Sydney
21 July 2002

Home
Archive
Subscribe
Links
Contact

Changing face of Pope’s soldiers

Vinnies SOS for cash to fight gambling ills

Priest’s anniversary wish – that more young men take up cloth

Simon’s still in need of a home

Excitement as pilgrims are blessed

Politics and prayers

International court is ‘crucial’ for East Timor

The icon of Our Lady of Kazan

Amnesty condemns attacks by Palestinian suicide bombers

Church unity theme for cardinal at Ryde mayor’s prayer breakfast

Aust gifts set charity record

Danger if teens are ‘running on empty’

Editorial: Romance in marriage

Letters: Jesus is the centre, not the clergy

Conversation: ‘Unreal’ love? Not if your love is real - Anne and Peter McGowan, family delegates

Reflections: Hunger – righting an imbalance

Becoming Catholic ‘a turning point’

Opinion: A return to the genuine ‘good old days’?

Schools fight to keep up with demand

Chaldean leader blesses new church

Helping hand for Sydney pilgrims

‘Big kids’ in new role as Seniors

Inspirations: Students rally to Winter Appeal

Opinion: A return to the genuine ‘good old days’?

What was Fr Desmond O’Donnell’s intended purpose in writing his Reflections column (Good old days are starting now, Reflections, CW 30/6)?

What was he trying to prove? The word Deflections seems more appropriate.

The phrase ‘the good old days’ is repeated half a dozen times to prove the opposite.

If by the phrase he alludes to the pre-1960s Catholic life, then he is wrong, but if he refers to the rest of the second millennium, I for one totally agree.

For it is during this period of time up to the present that we have been witnessing priests and religious turning their backs on their vocation, and even their faith, in droves, and seminaries and convents closing down for lack of candidates.

Catholic youth in their thousands have been giving up their faith before finishing their secondary eduction, notwithstanding the new approach to open-minded Catholic education envisioned by the liberal element within the Church.

The Church has always adapted herself to different circumstances, at different times, with various cultures, but she has never changed the authentic teaching she received from her founder through Peter and the other apostles.

We cannot label her for the sins of her members. We cannot put the blame on her when she is betrayed by some of her rebellious and scandalous children.

“Thanks in part to the media, the Church is now hopefully on its way to surgery,” Fr O’Donnel writes

How grateful he is to the media for their beneficial disclosure and exposure of the crimes committed and covered up within the Church!

He mentions only sex abuse of children by some of the clerical members.

But what about the undernourishment and starvation of Catholic youngsters in authentic teaching? Isn’t that a serious abuse too?

Did not our Holy Father write that “a disciple of Christ has the right to receive ‘the word of faith’ not in mutilated, falsified or diminished form but whole and entire, in all its Rigour and Vigour”(Catechesi Tradendae, paragraph 30, page 49)?

Like Fr Desmond, I, too, can feel grace continuing to call the faithful to move away from the so-called ‘good old days’ of the past.

Thanks to Pope John Paul II and those who faithfully and courageously follow his leadership we are witnessing a return to the genuine ‘good old days’.

In the meantime, let me borrow Fr Desmond’s closing appeal, “let us all have the courage to carry the cross of deserved humiliation and shame when we hurt children or one another in any way”.