Keywords: Australian Catholics
There are more than 200 results, only the first 200 are displayed here.
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RELIGION
- John Warhurst
- 05 April 2022
19 Comments
The 280 Plenary Council (PC) Members have just taken another major step towards the Second Assembly in Sydney on 3-9 July. Yet it is difficult to have a proper public conversation about this step because it has taken place behind closed doors. Towards the Second Assembly comes a long way under the guidance of the four writing groups, whose membership has not been made public. Though it is a mixed bag, it is probably the best document emerging from the PC, making it even more frustrating that it is not in the public domain.
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RELIGION
- Andrew Hamilton
- 24 March 2022
10 Comments
Any program of church reform will have soon to ask Chernyshevsky’s question, What is to be done? It is a dangerous question — he wrote his novel from jail and spent much of his life in exile or imprisonment. Discussion of Church matters is mercifully less perilous today, but the question does invite a radical repiecing of the connections and tradition and energies that constitute Catholic life.
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RELIGION
- Miles Pattenden
- 15 March 2022
19 Comments
Even as he sustains the papacy’s now traditional opposition to all forms of war and its emphasis on the extreme suffering war brings, especially to the innocent, Pope Francis has, in recent weeks, taken a different, more partisan approach which he and others must feel is justified.
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AUSTRALIA
- Frank Hurley
- 24 February 2022
1 Comment
Gambling is now a core national industry providing significant employment, profit for private providers and revenue for governments. All good but, as with every form of industry, there are ‘externalities’. In the case of the gambling industry, it is the personal and social costs of ‘problem’ or ‘addicted’ gamblers that must be taken into account.
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AUSTRALIA
- Frank Brennan
- 22 February 2022
1 Comment
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.
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RELIGION
- John Warhurst
- 10 February 2022
37 Comments
The Church in Australia has taken a step towards greater transparency with the release by the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference (ACBC) of its first ever Annual Report-this one for the 2020 year. This step is welcome, but there is more to be done. Synodality and co-responsibility presumes that those who are walking together have equal access to information upon which to discern the future of the Church at all levels.
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RELIGION
- Miles Pattenden
- 27 January 2022
31 Comments
Many Catholics will have found the news from Germany this past week painful. A law firm, Westpfahl Spilker Wastl, has presented findings in its investigation into historic sexual abuse in the Munich archdiocese. Running to 1,000 pages, the report is shocking: it lists at least 497 victims for the period 1945–2019 and identifies 235 probable offenders including 173 priests and nine deacons.
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AUSTRALIA
- Greg Craven
- 25 January 2022
53 Comments
One reasonably could ask whether this is the moment to write a book about the potential of Catholic Social Theory to contribute to Australian politics and policy. After all, the Church is still struggling to come to terms with decades of child abuse, hardly a recommendation for social potential. We currently also are attempting to make sense of a Plenary that is both confused and confusing.
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FAITH DOING JUSTICE
- Andrew Hamilton
- 11 January 2022
3 Comments
The debate about quotas based on gender has been well canvassed. The wider issues raised about merit and meritocracy, however, merit further reflection. Far in the background to both conversations lies a sophisticated body of reflection on merit among Christian theologians.
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RELIGION
- Miles Pattenden
- 16 December 2021
29 Comments
Pope Francis turns eighty-five this week. His pontificate has seen him emerge from obscurity in Argentine Church politics to become, late in life, a global cultural icon and one of the most popular popes in living memory. Over the past nine years he has invigorated the Church and, according to papal biographer Austen Ivereigh, has made the papacy ‘much more human, much more accessible, much less remote’.
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RELIGION
- John Warhurst
- 14 December 2021
31 Comments
Synodality confronts the traditional practice of hierarchy within the church. When the ACBC responded last December to The Light from the Southern Cross report, which promoted synodality and co-responsible governance, it re-stated its position that hierarchy was embedded in the church’s approach to governance. This immediately set up a potential tension between episcopal authority and participation in governance by the People of God.
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RELIGION
- John Warhurst
- 02 December 2021
72 Comments
Church and state are confronting one another right now over the federal freedom of religion bill and the Victorian anti-discrimination bill. Whenever such confrontation occurs it reveals our priorities. We define our identity by what we choose to fight for hardest.
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