigands to flee. He then took out his First Aid kit and proceeded to bandage the man’s wounds, comforting him with words of kindness. He then gently lifted the man into his car, laid him on the back seat, and took him to a nearby hospital. “Look after him,” he said to the medical registrar; “he has received an awful beating. I will stop by tomorrow to see if he is alright.” 

    “Which of these three do you think proved himself a neighbour to the man who fell into the brigands’ hands?” asked the wise man. “The one who took pity on him,” they replied. “Go and do the same yourself.”

    ____________________________

    The parable of the Good Samaritan is far more than a nice story about human kindness. Rather, it is a sobering challenge to people who should know better: our lives must not be governed by the cultural or religious constraints of our peers – of “my tribe”; of “my nation”.

    In today’s fractured political and social climate we must be very wary of fear-mongers who invoke tribalism. Such leadership only provides fertile ground for brigands and cowards. Citizens start to feel threatened and panic sets in as people compete for a dominant identity: it us versus them, me versus you.

    Not One Nation, but rather a divided nation.

    Peter Day is a Catholic Priest in Canberra. 

     

  • JOHN O’DONOGUE: On Compassion – even for people who are ‘different’

    Compassion distinguishes human presence from all other presence on the earth. The human mind is one of the most gracious gifts of creation. The human mind is the place where nature gathers at its most intense and at its most intimate. The human being is an in-between presence, belonging neither fully to the earth from which she has come, nor to the heavens toward which her mind and spirit aim. In a sense, the human being is the loneliest creature in creation. Paradoxically, the human being also has the greatest possibility for intimacy. I link compassion immediately with intimacy. Compassion is the ability to vitally imagine what it is like to be an other, the force that makes a bridge from the island of one individuality to the island of the other. It is an ability to step outside your own perspective, limitations and ego, and become attentive in a vulnerable, encouraging, critical, and creative way with the hidden world of another person. (more…)

  • ANN GILROY RSJ: A Response to Pope Francis’s Commission on Women Deacons

    Women Religious welcome any development in Church that responds to women’s repeated call to have an equal share in the decision-making. Pope Francis’s proposal to set up a Commission to study the possibility of having women deacons, while not yet a decision to change a structure, is offering Catholic women a frisson of promise. (more…)