Welcome to Eureka Street

back to site

Keywords: Caritas

  • RELIGION

    The changing landscape of Catholic social work

    • Denis Fitzgerald
    • 16 February 2018
    5 Comments

    Catholic social service agencies are facing many challenges from a number of the disruptions at play in our postmodern society. These have to be addressed if the agencies are to continue their work with those on the margins, and their indispensable contribution to the mission of the Church.

    READ MORE
  • ENVIRONMENT

    Climate revolutionaries of East Africa

    • Paul O'Callaghan
    • 11 July 2017
    3 Comments

    The world's poor are bearing the brunt of global warming yet they have done the least to cause it. African countries have some of the lowest carbon emissions rates in the world, but their fields are drying up and their pastureland is vanishing. Still, all is not lost. If we want to find the answers to climate change, many of them exist within the communities already being impacted. These people understand the urgent threat posed by global warming and they are banding together to find solutions.

    READ MORE
  • PODCAST

    ChatterSquare: Cardinal Luis Tagle on contemporary life and politics

    • Podcast
    • 05 July 2017

    Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle is the Archbishop of Manila and president of Caritas International. He is associated with Pope Francis in terms of pastoral sensibility. In this episode of ChatterSquare, he tackles some of the uneasy questions of our time. What does leadership look like in polarised and violent places? How do we hold together diversity within the Catholic Church? How can religious wisdom be brought to bear on public life without crossing the line between church and state?

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Being clear eyed and misty eyed about human rights and asylum seekers

    • Frank Brennan
    • 06 October 2016
    8 Comments

    Australia's policy is unique and unrepeatable by other nations because it requires that you be an island nation continent without asylum seekers in direct flight from the countries next door and that you have access to a couple of other neighbouring island nations which are so indigent that they will receive cash payments in exchange for warehousing asylum seekers and proven refugees, perhaps indefinitely. The policy over which Turnbull presides is not world best practice. It's a disgrace.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Refugee children process trauma through drama

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 21 September 2016
    1 Comment

    At a Sydney school, a group of teenage refugees come together to share their stories, first with each other, and then with their friends and families via a live theatrical performance. Treehouse Theatre is run by three dedicated teachers, who facilitate the sharing, and help transform the children's stories into scripts that can be performed. Their stories are yet another reminder of the human cost of conflict, and of policies that exclude and further traumatise those who are fleeing from it.

    READ MORE
  • ENVIRONMENT

    The boat people from paradise lost

    • Lyn Bender
    • 23 April 2016
    7 Comments

    Ursula Rakova told how the sea that had been the friend of her people, was turning against them. It had crashed through and divided her island in two. Coconut palms were collapsing at the new shoreline. Food gardens were lost, as the soil was increasingly rendered infertile by salty tides that washed over them. The land that had been handed from grandmother to daughter, would bequeath no legacy to the granddaughters. The homeland of generations was disappearing before their eyes.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Why Pope Francis is not an anti-Capitalist greenie

    • Frank Brennan
    • 23 October 2015
    4 Comments

    Francis knows there are all sorts of issues inside and outside the Church where for too long people with power have tried to keep the lid on, in the hope that the problems and complexities will go away, often by parodying those who see the problems or complexities as small 'l' liberals or cafeteria Catholics. He delights in being joyful and troubled while contemplating big problems, calling people of good will to the table of deliberation reminding them of the kernel of the Christian gospels. He has the faith and hope needed to lift the lid without fear and without knowing the answers prior to the dialogue occurring.

    READ MORE
  • The insights of Pope Francis in shaping Catholic health and aged care

    • Frank Brennan
    • 26 August 2015
    7 Comments

    When addressing Italian doctors last November, Pope Francis quoted St. Camillus de Lellis who suggested that the most effective method in caring for the sick was simply to 'Put more heart into those hands.' Let's do something to change the market settings and political settings here in Australia to modify the behaviour of all Australians in the future, and let's attend to our own Franciscan interior ecological conversion with our care for the vulnerable.

    READ MORE
  • A trinity of questions about Laudato Si’

    • Frank Brennan
    • 06 August 2015
    3 Comments

    Pope Francis is not the first pope to address a social encyclical to everyone. But in comparison with his predecessors, Francis has been more inclusive in the process of writing the encyclical and in the final content of the document. He quotes from 17 different conferences of Catholic bishops. He is at pains to indicate that he is collaborative and that he takes the principle of subsidiarity very seriously. Being the final redactor of the text, he has felt free to interpolate some very folksy advice from time to time. He has also taken the liberty of inserting some very blunt, evocative images of environmental and economic devastation.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Quake forces Nepalis to walk on water

    • Angela Ford
    • 02 June 2015
    2 Comments

    As a kiwi I had grown up with earthquakes. I remember them large, small and intrusive. Awed by their power, I cherished the still that followed. This is what made Nepal’s second major earthquake so different for me. I will never forget the beginning of the 7.3-magnitude quake, but will never recall the end.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Joe Hockey's 'better bang' foreign aid cut delusion

    • Michael Mullins
    • 18 May 2015
    38 Comments

    As a nation, we have demonstrated to the world that we have no shame when it comes to the treatment of asylum seekers. Now it's as if the aid cuts are being worn as a badge of honour. Joe Hockey talks about the 'targeted outcomes' philosophy of the cuts, 'build[iing] the prosperity and assist[ing] with poverty alleviation in our region', in order to get 'better bang for our buck in foreign aid'. But leading aid economist Stephen Howse argues the opposite.

    READ MORE
  • RELIGION

    Getting ready for Pope Francis' environmental Rerum Novarum

    • Neil Ormerod
    • 11 May 2015
    20 Comments

    Both John Paul II and Benedict XVI made passing reference to environmental issues. Benedict spoke of the need for protection of the environment, resources the climate in his encyclical Caritas in Veritate. But in terms of its significance, Pope Francis’ forthcoming encyclical has the potential to do for the environmental movement what Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (1891) did for the union movement – to provide it with a powerful source of moral and religious legitimacy in the face of those forces which have sought to limit their influence. 

    READ MORE