While Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Opposition leader Bill Shorten have promised to protect religious freedoms if same-sex marriage is legalised, the Northern Territory Government has unveiled proposals for extending anti-discrimination laws which would, if implemented, do away with all exemptions for religious organisations – except the freedom to ordain ministers of religion. The proposals […]
Australians in favour of authentic marriage – as opposed to its numerous proposed counterfeits – may well have been disheartened or dismayed in recent years by the seemingly overwhelming bias of the media and our culture in general at what may seem to many as the last battle that can be fought: the battle for […]
Sydney Catholic apostolate Parousia Media has announced it will represent Eternal Word Television Network in Australia and New Zealand in a new partnership with the world’s biggest Catholic television operator. Parousia founder and Director Charbel Raish made the announcement at a special fundraising dinner last weekend in Campsie. EWTN, a satellite TV service which goes […]
The Chief Executive Officer of the Catholic Church’s Truth Justice and Healing Council, Francis Sullivan, needs to urgently clarify statements he made earlier this week after he appeared to agree with the recommendation of the Royal Commission into Sexual Abuse in Institutions in Australia that priests be able to break the seal of the Confessional […]
Over the last week yet another report on the ever-mushrooming costs of childcare appeared in the nation’s media. Unsurprisingly, the report revealed a worsening situation in terms of the costs being faced by couples who place their children in care. The figures being reported are almost astonishing except for the fact that they are not […]
On paper, the Lee family, members of St Christopher’s Catholic Parish, Syndal, in Melbourne’s southeastern suburbs, are exactly the kind of people we want to migrate to Australia. Firstly, they are hardworking business operators who have successfully established two businesses – one a Korean restaurant in the heart of Melbourne’s CBD, the other a cleaning […]
What is the cost of domestic violence? One sad example may help illustrate the answer. Some years ago, a priest serving a desert Aboriginal community in Western Australia was called to the scene of yet another suicide in the community. A 13 year-old boy had hanged himself. Because the priest also found himself effectively serving […]
In a special selection of recent articles, The Catholic Weekly examines an issue that neither Australian society nor Australian media seem to be particularly interested in, much less concerned about. Yet it is one of the great human stories of the 21st century: religious persecution around the globe. As many of our readers will be […]
If we were to survey the Church in Australia at the present moment, we could be forgiven for concluding that in many respects an institution which has been a major factor in Australian life since the earliest days of this nation is now a significantly spent force, exhibiting many signs of being spiritually exhausted. This […]
As Everett, Pete and Delmar are on the run in the Depression-era Deep South of the 1930s in the classic Coen Brothers movie O Brother Where Art Thou?, they pick up a hitch hiker carrying a guitar case at a lonely crossroads in the middle of the Mississippi Delta. Shortly before this they encounter a […]
If there’s one problem facing Christians it is an increasingly hostile culture inimical and, indeed, often toxic to their best efforts to raise their children with the values they regard as most important. Another problem can sometimes be the misinformed and not very deeply formed other Christians whose limited or doggedly doctrinaire beliefs can make […]
On 19 August 1692 Martha Carrier, George Jacobs, George Burroughs, John Willard, and John Proctor were hanged at Salem in the-then colony of Massachusetts. Their purported crime had been the practice of witchcraft. The five were among an eventual 20 persons executed for consorting with the Devil, although an additional five, two of whom were […]
