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Keywords: Bill Uren

  • RELIGION

    Nancy Pelosi and the problem of the pro-choice Catholic politician

    • Bill Uren
    • 08 December 2022
    20 Comments

    Nancy Pelosi recently announced her retirement as leader of the Democratic Party in the House of Representatives, proclaiming that she was a wife, a mother, a grandmother, and a devout Catholic. Yet citing her support for pro-choice on abortion, the archbishop of her home archdiocese of San Francisco has forbidden her access to Holy Communion. So, the question remains: what sort of moral reasoning could Mrs Pelosi invoke to support her pro-choice stance?

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  • MEDIA

    In conversation with Morag Fraser

    • David Halliday
    • 16 December 2021
    4 Comments

    As part of the 30th anniversary of Eureka Street, we're running conversations with the team who first started the publication in 1991, alongside various people who have played a part in the Eureka Street story. In this video, Eureka Street editor David Halliday speaks with Morag Fraser. 

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  • RELIGION

    The Plenary Council: Restoring the Third Rite

    • Bill Uren
    • 05 October 2021
    15 Comments

    As a result of the pandemic, like other religious observances, the availability of the Sacrament of Penance has been drastically curtailed, and it is unlikely that recourse to the sacrament will be as frequent as previously even when the restrictions are lifted. Further, the confidence of the laity in the inviolability of the seal has, understandably, been undermined, a consequence of which may again be that recourse to the sacrament will be in decline. 

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  • RELIGION

    The Plenary Council: Consulting the faithful

    • Bill Uren
    • 30 August 2021
    31 Comments

    One might submit that a Plenary Council is a cumbersome instrument to ascertain the genuinely representative views of the Catholic Church in Australia. Many of the canonical strictures regarding the membership, agenda and process of the Council will dampen the original enthusiasm for the Council that provoked over 17,500 submissions.

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  • RELIGION

    The Catholic Church and modern science

    • Bill Uren
    • 15 September 2020
    250 Comments

    Whereas the Vatican II document sought to engage with, and to respect, the autonomy of the modern world and its science, only too many of the Vatican’s official statements over the past fifty years have effectively resiled from that commitment.

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  • RELIGION

    Seal of confession should remain inviolate

    • Bill Uren
    • 07 December 2017
    34 Comments

    I suspect the royal commission will recommend the seal of confession should no longer remain absolute. I also know that all priests of my acquaintance will rather go to jail than violate the seal. I cannot then see that such a move will be anything but unproductive. Perpetrators will be less likely to go to confession and priests will go to jail.

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  • The challenge of education for social justice

    • Frank Brennan
    • 08 July 2015
    3 Comments

    I suspect Pope Francis had some of our Jesuit alumni in mind when he wrote in his encyclical Laudato Si: 'A politics concerned with immediate results, supported by consumerist sectors of the population, is driven to produce short-term growth... True statecraft is manifest when, in difficult times, we uphold high principles and think of the long-term common good. Political powers do not find it easy to assume this duty'.

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  • EDUCATION

    Return to higher education elitism

    • Bill Uren
    • 23 January 2015
    16 Comments

    We can sympathise with the university Vice-Chancellors who support fee deregulation. Over many years Government financial support for higher education has been eroded in real terms, and maintaining international rankings depends upon deregulation. But do we want the major metropolitan universities to return to the financial exclusivity that characterised the early history of Australian tertiary education?

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The man who would be PM (again)

    • Staff
    • 27 June 2013
    14 Comments

    Last year Kevin Rudd sat down with human rights lawyer and Eureka Street columnist Frank Brennan for a candid and in-depth conversation about his faith, his values and his political philosophies. He also took questions from the 500-strong live audience. Relive this fascinating insight into returning Prime Minister Rudd.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Lives broken by false abuse claims

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 23 May 2013

    Whereas The Hunt portrayed a small town gripped by paranoia after a sensitive and imaginative child's confused comments are taken out of context, in Broken the accusations are more sinister, used by a young girl to deflect consequences from herself, in full knowledge of the damage that her claims will cause to the accused.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Peter Steele's hymns in sickness

    • Andrew Bullen
    • 14 June 2012
    8 Comments

    'Monday is Day Oncology, where the dark burses arrive by courier, and we're glad to see them stripped for action, hooked in the air, lucent against fear.' Maybe only Steele could see these bags of chemo as Christological signs. As with the zoo once, so now the oncology ward offers hints of that other eden.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Sex abuse action and the seal of confession

    • Michael Mullins
    • 25 July 2011
    29 Comments

    Senator Nick Xenophon's call to protect children by ending the seal of confession was an affront to freedom of religion. But he speaks for many Australians, whose goodwill is necessary to preserve such religious practices.

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