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Last year, the late Cardinal George Pell anonymously published a memorandum that criticized Pope Francis and his vision of a synodal church and condemned the Synod as a ‘catastrophe’, Cardinal Pell's memo signals building tensions between different visions for the future of the Church in Australia.
Australia Day has long been a source of controversy for Indigenous Australians. This year, the Referendum on Indigenous Voice to Parliament promises to be a major battleground in the ongoing debate over Australian identity, and will serve as a reminder of the deep-seated history of dispossession, discrimination and the long road to reconciliation.
The two Catholic leaders who passed away this summer both lived in the public spotlight for much of their lives, but they also each lived a private life of which we only ever gained glimpses. Those of us who didn’t know them tend to fill in the details based on which aspects of their public persona best align with our own attitudes.
The Church must speak up to be relevant, but those who seek to ‘speak for the church’ must be brave. They risk exposing themselves to claims of bias unless they stick to a very narrow agenda and speak in extremely measured terms. Yet if they are too bland they risk being irrelevant to the sharp end of political debate and their intervention becomes little more than a symbolic ritual.
It is highly doubtful that the Essendon Football Club appreciated the reaction that would occur when it presented its new CEO, Andrew Thorburn, with the option of giving up his role as a lay leader in the City on a Hill Anglican Church or resigning from his role with the Club. Even if many were uneasy about how the issue was caught up in the culture wars, it caused widespread concerns amongst people of faith.
In a recent meeting Pope Francis met the editors of European Jesuit cultural magazines. As usual in such meetings he did not give an address but invited the participants to ask questions. The questions ranged across a wide area, reflecting the different readership and religious culture of the magazines. Underlying the Pope’s responses lay a challenging and coherent approach to the Jesuit mission and to communication that invites self-reflection also among Jesuit magazines and their readers outside Europe.
There is a great deal of commentary about the growing importance of artificial intelligence, or AI, especially in business circles. To some extent this is a self-fulfilling prophecy — if people think something will have a seminal effect then it probably will. But if the supposed commercial benefits are significant, the dangers are potentially enormous.
In recent days, if you were to listen to the media reports, you could be forgiven for thinking that religious educators want to retain a right to exclude children or teachers from their schools on the basis of their gender or sexual orientation. Nothing could be further from the truth. Or nothing should be further from the truth.
With very little public debate or consultation, Victoria has repealed almost all laws relating to prostitution. Alone among all recreational activities, sex for payment is now unrestricted, even regarding health and safety. If we really care what happens to people, what place does sex work have in our society?
It is unfortunate that World Communications Day is celebrated in the middle of an election campaign. We have seen the worst of partisan media coverage, of shouting as a preferred form of communication, of endless experts promising Armageddon if the result is not to their taste. And yet we have also seen the best of media informing us of the issues that concern people in different parts of Australia. Without such public communication, for all its defects and excesses, our society would be the poorer.
In the early part of the twentieth century, Francis Galton (a cousin of Charles Darwin) used the latter’s work to argue that human breeding stock could be improved. He would weed out the weakest and the less able and produce a sturdier race. Until recently, the crematoria of Hitler’s death camps were enough to remind most that this was not an idea consonant with actual human flourishing.
It’s no secret that highly politicised issues seem to elicit strong emotional reactions, particularly feelings of intense anger. But not only are these feelings common, individuals seem actively motivated to seek out stories of tragedy, scandal, and injustice on a seemingly unending quest to feel moral outrage.