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Ever since Pope Francis stepped onto a balcony at St Peter's Basilica, his words have been abbreviated, deconstructed and turned into memes. The attention paid to last week's interview with the Pope, conducted on behalf of by major Jesuit journals worldwide, suggests that the Roman pontiff is still held relevant, even by those who regard religious institutions as anachronistic.
Pope Francis says in his recent interview that the wounded won't come to God if their pastors throw the rule book at them. Likewise the federal government will do nothing to increase employment participation if it chooses to demonise people through its punitive Work for the Dole Scheme. It's cruel and pointless to condemn people for not being able to walk up stairs while refusing to build a ramp.
ABC employee Jill Meagher was murdered by a man who had been granted parole while serving his sentence for a previous violent sexual crime. The largest threat to the security of the community comes from a view that sees punishment entirely in retributive terms. Unless the human development of prisoners is seen as central, imprisonment simply begets further risk.
The NSW Parliament recently passed a resolution condemning the Armenian Genocide, conducted by Turkey in 1915. The Turkish Consul-General in Sydney, the foreign ministry in Ankara and even the city council in Gallipoli immediately responded. The resolution disrupts the astoundingly successful charm offensive Turkey has conducted in Australia for years, fostering a positive relationship with Australia through the shared ordeal of Gallipoli.
Forgiving and forgetting are weighty matters. It is unlikely, for example, that Judith Tebbutt and Nigel Brennan, both of whom were held hostage in Somalia, will ever be able to forget their experiences of prolonged isolation, near starvation, and threats of death. Yet both have achieved a kind of forgiveness via the effort to understand their captors' lives.
Although community organisations are often a burr in the saddle of a managerially minded government, they are important because they represent a humane vision and because they can reflect back to government an intimate experience of what is happening to the people whom they serve. Their advocacy, even when unwanted, keeps governments in touch with human needs.
AFL footballer Liam Jurrah had his prison sentence for an assault conviction reduced to three months. Hopefully he will not be too harmed by his experience, and afterwards may be given the chance to recommence his football career. But the conditions confronting his cousins and brothers will not change. In the NT there is a troubling confluence between harsher penalties and increasing incarceration rates.
Recent ABS data reveals NT has both the highest rate of people experiencing homelessness and the highest imprisonment rate of any Australian state. Former Spanish PM Zapatero said 'a decent society is one that does not humiliate its members'. Successive Australian governments have systematically humiliated citizens on the basis of cultural background or health or social status.
Fr Frank Brennan's keynote address at the Archdiocese of Canberra and Goulburn Clergy Assembly, St Clement's, Gaylong, on 22 May 2013
The Commonwealth and the Victorian state budgets this year were marked by a contradiction. Both committed more money to incarceration — detention centres and prisons; and both limited programs to help the people confined there. Such contradictions are usually signs of a bad policy that flows from shallow cultural values.
Pope Francis' Holy Thursday expedition to the juvenile justice centre to wash the feet of young people, male and female, Christian and Muslim, breached liturgical rules. But he was right to do so. Church and state laws are securely grounded only when there is a shared sense of the importance of human flourishing.
Pope Francis will celebrate Holy Thursday Mass among young offenders who are marginal in any society. His gesture says something about Easter, and about the implications of his desire for a Church of the poor. Those who stand in solidarity with the marginalised will themselves become marginalised.
133-144 out of 200 results.