The Record Newspaper 03 December 2008

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WYD ‘hits the road’

National gathering of youth ministries, leaders, sets out a vision for directing WYD momentum in Australia

Many have wondered how to take advantage of the momentum created by WYD; one way chosen by Australia’s bishops is to back a strategy created by youth leaders.

■ By Robert Hiini

THE Catholic Bishops of Australia have approved a blueprint for youth ministry across the nation generated by a National Youth Leaders’ Gathering (NYLG).

The blueprint was drafted after three days of talks and small group interaction on 21 – 23 November, attended by over 330 people from dioceses, religious congregations, groups and movements throughout the country.

Approving the blueprint, the Bishops praised the post-WYD spirit of faith they said was evident at the Gathering and in the direction of the initiatives presented to them in the NYLG report.

The blueprint outlines three key areas for national co-ordination:

● Formation for Young People

● Support for Youth Ministry

● National Events;

The plan leaves room for each diocese, religious order, school, group or movement to implement their own specific initiatives.

Under Formation, young people identified Catechesis as a key area, saying that it should be “vibrant; use multi-media, be age-specific and developmentally appropriate; include Scripture, prayer and liturgy, Church teaching and Tradition, the Sacraments, Social Teaching, and include mentoring and leadership”.

They also called for a strategic plan for faith formation for schools and universities, a consolidated database of human and material resources, and avenues for empowerment of young people in leadership and ministry.

Continued - Page 6

Benedict grieves Mumbai attacks

■

By

John Thavis

VATICAN CITY (CNS) - Pope

Benedict XVI condemned the wave of terrorist attacks in India as acts of “cruel and senseless violence,” and led prayers for the nearly 200 people who died and the hundreds injured in the bloodshed.

A Vatican spokesman, meanwhile, warned that if extremists continue to exploit the ethnic and religious tensions of south-

ern Asia the results could be even more tragic.

Speaking at his noon blessing on November 30, the Pope asked for prayers for the victims of the attacks in Mumbai, the Indian financial capital, where suspected Islamic militants assaulted at least 10 targets in a three-day siege that began on November 26.

The Pope also expressed concern for the clashes between rival ethnic and religious groups in Jos, Nigeria, where at least 200 peo-

ple were killed from November 28-29. Churches and mosques were burned in the rioting.

“The causes and circumstances of these tragic events are different, but there should be a common sense of horror and condemnation for the explosion of such cruel and senseless violence,” the pope told pilgrims from his apartment window overlooking St Peter’s Square.

“Let us ask the Lord to touch the hearts of those who delude

Continued - Page 11

Bishop admits Catholic hospital sterilisations

Abortions may also have been performed according to statistics; hospital officials misled bishop over practices.

■ By

Chaz Muth

WASHINGTON (CNS) - The bishop of Tyler, Texas, in the US has concluded that Catholic hospitals in his diocese have violated ethical directives by performing sterilisations.

“As a bishop, I am deeply saddened and upset by this news,” said Bishop Alvaro Corrada, in a November 21 statement published in the Catholic East Texas, newspaper of the Diocese of Tyler.

Out of bounds: Trinity Mother Frances Health System, which operates Mother Frances Hospital in Tyler, Texas, is one of the health systems that was named in the whistle-blower report that didcovered ethical lapses at Texas Catholic hospitals.

PHOTO: CNS/CATHOLIC EAST TEXAS

“As bishop of the Diocese of Tyler, I have to admit my failure to provide adequate oversight of the Catholic hospitals as regards their protection of the sacred dignity of each human person.”

Bishop Corrada’s statement follows an investigation by his diocese after a national newspaper reported claims last July that thousands of sterilisa-

Continued - Page 7

Averted: Apostolic Nuncio to Australia Archbishop Giuseppe Lazzarotto, left, and Bishop Joseph Grech of the Diocese of Sandhurst socialise with young people from the Sandhurst Diocese at the Gathering. PHOTO: YVETTE NEHME

Narcisa

to prayer and good works. In 1868 she went to Lima, Peru, lodging in the hostel of the Lay Brothers of St. Dominic. This laywoman sought holiness through prayer and self-mortification, often praying alone for

© 2005 Saints for Today © 2008 CNS

Vatican wins European solar award

Hopes Church will help set stage for interest in renewable energies.

■

By

Carol Glatz

Archbishop Hickey Graduation Ceremony - Bishop Sproxton Shopfront Christmas PartyBishop Sproxton

14 Embrace the Grace Mass, New NorciaArchbishop Hickey Feast of St Lucy, SpearwoodBishop Sproxton 18

The Parish - Pages 2-5

The Nation - Pages 6-7

Letters - Page 8

Perspectives - Vista 4 - Pg 9

The World - Pages 10-11

Panorama - Page 14

Classifieds - Page 15

VATICAN CITY (CNS) - The Vatican won the 2008 Euro Solar Prize for turning the football field-sized roof of its Paul VI audience hall into a giant solar-power generator. A European association promoting renewable energy presented the award to Cardinal Giovanni Lajolo, president of the commission governing Vatican territory, during the inauguration of the new roof on November 26.

Cardinal Lajolo said he would make sure the award, a small silver and glass globe, would go to Pope Benedict XVI, who repeatedly has called on humanity to show greater care for creation.

The association’s president, Hermann Scheer, said he hoped more governments, businesses and individuals would be inspired by the Vatican’s efforts and

thereby promote and support renewable energy, too. A German company, SolarWorld, donated and installed 2,400 solar panels on the top of the Vatican’s audience hall after Vatican officials had made public their plans to convert the rooftop into a solar-power generator.

The gift is estimated to be worth about $1.55 million dollars.

Scheer said the only way to inspire more people to tap into solar power was for a well-respected, “worldwide institution, indeed, the Catholic Church with its global importance,” to set the stage and show it could be done.

He said he hopes the Vatican’s new solar-panel roof, which will produce some 300,000 kilowatt-hours of power each year, will help “overcome the mental block many people have toward new sources of energy.”

The solar panels began generating energy for the Vatican’s power grid on November 26 during the Pope’s weekly general audience.

A large electronic tally board hangs in the hall to keep count of how many

kilowatt hours are being produced and how much oil and carbon dioxide is being saved by using solar energy.

After just a few hours on a partly sunny November 26, 60 kilowatt-hours had been generated and 88 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions, or CO2, were avoided.

Pier Carlo Cuscianna, director of technical services for Vatican City, told reporters another solar-panel system was being installed above the Vatican’s employee cafeteria to help provide power for heating and cooling the building.

Another project still in the planning stages, he told reporters at the inauguration, is to set up 1.2 acres of solar panels at Vatican Radio’s Santa Maria di Galeria transmission centre in the countryside outside Rome.

He said they already have a list of potential donors for supplying the solar panels for this and other future projects.

The Vatican has said its aim is to use renewable energy sources for 20 percent of its energy needs by 2020, the target date set by the European Union for its members.

 CATHOLIC NEWS SERVICE

Young men not afraid of giving, offer selves to Mary

Retreatants find consecration ‘a highlight.’

NINETEEN young men consecrated themselves to Mary using the formula drawn up by Auschwitz martyr St Maximilian Kolbe at a retreat in Toodyay over the weekend of November 29-30.

retreat’s sponsors, the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate.

The weekend’s theme was inspired by a quote from St John Chrysostom: “Let us, then come back from that table like lions breathing fire, thus becoming terrifying to the devil.”

“Lions Breathing Fire,” a retreat for men, was guided by Fr Joseph Michael Mary FI, a priest belonging to the order of the

St Maximilian Kolbe

The men consecrated themselves to the Blessed Virgin Mary under the form left to the Church by St Maximilian Kolbe who was martyred by the Nazis in Auschwitz in 1941.

Fr Joseph said the consecration was considered by many of the men to be the highlight of the weekend.

The retreat’s organisers say that plans for another retreat next year, probably in April, are already underway.

Sunny day: Solar panels cover the roof of the Vatican’s Paul VI audience hall in this photo released by the Vatican. The hall’s original concrete roof was replaced with panels of photo-electric cells, generating the city’s first solar power. CNS PHOTO/VATICAN

Seeking spirituality: Retreatants pose for the camera with Fr Joseph Michael Mary FI of the Toodyay-based Franciscans of the Immaculate, the order that organised the retreat.

Historic Highgate set to receive new life for future generations

Windows will be key in restoration process; parish set to raise funds for work.

■ By Robert Hiini

A SPIRITUAL home to thousands of Catholics for 102 years, Sacred Heart Church in Highgate is undergoing a new stage of conservation.

Contractors have been engaged to reframe, re-leadlight and replace three of the heritage listed church’s stained glass windows that Parish Priest, Fr Peter Bianchini, says were “dangerous and literally falling out” of their positions.

The work will be the first stage in a conservation plan that the parish put together in 2004, having received a Lotteries Grant to replace the church’s guttering and repaint its eaves.

Casatelli Trust, the contractor engaged to do the work, is experienced in church conservation, having worked previously on the Catholic Education Office (formerly the Home of the Good Shepherd) and St Patrick’s Basilica in Fremantle.

Eventually, 35 windows in the church will be refurbished or repaired with three of them set to cost $70,000 in total, with another six averaging $10,000 per window.

Marko Bouquey-Moss Piero, a subcontractor engaged on the project says workers were surprised by the extent of the damage to the plaster surrounding the windows.

Water damage had leached out the plaster behind the surface gypsum leaving nothing but sand, making the alcoves very unstable, he said.

Mr Bouquey-Moss and his fellow subcontractors are using an innovative technique to combat this problem, injecting plaster back into the empty spaces in the walls.

Fr Bianchini says that the parish’s subsequent applications for grants have been unsuccessful and that all funds required for conservation will have to be raised by the parish. A committee has been established, made up of Sacred Heart parishioners, to raise the funds for the extensive work required.

The parish is a popular place for weddings with approximately 80 taking place every year - with nearly as many funerals.

“People who’ve been part of the parish seem to come back

Vinnies, parishes, ready to meet Christmas need

here,” says Fr Bianchini, Parish Priest of Sacred Heart for the past four years.

“They see it as their parish or they come back because they consider it their family’s church.”

The church was built in 1906 for the grand sum of £4000 under the supervision of inaugural Parish Priest, Fr Thomas Crowley, who was to continue in that role for 33 years.

The parish took its name from the land it was built on - ‘Alacoque Square’ – so coined by the Most Rev Matthew Gibney, then-Bishop of Perth, after St Margaret Mary Alacoque who introduced the world to the Sacred Heart of Jesus devotion.

The Church was designed by Irish born architect, Richard Joseph Dennehy, also responsible for the present Catholic Education Office in Leederville.

Fr Bianchini says that, despite the steep challenge of raising the funds, the conservation of the church is essential for its ongoing use and for future generations.

“Historically and culturally, Sacred Heart is a spiritual centre. This is evident in the people who have been here, moved on but still wish to be associated with the parish.”

Donations to the Sacred Heart Parish heritage fund can be made by calling 9328 3433 or emailing highgate@perthcatholic.org.au

Society and parishes prepare to help those who have little.

■ By Robert Hiini

THE Society of St Vincent de Paul and local Catholic parish Outreach groups are both preparing to make Christ present by helping the needy this Christmas.

The Society kicked off its 2008 Christmas Appeal on 27 November at Burswood Park at an event attended by schools, corporate volunteers, volunteers and Community Services Minister Robyn McSweeny MLC.

The Mercedes College Choir performed carols while students from St Joseph’s Primary in Queens Park performed a nativity play.

The Society needs to raise $600,000 to ensure that the 2500plus individual calls it receives every month asking for emergency welfare assistance in the form of food, clothing, help with utility bills and bedding get answered - not just at Christmas but throughout the

year. “We’re seeing families who are struggling to pay rent, some have lost their jobs and others are just feeling the pressures that the busy and expensive Christmas period can bring and with the economy on the down turn, we expect things are only going to get tougher for the families we assist,” spokesperson Lucinda Ardagh said.

“This Appeal helps to fund the Society’s West Australian support services programs well into next year, so the funds raised are vital to ensure we are in a situation to be able to respond to every genuine call for help we receive over the next six months.”

The charity is encouraging the community to make a financial donation or alternatively, food vouchers, toys and readymade food hampers are more than welcome.

Catholic parish Outreach associations are also providing festive cheer, practical help and emotional support to people in the lead up to Christmas.

Sacred Heart Parish in Mundaring held their annual Christmas morning tea on Friday November 28 in their hall, inviting

residents of a local nursing home as well as parishioners.

Students from La Salle College prepared the food and pre-primary students from Sacred Heart School gave a concert while their Year Six colleagues served food and tea.

Local coordinator, Annette Dawe, said Sacred Heart Care provides assisance to those in need throughout the year, visiting people’s homes, distributing emergency food and arranging transport for medical appointments.

In metropolitan Perth, 25 parishes have similar parishionerdriven Outreach organisations that provide a range of services to people in their local areas.

In the parish of Sts John and Paul, Willetton, children from Orana Catholic Primary’s after school catechesis program have been collecting Christmas presents for every resident of two nursing homes in the area.

The children’s catechists will deliver the presents that the children have donated and wrapped and the childrens’ personal cards of Christmas well wishes in the coming week.

I’m John Hughes, WA’s most trusted car dealer

Is it true that when people come to do business with me, they will be treated with courtesy, sincerity, professionalism and efficiency?

Is it true that “I want your business and I’m prepared to pay for it” and “I stand behind every car I sell”.

Is it true that I have over 40 technicians who are dedicated to getting my used cars in first class condition before sale?

Is it true that most of my sales are not from direct advertising but personal recommendation, repeat business and reputation?

Is it true I have my own finance company to assist good people with poor credit to buy cars from me?

Is it true I sell over 1,300 vehicles every month in Victoria Park and that is the biggest number from any one location in Australia?

Is it true that I have a warehouse selling cars under $10,000 and that I offer a full money back guarantee within one week?

Happy: Highgate Parish Priest Fr Peter Bianchini is looking forward to reversing the ravages of time through the conservation of Highgate’s parish church.

PHOTO: ROBERT HIINI

Wise, wise, wise: Children from St Joseph’s Primary School in Queens Park performed a nativity play to help launch the St Vincent De Paul Society’s annual Christmas appeal.

PHOTO: SOCIETY OF ST VINCENT DE PAUL

Light: One of Sacred Heart’s stained glass windows.

PHOTO: SACRED HEART PARISH

Children are natural believers: expert

Academics do not all fall into one camp when it comes to the creation-evolution debate. Justin Barrett, a senior researcher at the University of Oxford’s Centre for Anthropology and Mind, claims that young people have a predisposition to believe in a supreme being because they assume that everything in the world was created with a purpose.

“The preponderance of scientific evidence for the past 10 years or so has shown that a lot more seems to be built into the natural development of children’s minds than we once thought, including a predisposition to see the natural world as designed and purposeful and that some kind of intelligent being is behind that purpose,” he says. “If we threw a handful on an island and they raised themselves I think they would believe in God.”

In one study, six and seven-year-olds who were asked why the first bird existed replied “to make nice music” and “because it makes the world look nice”. Dr Barrett said there is evidence that even by the age of four, children understand that although some objects are made by humans, the natural world is different. He added that this means children are more likely to believe in creationism rather than evolution, despite what they may be told by parents or teachers.

Divorcing Italian couple charged with making their son suffer

A divorcing Italian couple who argued acrimoniously in front of their 12-year-old child and fought for his affection face prosecution for causing him psychological suffering. The charge, which carries a prison sentence of up to five years, was brought after a health visitor reported that the child was disturbed. Legal experts think there is no precedent for the case in Britain or Europe.

The prosecution reported that the mother and father blamed each other for “shortcomings and educational errors in bringing up the child”, with each parent trying to “discredit, devalue and undermine the other” in front of him and “project their emotions onto him, above all anger”.

This caused the child to become anxious and depressed, unable to concentrate or do his schoolwork, confused him and instilled in him “the conviction that his parents hated each other”. Both parents persisted in arguing in front of the child even though he told them it was “making him feel ill”. They had “manipulated” the child in an attempt to make him decide between them as part of their divorce battle.

A Milan judge will decide in December whether to go ahead with the trial. If it does go ahead, it could have implications for countless other cases. The case is a sign of growing social alarm over the effects of divorce on children.

Miller looks US-bound

A car accident has failed to deter a young Perth man from doing missionary work in the US.

■ By Robert Hiini

IN a time of financial crisis when most are keeping their money close to their belts, people are still willing to invest in agents of hope if Miller Lokanata’s recent experience is anything to go by.

In the past few weeks Mr Lokanata has received the prayers and financial contributions of scores of Catholics throughout Perth who became aware of his predicament.

Working towards the end of his time as Perth World Youth Day’s Media Officer, he was accepted into a missionary role with Lifeteen in Arizona – the largest and most successful Catholic youth ministry organisation in the western world – when disaster struck.

Needing $10,000 for flights, food and accommodation costs for the year long period of training and mission, Mr Lokanata’s car was written off in an early October accident.

He has been planning on selling it to fund his mission.

With no insurance payout forthcoming, Mr Lokanata thought his dream of taking up the once-in-alifetime opportunity to train and work at the frontier of ministry in digital media had come to an end.

He decided to send an email to his many friends and contacts asking people to pray for him and to consider investing in him.

So far, he has received $5,300 in three weeks from young adult Catholics throughout Perth, with amounts given ranging between $20-$1000.

Mr Lokanata says that he doesn’t want donations but instead for people to come on mission with him, but he feels a healthy sense of accountability for the funds he has received so far.

He thinks that God wanted him to invite people on mission too, saying the amount he received from the wrecker who took his car was, to the dollar, the same amount he still had owing on it.

“If I hadn’t lost my car I’d just be going by myself so it’s a massive blessing in a sense,” Mr Lokanata said.

One person who gave $300 said she felt God calling her to share her wealth and had been asking Jesus who she should give her money to 15 minutes before receiving Mr Lokanata’s email.

Having crossed the halfway mark, Mr Lokanata is scheduled to fly to Arizona on 30 December but still has a long way to go before he has the money he needs.

In 2009 he will be working with teens directly, helping to run camps, Lifeteen’s weekly “Life Nights” in parishes as well as undertaking a stringent program of prayer and the sacraments within the Lifeteen missionary community.

He will join six other young missionaries, five of whom are from

California and one from England, all aged between 22 and 24 years old.

Mr Lokanata has set up a website that he will update frequently to let all of his fellow missionariesin-spirit back in Perth know what he has been up to, in Jesus name.

He is obviously overwhelmed by people’s kindness and their willingness to invest in him and his mission in these economically troubled times. “I am really thankful to God and to all who are praying for me and those who have invested in me,” he said.

“People have been really generous. That’s how we are created.”

For more information about Miller Lokanata’s mission visit www.millerlo.co.cc . Donations can be made online or by calling 0413 289 040.

Miller Lokanata

Breakfast gets HIV ‘frontline’ report

‘Our workers show others we’re not afraid of visiting those with HIV/AIDS,’ visiting priest tells Caritas breakfast.

■ By Robert Hiini

CARITAS Australia marked World Aids Day here in Perth with a breakfast attended by 60 guests and featuring AIDS ministry veteran, Fr Jim Noonan of the Maryknoll Catholic Mission Movement in the US.

Co-sponsored by St John of God Health, the breakfast took place on Wednesday 26 November in the week leading up to the official day on 1 December.

Fr Noonan has spent many years caring for children and families with HIV and AIDS in Cambodia – a country where 13,000 AIDS cases are diagnosed every year.

The Cambodian HIV/AIDS epidemic remains the largest in Asia, with infection rates among adults hovering around 1 per cent of the population.

The number of people affected as a proportion of the population is ten times that of Australia.

He spoke about the challenges and successes of Bridges of Hope and Little Sprouts, two-life enhancing programs dedicated to caring for adults and children living with HIV/AIDS.

The Little Sprouts program offers much needed support to ensure children living with HIV/AIDS have access to clinical consultations, schools and proper nutrition.

Little Sprouts also tries to ensure healthy foster care arrangements and that as far as possible, children remain with families and communities.

Fr Noonan says that Australians and Caritas Australia “have been very faithful contributors” to Cambodia since the time of the Vietnam War.

He says that Caritas Australia made it possible for Maryknoll to setup in Cambodia, helping them to get their first temporary visas back in 1989.

He says that another central part of their work is to build HIV/AIDS awareness, dis-

pelling myths about the disease and helping to break down associated stigma – a service that is much in demand from health centres across the country.

“We have workers who visit sick people once a month and their neighbours see that we are not afraid of people suffering from this disease and they start to believe the truth that AIDS can only be transferred through blood,” Fr Noonan said.

Fr Noonan says that all countries and organisations need to stay vigilant in educating the local populace about HIV/AIDS and its prevention.

“If we face the problem and show people the way to make the situation more healthy then you’re going to be giving life to people who would otherwise be caught up in this vicious cycle.”

Lift-off winds up gifted evening

THE achievements of exceptional students at Lumen Christi College in Gosnells were celebrated on November 13 at the college’s annual Talented and Gifted Student (TAGS) Evening.

Over 250 people listened as TAGS coordinator, Mel Fiahlo, detailed the program undertaken this year by gifted and talented students, as identified by their teachers, in years eight, nine and ten.

Mr Fiahlo said that a significant part of the program was the research students undertook into reducing our carbon footprint and the catastrophic effects of global warming. Students looked at the development of sustainable housing, the efficient use of

renewable resources and the significance of mapping the human genome in the study of genetics.

Two year 10 students, Chris Walzcak and Brayden Smith, reported on their ongoing time spent at Western Australian universities as part of the program.

Chris is working at the University of Western Australia (UWA) on osteoporosis and Brayden is working on the C3 gene at Curtin University.

Other esteemed guests included Professor David Blair from UWA, founder of the Gravity Centre – an educational institute based in Gingin. The evening ended with aeronautics and some fun - the launching of rockets - outside the school library.

Willetton’s food festival proves a hit with crowds

Gathering shows what stewardship can achieve at parish level.

■ By Mark Reidy

THE delicious aromas of international cuisine drew over 2000 people to Sts John and Paul parish in Willetton on November 23. The Multicultural Food Festival has been a regular event since 1985 and is now one of the most popular events on the parish calendar.

A dedicated committee, under the guidance of Lilian Kee, began work on this year’s project in June and where delighted with the enthusiastic response of local parishioners, as well as the many who came from all over Perth, to sample the culinary delights of South Africa, Malaysia, Singapore, India, Italy and even the traditional Australian BBQ.

Parishioner Andre Sequeira, who assisted with food for the Indian stall, accredited the success of the evening to the parish’s

focus on the principles of Stewardship over the previous 12 months.

“We have learnt to be grateful for the time, talent and treasure that we have been gifted by God”, he said, adding that the application of these gifts was pivotal to the popularity of this year’s event.

Mr Sequeira said that the Food Festival was the culmination of the time given by the dedicated committee, the culinary talents of many parishioners who provided the smorgasbord of international dishes and desserts - as well as music and entertainment - the generosity of those who donated funds for supplies and raffle prizes, and the foundation of prayer that underpinned all these gifts.

Another parishioner commented that the festival was a wonderful opportunity to share and appreciate the truly multicultural aspects of the parish and at the same time have someone else cook you a delicious meal. Judging by the contented smiles and numerous take-away containers that people carried with them at the end of the evening, it is an event that many will be looking forward to in the future.

It’s like this: Brayden Smith reports at the Lumen Christi evening on his work on the C3 gene.

Anticipation: Parishioners and others line up to tase the culinary wizardry of Willetton parishioners whose creative cooking attracted an estimated 2000 people to their parish food festival.

Spreading the message: Fr James Noonan, a US Maryknoll missionary, speaks at the Caritas breakfast on 26 November about the work he and other Church workers carry out assisting those suffering from the marginalisation of HIV/AIDS in countries like Cambodia.

The power of a novena Pauline Smith reports on the popularity of the Novena to Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Singapore.

For some time we had been intrigued by snippets of reports we had been hearing about a novena to Our Lady, in Singapore. We were hearing how great numbers attended, and not only Catholics but other Christians, Muslims, Hindus from all walks of life.

It had even been suggested that senior political figures might be seen there before important meetings. Also we had heard of the number and variety of answers to prayers being proclaimed.

As fairly frequent visitors to Singapore our interest was aroused and we decided to see if we could find out more. We didn’t have to look far: our parish priest, Fr Aloysius Leong, also from Singapore, was very familiar with it. When we asked about the location of the church he said it was in Thomson Road.

This sounded familiar but we could not place it exactly and enquired as to the nearest railway station.

“Why, ‘Novena,’” he replied.

Then the penny dropped. We had often passed that station and thought what an odd name it was but until then had never thought of it as being connected to the traditional Catholic practice.

Recently, we were in Singapore again and set out to attend. We had been told just to follow the crowd up the hill, but we must have come out at the wrong exit. Trying to establish our position we approached a lady and asked her if she could direct us to the Novena Church.

She said she wasn’t a Catholic but could give us directions and then said that, as it was complicated from where we were, she would take us.

She proceeded to take us back to the station, through the concourse and out to the right street and pointed the way to the Church. We joined the crowd heading up the hill and were still early for the service.

The novena was to Our Lady of Perpetual Help, the same novena held here at the Redemptorist Monastery in North Perth.

The service, including a homily, lasted for just over thirty minutes. At the end, some came to the microphone to acknowledge blessings and answers to prayers. The last of these stuck in our minds. It was “thanksgiving to Our Blessed Lady for the healing of terminal cancer.”

Although we were early for the service the church was filling up when we arrived and was soon packed. The main church building had extensions on each side and these were also quickly filled to capacity.

People unable to find a seat overflowed out into the surrounding courtyard or stood in the aisles. The large car park was crammed to capacity and required marshals to manage it. At the conclusion of the service the crowd dispersed rapidly and as we walked down the hill crowds were already hurrying up the hill for the next session.

By happy coincidence, the next day, Sunday, the Singapore Catholic Newspaper Catholic News of September 28, 2008, had two pages dedicated to “Novena Church: a place of prayer, petitions, conversions and miracles” complete with photos. It reported the Saturday services are so popular that approximately 25,000 people, Catholic and non-Catholic, attend each Saturday. There are nine sessions in English and one in Mandarin.

These commence at 9am, with the last at 7pm with one hour off for lunch. The church receives 700 to 800 letters of petition or thanksgiving every week.

We came away refreshed and uplifted. Anyone witnessing it could not help but be impressed. The prayerful atmosphere evident there also seemed to go out with the people, as evidenced even by the lady who went out of her way to help us to find the church.

It is interesting to reflect that the same blessings are obviously available right here in Perth.

Monastery priests prayed

‘We won’t give up on those not in churches,’ vows Sandhurst Bishop at Youth meeting

Continued from page 1

The key areas identified under Support for Youth Ministry including the formation of a National Training Framework, a national website and national conditions of employment for Youth Ministry Workers. The young people also called for a new conversation on the nature of parishes and schools and their interrelationship.

A renewed focus on the support and promotion of Catholic identity also formed part of the blueprint, as well as the development of youth ministry traineeships.

The report from the NYLG suggested a National Day for Youth, incorporating many of the most popular World Youth Day elements. Other suggestions included a National Youth Ministry Conference and a Bi-Annual Youth Leaders’ Gathering.

Before drafting the blueprint, NYLG participants heard from Fr Tom Rosica who headed up Toronto’s WYD proceedings in 2002.Other speakers at the Gathering included Fr Michael Mason who outlined the findings of research into pilgrims’ experiences.

Young people also shared their experiences of WYD assessing the state of current youth ministry in Australia and, it is hoped in the devising of the blueprint, where it can go in the future.

Bishop Joseph Grech of Sandhurst, who, along with Bishop Eugene Hurley, spoke at the Gathering, described the event as “marvellous, just tremendous”.

“We shouldn’t give up on those not in the pews, not in our Catholic secondary schools and also those many young people who are pre-secondary,” the bishop said.

“We need to remember that we are preparing all our young people for all kinds of vocations, and also for eternity”.

After the gathering, Bishop Grech said the Bishops’ enthusiastic support of the blueprint was a reflection of their commitment to building on the fruits of World Youth Day.

“It is a sign of confidence in the young people of the Church and in the Holy Spirit. In hosting the National Youth Leaders Gathering we said we wanted to hear from our young people, to listen to their experiences of WYD and to learn from them

where they discern that the Spirit is leading youth ministry in this country,” he said. “This blueprint will help to guide us as we move forward and we are confident that it will generate abundant blessings on

WA makes its voice heard at National gathering

THE Archdiocese of Perth sent 21 people to the National Youth Leaders Gathering, entitled ‘Moving forward with Jesus,’ held in Parramatta from 21-23 November.

The West Australian contingent included Bishop Gerard Holohan from Bunbury, Debra Sayce from the Catholic Education Office, Anita Parker from Catholic Youth Ministry, four indige-

the Church for very many years to come.” A National Youth Projects Co-ordinator will be employed by the ACBC in the near future to co-ordinate many of the recommendations in the blueprint.

nous representatives from Broome diocese, two volunteers from Geraldton, and young people from various Perth parishes as well as several representatives from Religious communities.

The WS voice was led by Vicky Burrows of the Young Christian Students who was also master of ceremonies at the conference.

Sr Maria Mori OMSC, an Ursuline sister and teacher at Emmanuel Catholic College, assisted in a hypothetical panel discussion on ‘How to spend $2million donated to Youth Ministry’ and Tung Nguyen from Morley Parish gave a presentation on what youth ministry looks like in an Australian parish.

- Anita Parker

Fun: Pilgrims enjoy the atmosphere at the Youth Festival at Tumbalong Park during World Youth Day, Sydney, in July this year.

PHOTO BY WORLD YOUTH DAY

Averted: Police and fire crew attend the fire that broke out at the Redemptorist Monastery on Thursday November 27. No-one was injured and the fire was extinguished shortly after. The building is one of the historic centres of Catholic life in Western Australia.

PHOTO: ROB HIINI

to avert fire

“We offer grateful thanks to the Lord and his mother for the preservation of the monastery,” says Priest.

■ By Peter Rosengren

AFTER fire broke out in an upstairs room, priests of the North Perth Redemptorist Monastery gathered outside their historic Vincent Street building to pray the Rosary for the safety of community members and for the protection of their historic building on Thursday morning, November 27.

The fact that the building had not burned down was due to God answering their prayers and the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Redemptorist priest Fr Joe Carroll CSsR, told The Record

Fr Carroll said six priests were in the building or close by when the fire was noticed at about 9.30am but all were quickly evacuated to outside the front of the building, where they began praying the Rosary for the safety of all and that the building would be preserved.

Fire authorities were on the scene shortly afterwards and blocked off surrounding streets, however the fire was quick-

ly brought under control and extinguished; only one room was damaged.

Fire crews declared the building safe by about 10.30am and Mass was able to be celebrated as usual by 11 that morning, Fr Carroll told The Record

He said the Redemptorists are now awaiting confirmation by an engineer that no structural damage had occurred.

“We offer grateful thanks to the Lord and his Mother for the preservation of the Monastery and that the fire didn’t spread,” he told the paper.

“We also want to thank all the people for their support and prayers.” Services would continue at the Monastery as usual, he told The Record

The North Perth Redemptorist Monastery has been a major focus of Catholic life in Perth since the early years of the Twentieth Century and is wellknown as a centre for retreats, the popular Novena to Our Lady of Perpetual Help (see story on Page 6) , the regular availability of the Sacrament of Reconciliation and its Redemptorist community.

Had the fire taken hold, the loss of the monastery - officially known as the Church of Saints Peter and Paul and which is one of the historic churches of Western Australia - would have been a major blow to the Church in Perth.

Bishop admits US Catholic hospitals sterilised patients

Continued from Page 1 tions, and possibly some abortions, took place in 23 Texas Catholic hospitals from 2000 to 2003.

Initially, officials from Trinity Mother Frances Hospital in Tyler and Christus St Michael’s Health System in Texarkana told the diocese they were in compliance with the US Catholic Church’s “Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Services,” he said in the statement.

“Sadly, subsequent investigation reveals that there had been a serious misinterpretation of the ERDs and that in fact many direct sterilisations had been done and continued to be done at the time of the article,” Bishop Corrada said.

“In response to their own investigation of the matter, Christus St Michael’s in Texarkana has discontinued all tubal ligations. Prior to the release of the report, Trinity Mother Frances had experienced a 50 percent reduction in the number of tubal ligations,” he said.

Last July the US national Catholic newspaper, Our Sunday Visitor, published an investigative story about the report released in June.

The report was made by a group of anonymous whistleblowers who compiled hospital diagnostic and procedure codes and concluded there had been 9,684 instances of purported unequivocal “sterilization for contraceptive purposes” from 2000 to 2003.

The group, which Our Sunday Visitor said it contacted through an intermediary, also cited data indicating 39 abortions were performed at Catholic hospitals. Group members noted, however, the data could be subject to interpretation because it could include morally accept-

able procedures such as surgery to remove a baby that had died in the mother’s uterus or emergency services for an abortion performed at another location.

Bishop Corrada’s statement did not mention if his investigation found evidence of abortions being performed at the hospitals and telephone messages left with officials at Trinity Mother Frances Hospital and Christus St Michael’s Health System by Catholic News Service on November 26 were not immediately answered.

John Haas, a moral theologian and president of the National Catholic Bioethics Centre in Philadelphia, told Our Sunday Visitor in July that while US bishops are “exercising far more ethical oversight of facilities than they have in the past,” there are widespread misunderstandings about the US bishops’ ethical directives for health care facilities.

Haas said the misunderstanding was not “ill will, but just a shocking lack of understanding of the ethical principles and their application.”

“The Church has approved the ‘Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Services’ as binding upon our Catholic hospitals to ensure the sacred dignity of each patient is protected and defended,” Bishop Corrada said.

“Many causes and complications have resulted in this unacceptable situation,” he said. “I continue to work directly with the Catholic hospitals in the Diocese of Tyler, and with my brother bishops in the state of Texas, to bring an end to immoral procedures and to put in place some method of ongoing accountability and transparency of monitoring both protocols and actual practices.”

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LETTERS

In place of an editorial this week we offer a fascinating personal account of conversion

My story: truth is the other face of freedom

■ By Luca Marcolivio

The high-profile baptism of Magdi Cristiano Allam at the Easter Vigil ceremony presided over last year by Benedict XVI has a story behind it. According to Allam himself, his conversion journey was possible because of great Christian witnesses.

One of the directors of the Milan daily newspaper Corriere della Sera, he spoke about his conversion and the experiences that led to it when he met with university students of Rome last week to tell the story of his path to Catholicism.

Starting from the Easter Vigil of 2008 - which Allam called the “most beautiful day of my life” - when he received baptism from Benedict XVI in St Peter’s Basilica, the Italian-Egyptian journalist spoke of his life journey and the reflections that brought him to embrace “a new life in Christ and a new spiritual itinerary.”

“This journey,” he recalled, “began apparently by chance, but in truth was providential. Since age four, I attended Italian Catholic schools in Egypt. I was first a student of the Comboni religious missionaries, and later, starting with fifth grade, of the Salesians.

Review missed the value of author Tolle

Some years ago a rock singer shot to the top of the charts with his musical version of the ‘Our Father’. There was outrage among Melbourne Catholics until Cardinal Pell’s spokesman defended it on the grounds that at least young Catholic students and others may have been learning the words of Jesus’s prayer for the first time!

Memories of Mass with Pius XII in Rome during World War II

Iread with great interest the The Record of Wednesday November 12, 2008, in particular the front-page account of the “Miracle of the Sun seen by Pius XII”. As a young soldier of nineteen or twenty, I was called on to serve in rotation in Algeria, (French North Africa) and later served in the War in Italy. We made fair progress, then came to a rapid halt after a hard winter with three major assaults at Monte Cassino and the Benedictine Monastery.

Because of their extremely strong defensive positions these battles were classed in military terms as comparable with “Stalingrad” in Russia, with a huge loss of life. However, it left the road to “Rome” and its capture inevitable.

We, the ‘Brits,’ progressed to the right of Rome, while the Americans were given the job of the capture of the city. When things cooled off a bit, six of us, being Roman Catholics, were given the chance to represent the company (4th British Engineers) to go back to Rome for a Thanksgiving Mass in Saint Peter’s with Pope Pius XII.

He spoke to us in very good English – the air was electric –he went through the years when the ‘Saturday Sport’ in London was carting Catholics to be ‘hung, drawn, and quartered, in a public display for their faith and he seemed visibly shaken personally.

Army Padres attached to different companies were also visibly affected and at the end of the Papal Mass I went up the circular concrete stairs like a rocket to look out across the Tiber.

Pope Pius XII did a fantastic job hiding the Jewish people in the Vatican despite the threats of reprisal to Catholics if caught by the Gestapo. An Irish monsignor whose name I can’t recollect did a major job at night time going out to collect them and to hide them in the Vatican; this was revealed after the war.

THE RECORD

“I thus received an education that transmitted to me healthy values and I appreciated the beauty, truth, goodness and rationality of the Christian faith,” in which “the person is not a means, but a starting point and an arriving point.”

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“Thanks to Christianity,” he said, “I understood that truth is the other side of liberty: They are an indissoluble paradox.

“The phrase, ‘The truth will make you free’ is a principle that you young people should always keep in mind, especially today when, scorning the truth, freedom is relinquished.”

“My conversion was possible thanks to the presence of great witnesses of faith, first of all, His Holiness Benedict XVI. One who is not convinced of his own faith is sometimes so because he has not found in it believable witnesses of this great gift. The second indissoluble paradox in Christianity is without a doubt that of faith and reason. This second element is capable of giving substance to our humanity, the sacredness of life, respect for human dignity and the freedom of religious choice.”

Allam affirmed that the Holy Father’s 2006 speech in Regensburg - which caused uproar within the Muslim community - was for him a reason to reflect.

“An event, before my conversion, made me think more than other events: the Pope’s discourse in Regensburg. On that occasion, citing the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus, he affirmed something that the Muslims themselves have never denied: that Islam spreads the faith above all with the sword.”

He added: “There is a greater and more subliminal danger than the terrorism of ‘cut-throats.’ It is the terrorism of the ‘cut-tongues,’ that is, the fear of affirming and divulging our faith and our civilisation, and it brings us to autocensorship and to deny our values, putting everything and the contrary to everything on the same plane: We think of the Shariah applied even in England.

“The one called ‘a great one,’ that is, to always give to the other what he wants, is exactly the opposite of the common good, perfectly indicated by Jesus: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ That evangelical precept confirms for us that we cannot want good for the rest if we do not first love ourselves. The same is true for our civilisation.

“Contrary to that principle is indifference and multiculturalism that, without any identity, pretends to give all kinds of rights to everyone. A result of multiculturalism was the imposition of social solidity and the development of ghettos and ethnic groups in perpetual conflict with indigenous populations.”

“This led me to consider the third great paradox of Christian civilisation: that regarding rules and values, a key for a possible ethical rescue of modern Europe. The old world, nevertheless, is a colossus of materiality with feet of clay. Materialism is a globalised phenomenon, unlike faith, which is not.”

Responding to a question about a possible compatibility between faith and reason in Islam, Allam contended that “unlike Christianity, the religion of God incarnate in man,” Islam is made concrete in a sacred text that, “being one with God, is not interpretable.”

“The very acts of Mohammed, documented by history, and which the Muslim faithful themselves do not deny, testify to massacres and exterminations perpetrated by the prophet. Therefore, the Quran is incompatible with fundamental human rights and non-negotiable values. In the past, I tried to make myself the spokesman of an Islam moderate in itself.”

Regarding interreligious dialogue between Christians and Muslims, Allam said that it is possible only “if we are authentically Christian in love, including toward Muslims. If we make dialogue relative, we will instigate our questioners to see us as infidels, and therefore as land to be conquered.”

The journalist emphasised for the students the importance of an education that goes back to transmitting “an ethical conception of life, with values and rules at the centre of everything.”

A negation of such principles, he contended, “is wild capitalism, which, paradoxically, has its maximum development in communist China.”

“We cannot conceive of the person in ‘business’ terms,” he concluded, “and we have to find rules of co-existence that are not founded on materialism. We should redefine our society based on being and not on having.”



Ina Craig accuses Eckhart Tolle, author of the best-selling ‘A new Earth’ of dispensing ‘junk food’ to the ‘baby-boomer generation’. It occurs to me that at least he may be keeping thousands of people alive; people who have lost sight of the fact that they do have an inner spiritual life - a soul. He is also giving his readers a message that the world’s religious have something of value to teach them in this modern age. For that we must thank him.

We Catholics cannot congratulate ourselves on our success in reaching the ‘lost sheep’ of our time with the great treasures of our tradition.

Craig Smith reminds us that, as Catholics, we possess the ‘gourmet food’ and that we have known all along about the importance of Eckhart Tolle’s message because evidently we have read and absorbed Fr De Caussade’s wonderful 18th century classic about living fully the Sacrament of the Present Moment. Or have we?

Until Eckhart Tolle began writing, how many Catholics knew or had read anything about Jean-Pierre de Caussade and his teaching on ‘Abandonment to

in brief...

Vatican confirms plans for Israel visit

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -

The Vatican has confirmed tentative plans for Pope Benedict XVI to visit the Holy Land in 2009. Israeli sources said the most likely time for the visit would be in May, with stops in Israel and the Palestinian territories. The Pope was invited to visit Israel by Israeli President Shimon Peres in 2007.

At that time, the Pope made it clear he hoped to make the trip, but Vatican diplomats said the timing would depend in large part on efforts to calm the simmering IsraeliPalestinian conflict. In recent months, Israeli and Vatican officials began making more concrete plans for a papal visit. The contacts were first reported on November 27 by the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz and were confirmed by the Israeli Embassy to the Holy

I could not resist writing and to say how proud I felt to be chosen (or given the chance being out of the “Line of Battle” as a “Roman Catholic” to join the group to represent the 4th Division British Infantry) on the day at a Papal Mass of thanksgiving for the capture of Rome with Pope Pius XII.

Denis Gorman Fremantle

Divine Providence’? I’ve found very few.

So let’s be grateful to Tolle for reminding us again. There are aspects of ‘A New Earth’, that Christians will find unpalatable. However Craig Rice’s contemptuous dismissal of the book is unfair.

Eckhart Tolle states that his main aim is to bring about a ‘shift in consciousness’. I think Jesus is saying something similar when he tells us to ‘Stay Awake’.

Let’s have a proper critique of the book by one of our local theologians. There are some excellent teachers at our own Catholic University.

Barbara Stapleton Barragup

See. Ha’aretz said the most likely time for the trip was the second week in May.

Zambian police drop charges

LUSAKA, Zambia (CNS)Police in Zambia have dropped charges against Father Frank Bwalya, station manager of the Catholic Church’s Radio Icengelo, who was arrested for allegedly issuing commentary intending to bring divisions between communities.

A Kitwe district police official announced on November 26 that the charges against Father Bwalya were dropped for security reasons. Hundreds demonstrated and destroyed property in Zambia’s largest mining town, after the priest was arrested and detained by police on November 12.

Father Bwalya was arrested after his Kitwe-based community radio station broadcast a postelection phone-in program criticising the disputed October 30 election won by President Rupiah Banda.

A regular feature to mark the Year of St Paul by an archdiocesan preist.

A miracle ‘backfires’

Acripple from birth listened intently to Paul preaching. He caught Paul’s eye. Paul perceived faith to be cured so commanded the man to get up. The bloke stood and walked for the first time in his life. The crowd went wild.

They shouted out that Paul and Barnabas were gods disguised as men. Zeus and Hermes had come down to visit them. The pagan priests brought decorated cattle for sacrifices to Paul and Barnabas.

Paul and Barnabas were furious. They rushed into the crowd insisting they were humans, tearing their clothes in frustration.

They shouted that they came to bring good news to the opposite effect. Idols made by hands could not save people. But their appeals were almost futile.

Paul and Barnabas repeated that the true God of heaven, earth and the sea sends rain, gives life, gives food from earth and helps all to prosper.

They only just averted sacrifices being offered to them as gods. And why did people want to do that? Because Paul had cured a man crippled from birth in the name of Jesus Christ. The miracle had not backfired for the man born a cripple though.

Ref. Acts 14:8-18

NEXT TIME: A Riot

VISTA

The cold hearts of DIGITAL VOYEURS

The webcam suicide of an American teenager gives the lie to the notion of an “internet community”.

Earlier this month, the world witnessed the internet version of a man standing on a ledge threatening to jump. Instead of snarling strangers yelling “jump!”, digital voyeurs tapped away on their keyboards as they watched the life drain out of 19-year-old Abraham Biggs.

On November 19 at about 3am, Biggs (aka feels-like-ecstasy), began his web cast on Justin.tv with an announcement that he had overdosed on drugs. He also posted a suicide note. As this modern tragedy progressed, the chorus debated whether he had taken enough pills or whether he was faking. Others

challenged Biggs to finish the job. A few tried to talk him out of it. Throughout, there were the laugh messages - LOL and ha-hah-ha.

At 11am, a few noticed that Biggs was motionless. Eventually, one viewer contacted the moderator to get Biggs’ contact information. Twelve hours after Biggs’ declaration of death, the curtain came down. Police broke down the locked door of the Florida apartment and found the young man dead.

Biggs is not the first to commit suicide on a webcam. Last year a British man hanged himself on camera. His viewers also taunted and laughed at him until they noticed that he was turning blue.

Rosalind Biggs, Abraham’s sister, described her brother as an outgoing college student who loved taking his nieces to Chuck E. Cheese. Biggs also had a darker side, a history of bipolar disorder. Still, his sister says that her brother’s death

Internet addiction carries a “Moral Cost”

Cites online suicide as one example

ARLINGTON, Virginia, (Zenit.org).-

The Internet suicide of a Florida teen witnessed by an online audience is an example of the “enormous moral cost” of screen addiction, says philosophy professor Roger Scruton.

Scruton, a research professor for the Institute for the Psychological Sciences, said this in response to the actions of those who watched 19-year-old Abraham Biggs,

was sudden and a shock.

Biggs’ family was understandably angry with his callous chat room acquaintances. “It didn’t have to be,” she lamented.

His father was “appalled.”

Abraham Biggs Sr. chastised his son’s viewers: “It’s a person’s life that we’re talking about. And as a human being, you don’t watch someone in trouble and sit back and just watch.” The death of his child could have been prevented. A quicker response might have saved his life.

The father’s anger may be easily dismissed because there is no clear legal accountability. Nonetheless, he is correct about the moral responsibility. Abraham Biggs Sr is tortured by the idea that his son’s webcast was a cry for help. He is further tortured by the lack of response.

Understandable, but less forgivable, has been the reaction of journalists and their experts. Much of the media coverage has been focused on finding a scandal. The obvious scandal is the question of liability. Can chat rooms be sued?

Lawyers say it’s a stretch.

The echo chamber of the press and cultural experts assure us that this is basically kids being kids. Associated Press summed up the event as an “extreme example of young people’s penchant for sharing intimate details about themselves over the internet”.

A University of Ohio assistant professor of popular culture told

Jr, overdose on drugs and die last week on the live video Web site Justin.tv.

Users notified the police only when it was clear that the Florida teenager was no longer breathing. It has not been revealed how many watched him die, but more than 100 people were still watching the video when police arrived and turned the camera off.

Abraham Biggs Sr, the teen’s father, told the Associated Press that he was appalled by the actions of those who watched his son die: “As a human being, you don’t watch someone in trouble and sit back and just watch.”

Scruton explained in a statement sent out by the Institute of Psychological Sciences that there is a natural lure to watch others suffer: “Human beings have a desire to witness suffering, by way of celebrating their

AP that the public suicide was not shocking given the way teenagers chronicle every facet of their lives on sites like Facebook and MySpace.

When did suicide become a banality in our culture?

Furthermore, how could the revelation of a suicidal threat be placed in the same category as some schoolgirl’s latest crush?

Even stranger is the notion that people who remain anonymous and talk about themselves are being intimate or sharing secrets. How intimate was Biggs with the public? He never even revealed his name and address.

If Biggs is just another exhibitionistic teen, then what can be said about the spectators of this 12-hour death watch? Some may not have been certain that he was dying. They may have thought that he was joking. Yet the audience watched because in the dark recesses of their minds, they were titillated by the idea that he might actually be dying. Are young people naturally this callous or does the internet harden their hearts?

Yes to both questions.

own temporary freedom from it - hence the appeal of the Roman games and public executions.”

“But they also feel guilty when they do this, since they know that they are being tempted,” he continued. “They are being prompted to want what they see: to want another’s suffering, even another’s death, simply to gratify their own sadistic desires.

“Hence, in normal circumstances, shame will prevent them from going far in this direction, and turn their thoughts toward another goal - toward helping the other, rather than relishing his pain.”

Anonymity The professor said the Internet, however, “abolishes shame in this context as in so many others. Viewing the world from behind a screen, the Internet addict can relish every kind of narcissistic, sadistic and hateful feeling without cost.

Consider the popularity of fight videos on YouTube. In a recent interview British philosopher, Roger Scruton predicts that “the result of the internet will be a widespread hardening of the human heart, and a replacement of true relationships between people with their cyber-substitutes.”

The Florida teen’s suicide shows the deficiency in these cybersubstitutes. One may find mutual interests on the internet and a semblance of friendship. Can a friendship grow in chat room where the occupants buzz by like bees going from flower to flower? As with many people seeking companionship on the web, Biggs may have bought the line that chat rooms are communities. True communities are neighbours helping neighbours; not neighbours watching neighbours for amusement.

Like the man standing on the ledge, Abraham Biggs may have been hoping for a rescue, hoping for someone standing on the street with a safety net. Unfortunately, on the web, there is no net.

Theron Bowers MD is a Texas psychiatrist.

“Nobody sees him; nobody knows what he is doing; nobody judges - so he believes.”

Referring to the audience watching Briggs’ suicide, he said “the fascinated spectators could enjoy a cost-free sadistic spree, and - when the dreadful event was over - turn their vicarious lives in another direction, as though nothing had happened.”

“This is but one instance of the enormous moral cost of screen addiction,” Scruton said. “As we shall increasingly see, the result of the Internet will be a widespread hardening of the human heart, and a replacement of true relationships between people with their cyber-substitutes.

“Only concerted action now can control this menace; and it is important that all decent people turn their attention to the question of how it might be done.”

“app alled.” chastised his life boutAnd as

Is this Is the REAL Ho the REAL Hoy

Though no one knows if Valencia’s grail is the true Last Supper chalice, a group of experts says it has tremendous cultural value due to its impact on history and literature.

The tale of the Grail is so tantalising that members of an international congress “Valencia, City of the Holy Grail,” focused on the chalice traditionally associated with the institution of the Eucharist in early November.

The congress was organised by the Archdiocese of Valencia, the cathedral’s metropolitan chapter, the Catholic University of Valencia, the Spanish Centre for Sindonology, the Royal Brotherhood, and the Holy Chalice Confraternity.

Experts from several countries attended and gave presentations on the ways in which this relic has marked history and literature since its move from Rome to Spain by Lawrence the Martyr in the year 258, as held by tradition.

The body of existing data points to the Valencia grail as the most probable authentic chalice of Christ.

Unique Antonio Beltrán, professor of archaeology at the University of Zaragoza, noted that the cup is formed by a deep red agate, called “Oriental carnelian,” with streaks in the form of flames.

By its material he asserts that it must come from a workshop in Palestine, Syria or Egypt between the fourth century BC and the first century AD. The subsequent additions, such as the precious stones and the frame, date from the 13th or 14th century.

Jorge Manuel Rodríguez, president of the Spanish Centre for Sindonology, explained that although films have always shown “a wooden Holy Grail, […] that material did not comply with the norms of purification of the Jews.”

Another element discussed by the scholars was the journey of the chalice from Rome to Valencia. The experts affirmed that if the chalice arrived in Rome from Jerusalem, it was most likely taken by the Apostle Peter himself.

Jaime Sancho, president of the liturgy commission of the Archdiocese of Valencia, presented a datum that supports the theory that the first popes celebrated the Eucharist with the same chalice that Jesus used.

Sancho explained that in the Roman Canon, which dates back to the second century, it says literally at the moment of consecration “and, taking this glorious chalice in his holy and venerable hands,” instead of “the chalice.”

This and other proofs contributed by Sancho strongly imply the existence in Rome of a unique chalice.

This was affirmed by José Vicente

Martínez, professor of ancient history at the University of Valencia, and American researcher Janice Bennet, doctor in Spanish literature.

Both spoke about Pope Sixtus II, martyred in Rome during Valerian’s persecution, entrusting the Holy Grail to Deacon Lawrence to protect it from the emperor.

A manuscript by St Donatus told of this event, said Bennet, as well as the fact that Lawrence was a native of Valencia, not Huesca, as traditionally believed.

Several presenters gave historical proofs of the presence of the chalice in Spain over many centuries, from the study of various annals and paintings.

German anthropologist Michael Hesemann stated that “as opposed to what many think, the grail legends did not begin with the Anglo-Saxon accounts of King Arthur, but in the rooted tradition that says that the chalice of the Last Supper was already in Spain in the Middle Ages.”

The researchers were practically unanimous in supporting research on the chalice with modern scientific techniques to determine its origin, though they emphasised that its religious value does not depend on the resulting discoveries.

Miguel Navarro, doctor in church history from Rome’s Gregorian University, stated that the chalice “is not a magical object, but consecrated by Jesus’ use of it and by the faith that perceives it as such, which has great religious value, regardless of the fact that it cannot be proved with absolute scientific certainty that it is the Lord’s chalice.”

Relics, he added, are not “simple keepsakes, but something more valuable: palpable evidence of the reality of the human or historical event on which our faith is based, as salvation takes place in history, in the flesh.”

Moreover, Father Manuel Carreira, doctor of physical sciences, added that science and faith “are not opposed.” However, he specified that “although science can give an explanation of all this, it cannot demonstrate anything literally about what happens in the Eucharist.”

Navarro added that the chalice “insofar as relic, is beyond and above science, because its primordial significance belongs to the realm of faith, which does not mean that we approach it in an anti-scientific or fundamentalist way.” Rather, “we have the obligation to study it scientifically in its materiality.”

Benedict XVI used the chalice during the Mass with which he concluded the World Meeting of Families in Valencia in July, 2006. Pope John Paul II also used it in his visit to the city.

Pope follows case of kidnapped sisters in Kenya from afar, but close in prayer

VATICAN CITY, - Benedict XVI is following the progress of investigations into the kidnapping of two Italian nuns in Kenya.

Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, director of the Vatican press office, affirmed today that the Pope is “close in prayer” to those suffering from the November 10 kidnapping of Sisters Caterina Giraudo and Maria Teresa Oliviero, 67 and 61, of the Italian Contemplative Missionary Movement of Father de Foucauld.

“More than a fortnight has passed since the two Italian nuns […] were abducted in Kenya, where they are well known for their generous dedication to the very poor,” Father Lombardi’s message stated. He said the Holy Father is following the situation with concern and remains

“close in prayer to the suffering, not only of the two kidnapped nuns, but also to that of their families and of the Contemplative Missionary Movement of Father de Foucauld, of which they are members.”

“The hope,” the spokesman affirmed, “is that this painful and gravely unjust situation, of which entirely innocent and praiseworthy people are victims, may be resolved as soon as possible.”

The nuns were abducted in northeast Kenya, close to the Somalia border.

Initial investigations were trying to determine if the kidnappers were local Kenyans or from across the border.

ZENIT

Don’t let Wi-Fi leave your

Vatican Aide Encourages Setting Aside Times of Silence

VATICAN CITY - In the age of cell phones and the Internet, the Holy See’s spokesman warns that your prayer life could be in danger.

Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, director of the Vatican press office, made these remarks on the most recent episode of the weekly Vatican Television program “Octavia Dies.”

“There is an interior and spiritual dimension of life that must be guarded and nourished. If it is not, it can become barren to the point of drying up and, indeed, dying” the Jesuit priest said. “Reflection, meditation, contemplation are as necessary as breathing. Time for

silence - external but above and an indispensable condit Father Lombardi offered the occasion of “Pro Orantib women religious who dedic contemplation and prayer.

“In the age of the cell phon ably more difficult than befo nourish the interior dimensi difficult but necessary.

“For believers, in this dim with God is developed, life important than physical life fear those who can kill the b can destroy our soul. Wha person, is true for the comm humanity,” the spokesman c

 ZENIT Grail: Pope Benedict XVI celebrates Mass at the Fifth World Meeting of Families in Valencia, Spain, in 2006. Th Supper. The cup, known as the Holy Grail, has been kept in the cathedral in Valencia since 1437.

Sanctuary: The cup, believed by many to be the real Holy Grail, sits in its sanctuary in the cathedral of Valen

oly Grail? Grail?

prayer life dry

all internal - are a premise ion for it.”

these reflections Friday on bus” Day, a day for men and cate themselves to a life of

ne and the internet it is probfore to protect silence and to ion of life,” he observed. “It is mension of prayer dialogue in the spirit, which is more e itself. Jesus told us not to body as much as the one who at is true for the individual munity of the Church, true for ontinued. “If for each one of

us it is essential to know how to preserve dialogue with God in daily life, for the Church it is essential to have the sign and reality of life dedicated to contemplation and prayer, and for humanity it is essential to know there are beacons of light, sages and masters of the spirit.”

Without attentiveness to and cultivation of the spiritual life “you will lose your soul,” added Father Lombardi. “And today this is a very grave threat, and it is the most irreparable misfortune.”  ZENIT

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New Age, money, witchcraft, sex... nothing satisfied ABC’s collapse An unexpected Christmas gift?

Eddie Russell

Prayer is not a technique, but a personal relationship as Jesus said to call God, “Father.”

It is like talking to a friend about what is going on. I speak, listen and contemplate. There are times when I know I need to pray but don’t know how. St Paul tells us that’s when the Holy Spirit prays in us. Sometimes I pray in tongues, sometimes silently, and other times it is an awareness of God’s presence.

Why I became Catholic

with Debbie Warrier

I pray with my brethren at Flame Ministries International. We have a public praise meeting where we also pray for healing.

I have seen positive results, if not immediately, certainly over time. When praying for others, we need the same attitude as God towards those we pray for. Our human love can also make a difference to someone’s healing.

The Holy Spirit is the source of prayer and how God reveals Himself to us. Through the Holy Spirit, He makes His will known. The Holy Spirit gives us a sense of peace in the midst of life’s storms and faith is our source of hope. Even if things don’t look good, you know it’s going to be ok.

In 2002, I was invited through Cardinal Norberto Carrera to preach around Mexico. I had a profound personal encounter with Mary in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe. It struck me that Mary was the ultimate evangelist because she was the only one who had successfully converted Mexico. I consecrated my mission to her and developed a strong devotion.

The life of Pope John Paul II also inspires me. He had what I would consider to be authentic redemptive suffering. Pope John Paul II suffered deeply. Throughout that he was a public witness for the value of life over the culture of death. His suffering had meaning and he did it for the salvation of others.

I have had a personal experience of salvation. Before my conversion to Catholicism, I sought selffulfillment from such things as: financial success, New Ageism, witchcraft, sex, alcohol, drugs and astrology. All this came to an abrupt end one morning. Arriving home from the clubs around 6am, my body collapsed and I lay paralyzed on the lawn. My mind was alert and I knew death was present.

I felt as if my life was seeping into a dark pit that I believed was hell.

In desperation my soul cried out for help. Not to the false gods I had placed my trust in until then, but to the one true God of salvation.

This horrendous agony continued for some time, and then suddenly changed.

At that moment I was immersed in a Love so powerful it is impossible to describe. The pit closed and I knew God was real. I awoke some hours later and normality resumed.

In the ensuing months I read the Bible until my conversion was complete.

Through the Gospel of Matthew and other biblical passages I realised Jesus was really alive! I developed a deep desire for the Eucharist as a result. The writings of Thomas A Kempis, Aquinas, St John of the Cross, St Theresa of Avila, St Francis, St Augustine and the Desert Fathers became my first exposure to Catholic spirituality.

Saying, “Yes” to God saved me. Faith is a miracle in itself.

debwarrier@hotmail.com

with Catherine Parish

Sitting watching my children perform in their school band and choir at the big musical concert our school runs each year (or rather, standing in the canteen getting the after-concert supper ready, if we are being really precise about it) it crossed my mind that the collapse of the ABC Learning Centre group might be a crisis for mums and dads, but it might be a blessing in disguise for some children.

Now, I am not being judgemental or condemnatory here, and I fully realise that there are many single parents out there bravely struggling along supporting their families, and that paid childcare is their only option. I know there are many families that need both parents to work just to make ends meet.

But when I see the ‘representative’ case in The Australian, a nurse working four days a week, with a film producer partner, and two children in care, one of them four months old, I have to ask – is this the best thing for those children?

There is a growing body of solid evidence that one-on-one daily care from one constant carer is the best beginning for children, at least until they are two years old and, ideally, until they are four or five years old.

Boys especially need the security of this ideal environment for optimal development. With the best will in the world, there is no child care centre able to provide that level of care; and if there were, most people would balk at the astronomical cost of it.

Perhaps having to stay home after Christmas, even for a little while, with their children because there is no other option for their care, might work to the advantage of both children and parents. Having to seriously reconsider the structure of their lives, at least temporarily, might lead some couples to realise that their child’s childhood is quickly passing, and they are missing it.

They might realise that they are missing getting to know their children intimately, learning to read the little signals that kids use to convey messages without necessarily speaking, establishing that trusting and loving relationship that comes into its own when your children reach adolescence.

Missing establishing relationships in the community in which they live, with neighbours and with families of their children’s schoolfellows, with the school itself.

These links are vital to the well-being and safety of children as they get older and begin to go out independently. The list of useful and interesting information I have discovered through the local grapevine is quite a long one!

Some couples might find that the cost of the second car, the child care, the convenience meals, the work clothes and shoes, the union dues, the work outings, professional registration fees, that they no longer have to pay for, might be a worthwhile trade for more time with their children.

And it isn’t only a good thing for the children’s sake. The truest and most memorable joys of parenthood are not to be found in bytes of so-called quality time snatched in the evening and at week-ends between other commitments. As any parent could tell you, they come to you unexpectedly – but you have to be there to catch them.

A time to rise above the mess...

‘Superlative Advent’

“For the just man falls seven times and rises again, but the wicked stumble to ruin.” – (Proverbs 24:16)

The Church is wise in her ways, and rich in subtlety. She knows how to deal with sloppy, lazy men. Catholic life is ordered, and ordered for a purpose: for flourishing. It is good to be a Catholic.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the provisions made, and the spurs provided, in the Church’s calendar. At various stages of the year, Catholics are called from everyday life - from work, from anxiety, from selfish concerns –and directed back towards God. We are asked to refocus our attention on Him, and to re-dedicate ourselves to His service. Advent is such a time.

Like Lent, Advent is therefore a season of waiting. We wait for Christ. We wait for Christmas. We look forward, with the whole Church and the people of God, to the Mass of Christmas night. We anticipate salvation, and prepare to welcome the Incarnate One.

To ensure we are worthy of this Christmas miracle we also discipline ourselves. We pray more. We might fast. We turn our minds to giving, and attempt to harmonise with our families.

What a refreshing change from the modern, secular world. Just when we might have been getting smug, just when we were starting to believe the siren call of self-worship, and arrogance – Catholics are forced to confront our failings.

For we acknowledge, in all of this, that we are not yet perfect.

Being Heard

By John Heard

We recognise that we are, indeed, nothing without Christ, and that absent the events of Christmas (and the events of Holy Week and Easter), Christianity would be empty words, and useless rituals.

Christians would be, in fact, the silliest people around. In our single-minded defence of a meaningless creed, and our hollow ideals, we might even be obviously corrupt.

Advent is, for these reasons then, a time of great hope. Christmas is one of those times when a Christian gets his reason for being. In Advent, we are taught again how to live, what to think, and how to pray.

The Advent words of Isaiah capture the longing, the yearning spirit of this time. On the First Sunday he cries:

“Oh that you would tear the heavens apart and come down” - (Isaiah 63:1617).

How many times have we - same sex attracted men and women, worried parents, harried hierarchs, and so many others – how many times have we prayed that God might tear the sky, and step down into our lives?

When something goes wrong, we pray. When money is tight, we pray. And when our best efforts fall short –we turn to Him. We reach out, from the mess and

squalor of the world, for something higher.

Indeed, in preparing for Christmas, we reach out for the superlative. We reach out to embrace God, who St Anselm taught is that than which nothing greater can be conceived. We do so because we are a people of hope. We affirm that at Christmas time Almighty God became one of us, so that we might become more like Him.

In this time, then, and in light of that mystery, Catholics walk with the Church. Whole nations, entire cultures, small shops, and supermarkets, major city centres, and parish schools – all of these are transformed. At Christmas, more so than during Ordinary Time, we decorate our houses to welcome the season, and we prepare – by ritual, and custom – to honour our God.

In Advent, especially, we are given time to repair our ways, and to mend our hearts. If we have become proud, we embrace humility. If we have started down the path to sinfulness, we school ourselves in the virtues, and pray for the grace to be better men. We ask God to heal us, so that we might more perfectly welcome Him on Christmas morning.

Advent teaches us, at last, that if what we long for is good, true, and beautiful our waiting will not be in vain. It is a time to fix our lives, and to turn to more fruitful endeavours.

For we stand, at the end of it all, before the crib of an Infant. We worship the Christ Who brought angels, shepherds, stars, and kings to Bethlehem. We pray that He might bring peace to the world, and that He might bless our families.

John Heard is a Melbourne writer. johnnyheard@gmail.com

Student fees serve only cadres

In clear view

By Guy Crouchback

It is not surprising that the present Federal government is seeking to restore compulsory student amenities fees. It is a gradualist, back-door re-introduction of compulsory student unionism. This, on past experience, means literally hundreds of millions of dollars taken from students and given to the ALP and the left.

Innumerable ALP State and Federal politicians, including Kim Beazley and Julia Gillard, as well as various lesser apparachiks, received their first political training in compulsorily-funded student guilds. Gillard was the second woman to lead the far-left Australian Union of Students.

Catholics should be specifically concerned as Catholics and Christians as well as in their capacity as ordinary citizens.

There is good reason to suppose much of this money will be used for various political camapigns directly or indirectly against family values and for promoting secular/atheist/ nihilist and anti-Christian positions on abortion, prostitution and a host of other social issues.

Historically, student unions have functioned as cadre-generating factories for the left generally as well as major auxiliaries for political campaigns.

Unlike many political party branches they operate not only at elections but continually.

The left’s hold on compulsorilyfunded student unions is decades old. There were also associations with real grown-up terrorism, including support for the PLO when it was involved in hi-jacking.

Students who tried to resist the left’s control were forced to neglect their studies for the wearying, frequently sordid and sometimes dangerous business of student politicking. Peter Costello and ALP rightwing MHR Michael Danby were among those physically attacked.

Most students not committed to leftist politics as a career path put their studies and other activities first, tending to leave the left with permanent majorities in postions of power.

The DLP-aligned and anti-left Democratic Clubs have now faded away and will not be available in the future.

The National Union of Students, which in the 2004 election spent $255,307.00 on Leftist campaigns in marginal electorates, has said the money will be passed on to students for “student services.”

The experience of compulsory student fees has been that they pay for not only individual political campaigns but also for offices, printing, computers, telecommunications, vehicles, stationary and student newspapers - all major political sinews of war, plus various agitprop

cultural events. The situation could have been designed deliberately to prevent transparency and accountability.

Perhaps unintentionally revealing the true agenda, University of WA Vice-Chancellor Alan Robertson is reported to have said: “It’s good if young people are engaged in politics. Look at our current Parliament and the very high number of members [who] were involved in student politics from all sides.” This fatuous comment misrepresents the situation in several ways. (Since when was forcing students into political activity in the University’s charter?).

Apart from anything else it falsely suggests a kind of symmetry between activities from “all sides.” In fact those Parliamentarians on the Left previously engaged in student politics were overwelmingly occupied with building careers through student unions.

Those not on the left who were involved in student politics were overwhelmingly occupied in campaigning against compulsory student unionism.

The claim by National Party Senator Barnaby Joyce that he would support a compulsory fee but demand it not be used for political purposes shows, to put it charitably, naivete.

Experience has proved that it is impossible to distinguish between political and non-political uses of this money. Consider just the case of a compulsorily-financed student newspaper: how is that to be kept “non-political”? By appointing an official censor? Where could a dividing-line between the political and non-political be drawn?

Once its editor decides to promote anti-Christian material or, for example, pro-abortion or sexually licentious material, Catholic and other Christian students will have no choice but to fund it if they want to continue their university careers.

Must Jewish students fund propaganda openly or covertly, directly or indirectly, supporting Israel’s enemies and those dedicated to its annihilation?

And who thinks the various beneficiaries would take the slightest notice of Joyce’s “demand” once they have their hands on the cash-cow of

THIS IS THE MASS

Special Souvenir Edition World Youth Day 08

Foreword by George Cardinal Pell This

compulsory fees? The experience of voluntary fees under the Coalition has not shown a negative effect on the Universities’ raison d’etre - the imparting of education through lectures, laboratories, tutorials and libraries.

Nor do the vast majority of students want compulsory amenity fees back. For some reason they would like to continue to be able to spend their money as they choose.

The claim by Melbourne University vice-chancellor Glyn Davis that voluntary student unionism has cost that university about $5 million a year is good news for students and a vindication of voluntary fees.

Further, Robson admitted that with voluntary payments the WA University had “a very active guild,” indicating compulsory fees were not necessary if guilds supplied things students actually wanted.

They were only necessary to force students to pay for things they did not want.

The principle of “user pays” is as manifestly just as the principle of accountability, whether for political or non-political organisations.

In the last few years student societies, dependent on the voluntary contributions of members, have been run in a more open and accountable way: they have been supported by people with an interest in them being efficient and delivering services, just like real-world clubs and societies.

Australian universities today are not the Oxford of Brideshead Revisited and their students tend not to be languid young aristocrats with unlimited time and inclination to indulge in college activities.

Many students today are mature men and women with families, studying part-time and, in the present economic climate, working in grim earnest to improve their qualifications.

They have neither the time for, nor interest in, activities such as building taverns for subsidised drinking and hiring rock-bands, and there is no ethical reason why they should be forced to subsidise others’ drinking and head-banging, any more than any students should be forced to subsidise political or other causes they may find repugnant.

Evangelium

Vitae was clearly infallible

Q&A

By Fr John Flader

Abortion and the mother’s life.

I was recently surprised to read in a Catholic publication that abortion is never morally permitted except when the mother’s life is at real risk. Is this the case?

You are right in being surprised, since abortion is never morally acceptable, even when the mother’s life is at risk. But let me explain.

Pope John Paul II dealt with the issue of abortion at length in his Encyclical Evangelium vitae (“The Gospel of Life”) in 1995.

In view of the confusion and ambiguity in the minds of many as regards what an abortion is, the Pope defined it clearly: “Procured abortion is the deliberate and direct killing, by whatever means it is carried out, of a human being in the initial phase of his or her existence, extending from conception to birth.” (EV 58)

After summarising briefly the arguments from the natural law, Scripture, Tradition and the Magisterium of the Church, he stated, with the fullness of his papal authority and in no uncertain terms, the Church’s prohibition of abortion: “Therefore, by the authority which Christ conferred upon Peter and his Successors, in communion with the Bishops – who on various occasions have condemned abortion and who in the aforementioned consultation, albeit dispersed throughout the world, have shown unanimous agreement concerning this doctrine – I declare that direct abortion, that is, abortion willed as an end or as a means, always constitutes a grave moral disorder, since it is the deliberate killing of an innocent human being.” (EV 62)

It is clear by the terms in which this prohibition is expressed that it constitutes a definitive exercise of papal Magisterium, and is therefore infallible. (cf. J. Flader, Question Time, Connor Court 2008, n. 20)

Pope John Paul went on to reiterate that there can be no exceptions to this teaching: “No circumstance, no purpose, no law whatsoever can make licit an act which is intrinsically illicit, since it is contrary to the Law of God which is written in every human heart, knowable by reason itself, and proclaimed by the Church.” (EV 62)

life. Pope John Paul excluded abortion, “willed as an end or as a means”.

Here it would be a case of using abortion as a means to save the mother’s life, and this is clearly unacceptable.

And he said that “no circumstance, no purpose… whatsoever” can make abortion licit, even a circumstance or purpose as noble as saving the mother’s life.

It is simply an application of the well-known principle that one cannot do evil that good may come from it (cf. Rom 3:8). Direct abortion, being “intrinsically illicit”, is always an evil and hence cannot be carried out even for the best of reasons. In short, the mother cannot kill her unborn child in order to save her own life.

St Gianna Beretta Molla has much to teach us about this. An Italian paediatrician with three children, in September 1961 during the second month of another pregnancy she was diagnosed with a fibroma of the uterus.

She was given the options of an abortion, the removal of the womb with the baby inside, or removal only of the fibroma, which could involve future complications.

She chose the latter, pleading with the surgeon to do everything possible to save the life of the child she was carrying.

Fortunately this was achieved and seven months later, when she was about to give birth, she was once again ready to give up her own life to save her child. Again she pleaded with the doctors, “If you must decide between me and the child, do not hesitate: choose the child – I insist on it. Save him”.

On the morning of April 21, 1962, Gianna gave birth to a daughter, Gianna Emanuela. In spite of all the efforts to save both mother and child, a week later on the morning of April 28, amid great pain and repeated exclamations of “Jesus, I love you. Jesus, I love you”, the mother died. She was 39 years of age. St Gianna Beretta Molla was canonised by Pope John Paul II on 16 May 2004. She had lived out to the end the teaching of the inviolability of the life of the unborn child, offering to die herself rather than have her baby die.

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In view of this unequivocal teaching, it is clear that abortion can never be justified, even to save the mother’s

On one occasion she had said: “The doctor should not meddle. The right of the child is equal to the right of the mother’s life. The doctor can’t decide; it is a sin to kill in the womb.” director@caec.com.au

University of Sydney: Australia’s oldest university.

Bishop tells Pope of Islamist gang terror

Iraqi bishop says Christians shocked by their neighbours’ violence.

■

By Cindy Wooden

VATICAN CITY (CNS) - The Christians of Iraq were shocked when Muslims started trying to drive the Christians of Mosul out of their homes in early October, an Iraqi bishop told Vatican Radio after meeting Pope Benedict XVI.

Chaldean Auxiliary Bishop Shlemon Warduni of Baghdad met the Pope on November 26 at the end of the Pope’s weekly general audience.

The Pope told the bishop, “Iraq is in our hearts. We constantly remember the Christians, praying for them and for peace in the country.”

Bishop Warduni told Vatican Radio that between 700 and 800 of the 2,500 Christian families who had left Mosul in October had returned after the Iraqi government sent troops to the city to protect Christians.

“This whole thing made us very sad because we have lived together in peace for centuries,” the bishop said. “During all the wars, our churches and our homes were open to Muslims and to all others.”

Referring to the violence that claimed the lives of 13 Christians in October and led to the destruction of many homes, the bishop said, “It was a shock that Christians were attacked in such a diabolical way.”

Bishop Warduni said the United States, Europe and the United Nations did not do enough to get the Iraqi government to act immediately when Muslim gangs began going through the city, using megaphones to tell Christians to leave Mosul.

Now that Iraqi troops are patrolling Mosul, he said, “some are coming back, but many still do not have trust and are afraid they will be chased out again.”

in brief...

Without ethics, financial crisis could be much more severe, nuncio warns

VATICAN CITY (CNS) - A leading Vatican diplomat warned that the current financial crisis could become a catastrophe unless solutions are found that respect ethics and involve all levels of society. “It is necessary to recover some basic aspects of finances, such as the primacy of labor over capital, of human relationships over purely financial transactions, and of ethics over the sole criterion of efficiency,” Archbishop Celestino Migliore, the Vatican’s apostolic nuncio to the United Nations, told Vatican Radio November 28.

Church reconciles itself to man of faith

In spite of rough treatment, Galileo saw God as the author of the universe.

■ By Cindy Wooden

ROME (CNS) - Fourteen years after Pope John Paul II said the Catholic Church erred when it condemned the 17th-century astronomer Galileo Galilei, the Vatican secretary of state said the astronomer was “a man of faith” who recognised God as creator of the cosmos.

Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the secretary of state, spoke briefly on November 26 at the opening of a Rome conference titled, “Science 400 years after Galileo Galilei,” designed to bring scientists, ethicists and other experts together to discuss the role of ethics in scientific research.

The cardinal said recent studies and the Vatican’s own review of the Inquistion trial of Galileo “have shed light on the shortcomings of churchmen tied to the mentality of their age,” but also gave people a more accurate understanding of Galileo’s beliefs.

“Galileo, a man of science, also cultivated with love his faith and his deep religious convictions,” Cardinal Bertone said, repeating Pope Benedict XVI’s statement that “Galileo Galilei was a man of faith who saw nature as a book written by God.”

In 1992, Pope John Paul said the Church had erred in condemning Galileo for assert-

ing that the Earth revolved around the sun.

After being found guilty of “vehement suspicion of heresy”’ by the Roman Inquisition at the age of 69, Galileo spent his remaining eight years under house arrest.

The United Nations has proclaimed 2009 the International Year of Astronomy to mark the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s use of a telescope to observe the cosmos.

In addition to publishing the text of Cardinal Bertone’s remarks on November 26, the Vatican newspaper ran an article titled “Thank you, Galileo” on its front page.

Written by Jesuit Father Jose Funes, director of the Vatican Observatory, the article expressed several hopes for the Galileo anniversary year: that it would encourage people to consider seriously the relationship between faith and science; lead scientists to recognise the role faith played in Galileo’s life; and lead theologians to recognise the contributions Galileo made to the Church’s attitude toward science.

“I think the Galileo case will never be closed in a way satisfactory to everyone,” Father Funes wrote in L’Osservatore Romano.

“The dramatic clash of some churchmen with Galileo has left wounds that are still open.”

Still, he said, when errors and misunderstandings are confronted, they can lead to clarification and a deeper level of understanding.

“In that sense, I hope that what was - and perhaps still is - an area of conflict can become the ground for an encounter and dialogue,” Father Funes wrote.

Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, told reporters on November 25 that he hoped to find a scholarly institution willing to publish a critical edition of all of the documentation related to Galileo’s trial.

Although he was placed under house arrest, “Galileo was never condemned” officially, the archbishop said.

“The Pope did not sign the condemnation because the cardinals could not agree.”

St Paul a loving pastor of zeal: Patriarch

St Paul has daily impact on people, says Greek Orthodox patriarch

■ By Pete Sheehan

HUNTINGTON, N.Y. (CNS) - St Paul the Apostle's writings and ministry have a daily impact on people almost 2,000 years later and "an ocean away," and the Pauline year is not long enough to fully appreciate his legacy, Archbishop Demetrios told an audience in Huntington.

The patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church in the US said St Paul's influence is apparent if often unnoticed today and pointed out how often St Paul is quoted, not just in church circles, but in everyday life.

"Fight the good fight," "labour of love," "the wages of sin" and "suffer fools gladly" are among the common expressions from the 13 letters in the New Testament attributed to St Paul, Archbishop Demetrios said.

Yet the apostle's legacy is "more profound," he noted.

Archbishop Demetrios, who is a Pauline scholar, made the remarks on November 23 in delivering the sixth annual Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua lecture on pastoral theology at Immaculate Conception Seminary in the Rockville Centre Diocese.

An estimated 250 people filled the hall for the lecture, which is named after the retired archbishop of Philadelphia who was a graduate of the seminary in Huntington.

Catholics and Orthodox Christians are celebrating a Pauline year from June 28, 2008, to June 29, 2009.

Joined by other Christian leaders, including Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, Pope Benedict XVI opened the year of St Paul at an evening prayer service in Rome. He said the apostle's courageous witness to the faith should serve as a model for contemporary Christians.

In his lecture Archbishop Demetrios spoke of St Paul's "pastoral genius" in taking the Gospel of Christ to the larger world and establishing a body of thought that has endured so long.

A prime characteristic of St Paul's legacy, the archbishop said, was his "adherence to the absolute nature of the truth of the Gospel." St Paul saw the Gospel "not as an abstract, theoretical truth," but a truth grounded in the person of Jesus, who died

and is risen, he said. Christ crucified represents "the medicine of first resort for every spiritual weakness," he continued, and thus there can be "no possibility of compromise." According to St Paul, to be a pastor is to offer that Gospel with integrity, added the archbishop.

St. Paul insisted on overcoming human distinctions among believers, the archbishop said. "There is a school of thought" that divisions within a group must be accepted as part of the fallen human condition, but St Paul rejected such thinking, he said.

"What is the church" but the body of Christ, allowing for no divisions, the archbishop explained. St Paul specifically denounced distinctions among Jews and Greeks and rich and poor because any such distinctions are to be subordinated to unity in Christ, he said.

"We encounter the word 'brother' 34 times" in St Paul's writings, Archbishop Demetrios said, driving home the point that in Christ "any other distinction is secondary."

In addition, St Paul emphasised "the plan of God for salvation for all people," Archbishop Demetrios said.

St Paul traveled "the farthest reaches of the Roman Empire" in his zeal to draw souls to Christ, he continued.

Closely related is St Paul's adherence to the pastoral care of souls, which the apostle freely expressed in his writings, Archbishop Demetrios explained. St Paul wrote to his disciples that he prayed for them and thanked God for them.

"What an incredible difference it would make if every pastor" showed such zeal for his people, the archbishop said.

While "self-styled apostles" took advantage of the people to whom they preached, he said, "St Paul took the opposite approach," accepting nothing and refusing "to be a burden."

Rather, St Paul demonstrated "pastoral passion," comparing himself to a father or to a nurse caring for a child, the archbishop said.

A wronged man: Galileo was held under house arrest for the last eight years of his life. Pope Benedict XVI has spoken of him with admiration.

Shocked and sadenned: Auxiliary Bishop Shlemon Warduni of Baghdad, Iraq, speaks at a news conference in Baghdad October 16.

CNS PHOTO/WATHIQ KHUZAIE, REUTERS

The real deal on St Paul: Archbishop Demetrios, primate of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, delivers an address on “Enhancing the Ecumenical Dialogue” at Jesuit-run Fairfield University in Connecticut on November 14. Before delivering his remarks, the archbishop received an honorary doctor of laws degree from Fairfield. CNS PHOTO/B.K. ANGELETTI, FAIRFIELD UNIVERSITY.

Burundi ‘angel’ receives prize

Prize awarded to woman who helps child victims of war in Burundi.

■ By Catholic News Service

SEATTLE (CNS) - A Catholic woman who has provided a safe haven for child victims of ethnic strife in Burundi has received the $1 million Opus Prize, billed as the world’s largest humanitarian award for social innovation.

Marguerite “Maggy” Barankitse received the honor on November 18 from Jesuitrun Seattle University and the Opus Prize Foundation.

Barankitse founded Maison Shalom in 1993 as a home for 25 children orphaned after a violent attack by ethnic Tutsis. It was the first year of a civil war between the Hutus and the Tutsis that would last 12 years.

Burundi continues to recover from the war, which claimed more than 300,000 lives. A half-million people were displaced internally and at least another half-million were driven from the country, according to estimates.

Barankitse’s organisation has grown into a multiservice agency which runs 500 small houses where children are nurtured and supported so they can be reintegrated into loving families. Maison Shalom also recently opened a hospital.

Seattle University and the foundation also announced two winners of $100,000 prizes: Michael Woodard, founder of Jubilee House Community and Centre for the Development of Central America, and Krishnammal Jagannathan, founder of Land for Tillers’ Freedom.

Woodward has spent 15 years helping people in Nicaragua become self-sufficient and escape poverty. Jagannathan has spent 40 years fighting for land rights and the selfempowerment of women in Tamil Nadu, India.

“Seattle University is clear about its mission: empowering leaders for a just and humane world,” Jesuit Father Stephen Sundborg, university president, said in a statement. “Bringing these unsung heroes to

our campus is a great opportunity to honor their work and provide our students an incredible educational experience by meeting inspiring individuals.”

“Something is coming about from our students being global citizens and reaching out across the world to reach other people,” he added. “My vision is that our students learn their own humanity through knowing more of humanity.”

The Opus Prize is a faith-based humanitarian grant awarded annually to an individual or organisation of any religious background, anywhere in the world. Recipients must demonstrate a pioneering approach to solving the root cause of social problems in their community.

The prize is awarded by the Opus Prize Foundation through a partnership with a university or college “as a way to inspire lives of service,” according to a news release.

The foundation is a philanthropic organisation created by the Opus Group, a national real estate development company with head-

quarters in Minneapolis and offices across the country.

“We are thrilled to be recognising and supporting three amazing entrepreneurs for their transforming, faith-driven work throughout the world,” said Amy Sunderland, the foundation’s executive director. “These individuals show us that change is possible. They are an inspiration to us all.”

The news release said Barankitse’s work has allowed former child soldiers, street children and those made orphans by the war to learn to live together and to learn a skill so they can earn a living.

About Woodard, it said he has “reinvigorated lagging economies” in Ciudad Sandino, Nicaragua, and surrounding areas through education, microcredit, agriculture and technology initiatives.

Jagannathan, it added, has elevated the social status and acceptance of “dalits,” or members of low castes - through housing and farmland provisions and negotiated land subsidies with the Indian government.

Officials call for unity in face of terror

Continued from page 1 themselves by thinking that this is the way to resolve local or international problems,” he said.

The morning after gunmen attacked the targets in Mumbai, including the luxury Taj Mahal hotel, the pope deplored the brutality of the violence in a telegram sent to Cardinal Oswald Gracias of Mumbai.

The papal telegram appealed “for an end to all acts of terrorism, which gravely offend the human family and severely destabilize the peace and solidarity needed to build a civilization worthy of mankind’s noble vocation to love God and neighbour.”

The Vatican spokesman, Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, said the well-coordinated attacks were reminiscent of the September 11, 2001, terrorist acts against US targets saying that the terrorists had clearly chosen India, a place of tensions and conflicts, as a “critical point at which to try to ignite an even more frightening conflagration, whose consequences are difficult to imagine, given the demographic dimensions of southern Asia and its role in world development.”

In addition, he noted that India’s minority Catholic community had suffered recent discrimination and attacks, just as the country’s Muslim community did several years ago in a wave of anti-Islamic violence.

“Fundamentalism is one of the most dramatic risks faced by humanity, and it challenges the conscience of every religious person,” the Vatican spokesman said.

In India, Cardinal Gracias immediately expressed the church’s shock and sadness at the terrorist attacks, which he said were an attack upon the entire country.

“The church in India condemns this attack in the strongest possible terms. Innocent and unconnected people have been killed. Very brave police officers have been killed,”

alert: Forensic experts and

the cardinal said in an appeal issued on November 27. He said the Catholic Church in Mumbai was making all its medical services available to the wounded.

“We must fight together as a nation and as a united people to combat the terrorists. We must never give up hope because ultimately hope will prevail,” the cardinal said.

The Indian bishops’ conference, meanwhile, appealed to the government to take all necessary means to “guarantee the safety of citizens, who yearn for peace and calm.”

India’s National Security Guard commandos killed the last group of terrorists when they battled their way into an area of the Taj Mahal hotel Nov. 29.

Shortly before that, the commandos had

stormed a Jewish center in the city and found six hostages dead.

In Pakistan, a leading Christian politician condemned the terrorist attacks in India and rejected accusations, voiced by some Indian leaders, that Pakistan was somehow behind the violence.

Shahbaz Bhatti, a Catholic and the head of the All Pakistan Minorities Alliance, told the Rome-based agency AsiaNews that “we strongly condemn this act of barbaric terrorism and share our grief and sorrow with all families who lost their loved ones in this tragedy.”

He called on the governments of India and Pakistan to make a joint effort to ensure peace and security in the region.

Faith dead without concrete acts of love, says the Pope

Real faith shows itself as love for others, pope says at audience

■ By Cindy Wooden

VATICAN CITY (CNS) - If Christian faith is not translated into love and concrete help for the poor, it is not real faith, Pope Benedict XVI said.

“Real faith becomes love and expresses itself in charity. A faith without charity, without this fruit, would not be true faith. It would be a dead faith,” the Pope said on November 26 at his weekly general audience.

The gathering was held in the Vatican audience hall on the first day solar panels installed on the roof began generating energy for the Vatican’s power grid.

The audience began with Pope Benedict entering the hall side by side with Armenian Orthodox Catholicos Aram of Cilicia.

The Pope told an estimated 9,000 people at the audience that the visit of the Lebanon-based patriarch “is a significant occasion for strengthening the bonds of unity already existing between us as we journey toward that full communion which is both the goal set before all Christ’s followers and a gift to be implored daily from the Lord.”

Catholicos Aram told the Pope that all Christian churches must work together to fight “the decay of moral values” and to minister to a world “in dire need of spiritual transformation.”

In his main talk, Pope Benedict continued a discussion he began the week before about St Paul’s teaching on how people are made just in the eyes of God and on the relationship between faith and good works.

St Paul taught clearly that people can do nothing to make themselves just in the eyes of God, but rather that justification is God’s gift to those who believe, the Pope said.

“But this faith is not a thought, an opinion or an idea,” he said.

Faith implies communion with Christ and conformity to him, the Pope said. Those who have faith in Christ strive to act as Christ did.

Pope Benedict focussed on St Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, especially the passage that begins, “If I speak in human and angelic tongues but do not have love, I am a resounding gong or a clashing cymbal.”

Like the people of Corinth to whom St Paul wrote, he said, Christians today also can be tempted to think that because they are saved by faith alone, they do not have to worry about anything but their prayers.

“What would we be reducing the liturgy to if, at the same time as we turned to the Lord, we did not also serve our brothers and sisters? A faith that does not express itself in charity,” the Pope said, answering his own question.

Christianity is not a rulebook, he said. “The Christian ethic is not born of a system of commandments, but is the consequence of our friendship with Christ.”

“The Christian life is nourished by the action of the Holy Spirit, which gives rise to love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. These are the fruits of the spirit that grow from faith,” he said.

“Believers know that love for God becomes concrete in love for one another,” Pope Benedict said.

“Justified through the gift of faith in Christ we are called to live in the love of Christ for our neighbours because it is on this criteria that we will be judged at the end of our existence,” he said.

Opus

Friend of children: Seattle University and the Opus Prize Foundation on November 18 awarded the $1 million Opus Prize to Marguerite “Maggy” Barankitse for her work providing safe havens to 30,000 child victims of ethnic strife in the African country of Burundi. Courtesy of Opus Prize/CNS.

On

policemen look through a window of Nariman House in Mumbai, India, Nov. 30. Pope Benedict XVI condemned the wave of terrorist attacks in India and led prayers for the nearly 200 people who died and the hundreds injured in the bloodshed. CNMS/REUTERS

Critics miss film’s take on culture of death

The Happening

■ By Matthew Mehan

MERCATORNET - The director who brought us blockbusters like The Sixth Sense and Signs has just released on DVD what critics derided as a flop. With 72 percent of critics hating it, M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening was seen as the fall from grace of a 21st century Hitchcock. Considered eerie and arty, Shyamalan said that this time he just wanted to make a "B movie." The critics took him at his word and panned it. But they missed the point: The Happening is a painful satire on a Western culture which has turned its back on new life by preventing or aborting the next generation, claiming population control as its justification.

Some warnings. First, this film contains savage imagery. One after another characters commit suicide in bizarre and bloody ways. Unfortunately, it runs the danger of brutalising the audience it hopes to civilise.

Second, this review, in order to rescue The Happening from its critics, contains numerous unapologetic spoilers - reader beware.

In the film, people’s survival instinct is reversed by New England’s flora. As a defence against human overpopulation, plants are releasing an invisible neurotoxin which causes those who inhale it to kill themselves by the first available means. Lemmings throw themselves off cliffs in order to reduce their population. Population control advocates do not throw themselves over cliffs; they throw the next generation. One of the opening scenes of the film depicts a host of construction workers walking off the top of a 20-storey building like lemmings. The film shows citizens of the culture of death doing to themselves what they usually do to the next generation, especially the unborn.

High school biology teacher Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg) is married to the beautiful but sullen Alma (Zooey Deschanel), who is

afraid to have children – like so many others. A young boy, with whom the couple flees from the happening, raises the topic. "Are ya married?... Yes....Got kids?... We’re waiting.... For what?... Huh?!... In marriage you gotta take responsibility." Shocked, Elliot stops the conversation. But in the tender closing scene, shot from a great distance, the couple is celebrating a positive pregnancy test. Population and reproduction are placed front and centre. In the opening scene Elliot is asking his students to employ the scientific method to discover why the US population of bees has dropped so dramatically. The students hypothesise. Disease? Parasites? Disorienting signals? Elliot counters, "but where are all the bee bodies?" Teacher and students ignore an obvious scientific answer: the bees are not reproducing. This "B movie" does not let the audience ignore the missing bodies of the stifled next generation.

Shyamalan weighs the pros and cons of modern science throughout the film.

Scientists have an accurate theory about the plants. In grave danger, Elliot calms himself down with mantra-like recitation of the steps of scientific inquiry and comes to a shrewd idea for what to do next. Yet the film also questions whether a desire for comfort can obscure the lessons of science. Elliot’s best friend Julian, who teaches mathematics, decides to leave his daughter to go on a suicide rescue of his wife.

Elliot asks Julian to give him some statistics to make Julian’s death wish make sense. Julian makes up some statistics and gives a bitter wink. In the next scene, Julian tries to calm down a fellow "rescuer" by asking her a math problem, explicitly saying that numbers and percentages help calm people down — in this case as they proceed (more calmly) to their deaths, using a number game concerning the mathematics behind the Malthus Curve. The implication is that science cannot teach values and that the science behind overpopulation theories

Australia an entertaining romp

‘Australia’ reviewed through American eyes.

■ By Harry Forbes

NEW YORK (CNS) - Largescale romantic adventures have become a screen rarity, so lovers of that genre will happily wallow in all three hours of “Australia” (Fox), despite fanciful plot contrivances and some awkward tonal shifts.

The sprawling, generally entertaining epic is set just before and after the bombing of Pearl Harbor as Lady Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman), a starchy English widow, takes over her late husband’s cattle station down under.

It doesn’t take long before she falls in love with a rough-hewn horseman known simply as Drover (Hugh Jackman). He’s hired to escort her to her property, Faraway Downs, and she later convinces him to help drive the animals to port ahead of rival magnate King Carney’s (Bryan Brown) villainous henchman, Neil Fletcher (David Wenham), who clearly had a hand in her husband’s demise.

Narrating the story in somewhat cloying fashion is the otherwise appealing 13-year-old Brandon Walters, playing half-Aboriginal, half-Caucasian Nullah. Though Sarah confesses she’s not very comfortable around children, when the boy tragically loses his mother, her latent maternal instincts come to the fore. Sarah comforts the orphaned boy with a humorously shaky rendition of “Over the Rainbow,” the strains of which sen-

timentally permeate the rest of the movie.

Nullah is guided by an Aboriginal shaman named King George (David Gulpilil) who watches over the boy from afar, sometimes offering “magical” intercession when the boy gets into scrapes and encouraging Nullah to use his own powers - as when he’s standing on the edge of a precipice and facing a cattle stampede headon, and is able to stop the rampaging herd through what looks like sheer mental willpower. (The Aboriginal mastery of nature here is somewhat akin to those ascribed to Native Americans in latter-day Westerns.)

The stampede is but one of the many set-pieces around which director and co-writer Baz Luhrmann has fashioned his story: a rambunctious barroom fight, a swanky ball and the Japanese invasion.

The script was co-written with Stuart Beattie, Ronald Harwood and Richard Flanagan. It would

seem Luhrmann’s primary goal was to pay lavish homage to classic epics and Westerns, creating an old-style Hollywood love story, courtesy of its magnetic leads. Kidman and Jackman indeed make a handsome pair - their transformations to enlightened crusader and committed protector, respectively, are well conveyed.

They’re solidly supported by Aussie acting pros like Brown, Wenham and Jack Thompson as Sarah’s boozy accountant.

The historical backdrop is quite interesting. The shameful forced evacuation of mixed-race children, to remove them from their indigenous backgrounds and families and “re-educate” them, is a lesserknown piece of history.

Though priests are involved in this misguided practice, they are portrayed as genuinely concerned for the children’s welfare. The victims of this displacement came to be known as the “Stolen Generations.”

So, too, the deadly 1942 bombing of Darwin, the waterfront outpost of the Northern Territory, by the same fleet that attacked Pearl Harbor, is also vividly dramatised.

With its reverential portrayals of the indigenous characters, the film carries a strong plea for racial tolerance, much like the subplot of George Stevens’ “Giant,” which charted the easing of prejudice toward Hispanics in Texas.

Sex, language and violent elements are remarkably restrained. Apart from the implication of Sarah and Drover cohabiting -- and one very brief but nongraphic bedroom scene -- and a pointed use of a rough expletive by Jackman.

is bogus. The abandonment, rejection or replacement of children is a recurring trope in the film. In a reference to "green" population control advocates, two childless nursery owners refer to their plants as "their babies." A bitter old woman has a life-sized and welldressed baby-doll. When Elliot asks some paranoid hicks for food for his wife and a young girl and two young boys, they refuse. The boys, outraged by their callousness, try to kick in the door and are shotgunned through a window slat- the only two deaths in the film that are not suicides.

Most of the suicides happen quickly and Shyamalan does not linger on them. But three stand out as particularly grotesque. All three victims are anonymous and their deaths represent various abortion techniques. In one, a man in the distance lies down in front of a vacuum mower, like a first trimester vacuum aspiration of a foetus. In another, lions tear a zookeeper limb from limb. And finally, there is a close-up of a woman stabbing herself in the back side of the neck with a steel hair pin about ten inches long. There is a suicide analogue for the abortion technique of each trimester. As I warned, The Happening may be subtle but it is also breathtakingly brutal.

Like most B-movies, The Happening ends happily. Elliot and Alma’s love has become a new human life. Shyamalan hints that science, love, and life will contradict and defeat the pseudo-science and selfishness of the culture of death. This brutal and subtle work of art is for those who can endure but not relish its violence.

However, it is not for those hoping for a B-movie carnage flick. The Rotten Tomatoes website distils the critiques of 163 reviewers: "The Happening begins with promise, but unfortunately descends into an incoherent and unconvincing trifle." The film begins with faltering marriage and a sea of suicidal death and ends with a happy pregnant couple full of life and love. By the critics’ logic, committing suicide is "promising" and loving new life is a "trifle." No wonder the critics missed the point of this masterful film.

Four Christmases

■ By John Mulderig

NEW YORK (CNS) - “Four Christmases” (Warner Bros.) is a routine comedy that takes many a crude detour on the way to its muted affirmation of emotional maturity and commitment. Despite the innovative casting of dramatic actors in some of its supporting roles, documentarian Seth Gordon’s first fictional offering boasts a few clever exchanges between its two leads, but little else.

Vince Vaughn plays San Francisco yuppie Brad and Reese Witherspoon is his live-in girlfriend, Kate. Each year these two make elaborate excuses to their dysfunctional families so they can spend Christmas in a tropical getaway.

When an airport shutdown ruins their plans and television news coverage reveals that they’re bound for the beaches of Fiji, not the slums of the Third World to do charity work, as they’d claimed, their cell phones instantly come alive with calls from wounded relations. So it’s off to visit all four of their divorced parents in one day.

Brad’s father, Howard (Robert Duvall), leads a Cheez Whizand-beer existence in a shack in the hills, while his mother, Paula (Sissy Spacek), is a flighty disciple of the New Age.

Kate’s mother, Marilyn (Mary Steenburgen), is dating evangelical pastor Phil (Dwight Yoakam) which leads her to volunteer

stage-fright-stricken Kate and born ham Brad for the roles of Mary and Joseph in the church nativity play. (The result is an absurd, but not offensive, disarray.)

Her father, Creighton (Jon Voight), proves a more seriousminded character, reflecting on his past mistakes, including several divorces, and offering a grace before Christmas night dinner that emphasises the importance of family.

Along their unwilling journey, Brad and Kate discover secrets about each other’s past and, of course, realise they hardly know each other as well as they’d thought. Kate also begins to question their uncommitted lifestyle, which excludes both marriage and children.

Duvall pulls out all the stops as a front-porch cracker and Spacek is, by turns, dreamily vague and intently befuddled, especially during a board game in which, much to her competitive son’s annoyance, Paula consistently misinterprets the rules.

But the weak script - co-written by Matt R. Allen, Caleb Wilson, Jon Lucas and Scott Moore - generally tends toward predictable slapstick, queasy subject matter (babies throw up with alarming frequency) and such tired gags as having elderly characters make risque remarks.

The film contains brief nongraphic, nonmarital sexual activity, cohabitation, much sexual humor, some crude and crass language, and a contraception reference.

Kids bitz

colouring/activities

Just before her baby was born, Mary and Joseph had to go to Bethlehem to be counted for a census. It was a long journey, so Mary rode on a Donkey.

artist of the week

I N T E R E S T I N G S T U F F INTERESTING STUFF

In Bible times, bread was the basic food each day. Wheat, buckwheat, and barley could be toasted over an open fire and eaten fresh. These could also be ground into flour for baking bread on hot stones. The common man could not afford to eat meat except on special occassions, such as Passover. However, the Bible kings ate a variety of meats, such as oxen, goats, sheep, deer and geese. Other foods that were also widely served include hyssop, mint, thyme, eggs from wild birds, butter, and cheese made from sheep's milk.

The Bible was written by about 40 men over a period of about 1600 years dating from 1500 BC to about 100 years after Christ. These men wrote this Scripture as they were given inspiration by God. (2 Timothy 3:16)

The first translation of the English Bible was initiated by John Wycliffe and completed by John Purvey in 1388.

The Bible has since been translated in part or in whole into over 1200 languages and dialects.

The Bible was divided into chapters by Stephen Langton in 1228. The Old Testament was divided into verses by R. Nathan in 1488 and the New Testament by Robert Stephanus in 1551.

The entire Bible divided into chapters and verses first appeared in the Geneva Bible of 1560.

Today the Bible is the largest seller of all books published.

FREE WEEKLY GIFT FROM RECORD BOOKSHOP

PUZZLE

Choose from the following words and list below the seven sacraments: Baptism, Advent, Confirmation, Beatitudes, Eucharist, Reconciliation, Cardinal Virtues, Penance, Marriage, Holy Orders, Anointing of the Sick, Prayer.

KIDS BITZ ARTIST OF THE WEEK will receive a free gift from the Record Bookshop. All you need to do is post or email in a drawing, poem or colouring picture. This week we are giving away another Beautiful Red Dove pendant chain. please post or email : Justine Stevens, The Record, PO Box 75 Leederville WA 6902 or email production@therecord.com.au

SPOTLIGHT ON SAINTS

St Mary Di Rosa

Mary Di Rosa (1813-1855) was the daughter of a wealthy Italian man, and her mother was a countess. When Mary (who was called Paula by her parents) was 11 years old her mother died, and when she was 17, she had to leave school to help her father care for her eight brothers and sisters.

Although Mary's father wanted to help her find a suitable husband, she told him she chose to lead a single life devoted to helping unfortunate people, especially the girls who worked in the family's textile mill. When a cholera epidemic broke out in the village of Brescia, Mary worked as a volunteer nurse at the hospital along with another volunteer named Gabriela Echenos-Bornati. The two women were gentle and loving to the sick patients.

Because of her work at the hospital, Mary was asked to manage an institution for poor girls. This institution was the foundation of what became the religious society called the Handmaids of Charity.

We honour Mary on December 15.

John Kelly aged 9 Years from Success is Our Artist of the Week. Congratulations John you will be receiving your Dove Pendant in the mail.

PANORAMA

A roundup of events in the Archdiocese

Panorama entries must be in by 12pm Monday.

Contributions may be emailed to administration@therecord.com.au, faxed to 9227 7087, or mailed to PO Box 75, Leederville, WA 6902.

Submissions over 55 words will be edited. Inclusion is limited to 4 weeks. Events charging over $10 will be a put into classifieds and charged accordingly. The Record reserves the right to decline or modify any advertisment.

Saturday December 6

WITNESS FOR LIFE

Commencing 8.30am with Mass at St Augustine’s, Gladstone Road, Rivervale, followed by Rosary procession and prayer vigil at abortion clinic, led by Fr Paul Carey SSC. Enq: Helen 9402 0349.

Saturday December 6

DAY WITH MARY

9am to 5pm at Good Shepherd Church, 44 Streich Avenue, Kelmscott. Day of prayer and instruction based upon the Fatima message. 9am Fatima Video. Reconciliation, Holy Mass, Eucharistic Adoration, Sermons on Eucharist and Our Lady, Rosaries, Procession of the Blessed Sacrament and Stations of the Cross. BYO lunch. Enq: Franciscan Sisters of the Immaculate 9250 8286.

Saturday December 6

CHRISTMAS CAROLS AND REFLECTION NIGHT

6pm at Sacred Heart Church, 50 Ovens Road, Thornlie. Reflection Night with Carols especially organised in anticipation for the Lord’s birth to encourage everyone to celebrate and rejoice in exaltation with a real community spirit. Sausage Sizzle provided! Contact Barbara 9459 4306 or Sandy 9455 4390.

Sunday December 7

DIVINE MERCY

1.30pm at St Joachim’s Church, Shepperton Road and Harper Street, Victoria Park. Holy Rosary, and Reconciliation. Holy Family Sermon by Fr Joseph Mario followed by Divine Mercy prayers, Benediction and refreshments. DVD/Video - Body and Blood of Jesus, Part 2 by Fr Corapi. Enq: John 9457 7771 or Linda 9275 6608.

Sunday December 7

ANNUAL ROSARY PROCESSION

4.30pm at St Joseph’s Parish, Hamilton Street, Bassendean, in honour of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, followed by Benediction. Light refreshments. Triduum Rosaries will be held in preparation for this event from 3 December to 5 December commencing 7.30pm respectively. Enq: Colin 9279 9750 or Renato 0419 924 633.

Monday December 8

HOUR OF GRACE

12noon to 1pm at St Jude’s Parish, 20 Prindiville Way, Langford, followed by Benediction. All are most welcome to join in the celebration of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Mother Mary. Enq: 9458 1946.

Monday December 8

FEAST OF THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION

12noon to 1pm at Holy Spirit Church, Keaney Place, City Beach. Come and join in the Hour of Grace. Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament during the hour, with Rosary and quiet time.

Monday December 8

HOUR OF GRACE

12noon to 1pm at Holy Trinity Church, 8 Burnett Street, Embleton, Feast of the Immaculate Conception, Blessed Sacrament will be exposed. Enq: 9272 1379.

Monday December 8

FEAST OF IMMACULATE CONCEPTION

7.30pm at Our Lady of Fatima Church, 10 Foss Street, Palmyra. Latin Mass according to the 1962 missal will be offered for the feast. Latin Mass is offered every Sunday at 12 noon. All welcome.

Wednesday December 10

CHAPLETS OF DIVINE MERCY

7.30pm at St Thomas More Catholic Church, Dean Road, Bateman; a beautiful, prayerful, sung devotion will be accompanied by Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament and Benediction. All are welcome. Enq: George 9310 9493 home or 9325 2010 work.

Saturday December 13

ST PAUL’S COMMUNITY  THREE SPRINGS CHURCH FUNDRAISING

Launch and sale of recorded CD called – Crowing in the Midwest, at Christmas Dinner. Cost of CD is $5 plus

postage of $3. If you would like to order the CD please forward payment to PO Box 213, Three Springs WA, 6519. All welcome to join us in our celebrations. Enq: Myrtle 08 9954 1135.

Saturday December 13

ST PADRE PIO PRAYER GROUP

8.30am at St Bernadette’s Church, LJ Goody Centre, 49 Jugan Street, Glendalough. St Padre Pio DVD, 10am Exposition of the blessed Sacrament, Rosary, Divine Mercy, silent Adoration and Benediction. 11am Mass, using St Padre Pio liturgy. Confessions available. 12noon lunch; bring a plate, tea and coffee provided. Enq: Des 6278 1540.

Thursday December 18

ST PEREGINE HEALING MASS

7pm at SS John and Paul Church, Pinetree Gully Road, off South Street, Willetton, in honour of St Peregrine, Patron of Cancer sufferers and helper of all in need. The celebration will include Veneration of the Relic and Anointing of the Sick. Enq: Patrick, paddyjoe@iinet.net.au

Friday December 19

MEDJUGORJE  EVENING OF PRAYER

7pm to 9pm at Holy Spirit Parish, 2 Keaney Place, City Beach, commencing with Adoration, Rosary, Benediction and Holy Mass. Free inspirational DVD of Fr Donald Calloway may be obtained on evening. Enq: Eileen 9402 2480.

Sunday December 21

STATIONS OF CHRISTMAS

3pm at St Theresa’s Church, 678 North Beach Road, Gwelup. The Balcatta Fraternity of the Secular Franciscan Order invites you to prepare for Christmas with the Stations of Christmas. The celebration will conclude with afternoon tea at the Community Centre. Enq: Anne-Marie 9447 252 after 6pm.

Wednesday December 31

NEW YEAR’S EVE

10.45pm to 11.45pm at Holy Trinity Church, Embleton, Eucharistic Adoration, followed by Midnight Mass, and then fellowship at the parish Hall. Please bring a plate. Enq: Parish Priest 9271 5528 or George 9272 1379.

Friday January 2

MIDNIGHT MASS

11.55pm at Glendalough Parish Church, corner Leeder and Jugan Street, celebrated by Fr David Watt, preaching on Modern Means of Communication.

Sunday January 4

DIVINE MERCY

1.30pm at St Joachim’s Church, Shepperton Road and Harper Street, Victoria Park. Holy Rosary and Reconciliation. Sermon with Fr Joseph Asnabun on Adoration of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament followed by Divine Mercy and Benediction. Refreshments, followed by DVD on Body and Blood of Jesus Part 3 with Fr John Corapi. Enq: John 9457 7771 or Linda 9275 6608.

Friday January 23

MEDJUGORJE  EVENING OF PRAYER

7pm at St Joachim’s Parish, Shepperton Road, Victoria Park; an evening of prayer, commencing with Adoration, Holy Rosary, Benediction and concluding with Holy Mass. Free inspirational DVD of Fr Donald Calloway on night. All warmly welcome. Enq: Eileen 9402 2480.

Sunday January 25

PILGRIMAGE TO BOVE FARM SHRINE OF OUR LADY OF THE MOST HOLY ROSARY

Exposition, Rosary, Divine Mercy Prayers, Chaplet of Divine Mercy, and Praises of Divine Mercy. Holy Mass, celebrant Fr Alfonsas Savickis, other Priests invited to concelebrate. Conclude with Divine Mercy Way of the Cross for those able to walk the bushland. Refreshments and barbecue provided. Enq: South Perth – John 9457 7771, North Perth Charles 9342 0653.

EVERY SUNDAY

DIVINE MERCY PRAYER AS NOVENA

3pm St Aloysius Church, 84 Keightley Road, West Shenton Park, commencing 14 December, an opportunity for all to gather once a week and say the powerful Divine Mercy, Eucharistic Adoration, healing prayers followed by Holy Mass at 4pm. Enq: 9381 5383.

ACCOMMODATION NEEDED

Female overseas student aged 23, with 3 months old baby, needs accommodation and support with a family, preferably north of the river for approximately 12 months. Phone: Lydia, Pregnancy Assistance, 9328 2929.

JOSEPHITEMARY MACKILLOP 2009 C ALENDARS

Special Edition Centenary Year, of Blessed Mary MacKillop’s death. Each month has an Inspirational Quote from Mary MacKillop’s writings and a beautiful colourful scene. Too inspiring to miss out! To purchase a copy please ring the Secretary 9334 0999.

INTERPARISH SOCCER: A NOTICE TO ALL PARISHES

The young parishioners in Lockridge are interested in having soccer matches against other parishes. It is a great way for a bit of ‘friendly rivalry’; keep up fitness whilst having fun and all in a good atmosphere. Enq: 0433 646 208 or 0431 951 772.

Every 1st Thursday of the Month

PRAYER AND MEDITATION SERVICE USING SONGS FROM TAIZE

7.30pm at Our Lady of Grace, 3 Kitchener Street, North Beach. The service is a prayerful meditation in which we sing beautiful chants from Taize together, spend time in prayerful, meditative silence, bathed in candlelight reflecting upon themed readings. Enq: Beth 9447 0061.

Every First Friday and Saturday of Month

COMMUNION OF REPARATION  ALL NIGHT VIGIL

7pm Friday at Corpus Christi Church, Mosman Park, 47 Lochee Road. Mass with Fr Bogoni and concluding with midnight Mass. Confessions, Rosaries, Prayers and silent hourly adoration. Please join us for reparation to Two Hearts according to the message of Our Lady of Fatima. Enq: Vicky 0400 282 357.

Every First Friday

CATHOLIC FAITH RENEWAL

7.30pm at Sts John and Paul Church, Willetton; praise and worship, teaching and Mass offered by Fr Saminedi, then supper and fellowship. All very welcome! Enq. Maureen 9381 4498.

Every First Friday

HOLY HOUR FOR VOCATIONS TO THE PRIESTHOOD AND RELIGIOUS LIFE

7pm at Little Sisters of the Poor Chapel, 2 Rawlins Street, Glendalough. Mass celebrated by Fr Saminedi. 7.30pm, Adoration with Fr Don Kettle. All welcome. Refreshments provided.

Third Sunday of the Month

OBLATES OF ST BENEDICT MEETINGS

2pm St Joseph’s Convent, York Street, South Perth, affiliated to the Benedictine Abbey of New Norcia. All those interested in studying the rule of St Benedict, its relevance to lay people’s day-to-day life are welcome. Vespers and tea conclude meetings. Enq: 9457 5758

Every Saturday

HOLY SPIRIT OF FREEDOM CHARISMATIC PRAYER MEETING

10.30am to 12.30pm at St Peter the Apostle Church Hall, 91 Wood Street, Inglewood. All are most welcome.

Every Sunday

LATIN MASS KELMSCOTT

The Latin Mass according to the 1962 missal will be offered every Sunday at 2pm at the Good Shepherd Parish, 40-42 Streich Avenue, Kelmscott, with Rosary preceding. All welcome.

Every 4th Sunday of the Month

HOLY HOUR PRAYER FOR VOCATIONS TO THE PRIESTHOOD AND RELIGIOUS LIFE

2-3pm at Infant Jesus Church, Wellington Road, Morley. The hour includes exposition of the Blessed Sacrament. Let us implore God to rain an abundance of new life into our Church, open our hearts and those of the young people of the world to hear His Word for us now, today. All welcome! Enq: 9276 8500.

Every Sunday

PILGRIM MASS

2pm at Shrine of Virgin of the Revelation, 36 Chittering Road, Bullsbrook; with Rosary and Benediction. Reconciliation is available in Italian and English. Anointing of the sick; second Sunday during Mass. Pilgrimage in honour of the Virgin; last Sunday of month. Side entrance and shrine open daily between 9am and 5pm. Enq: 9447 3292.

Every Tuesday

NOVENA TO GOD THE FATHER

7.30pm St Joachim’s Parish Hall, Shepperton Road, Victoria Park; incorporating a Bible teaching, a Perpetual Novena to God the Father and Hymns. Light refreshments will follow. Bring a Bible and a friend. Enq: Jan 9323 8089.

Every Monday

ADORATION, RECONCILIATION AND MASS

7pm at St Thomas, corner Melville and College Roads, Claremont; Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament with Evening Prayer and Benediction, spend 40 minutes quietly before our Lord for the health, faith and safety of yourself and your loved ones; Reconciliation 7.30pm, Mass and Night Prayer 8pm.

Every Sunday

MUSICIANS AND SINGERS

6pm at the Redemptorist Monastery Church, Vincent Street, North Perth; the Shalomites have been providing the music and singing for over thirty years. We are looking for new members. All interested singers and musicians welcome. Enq: Stephen or Sheelagh 9339 0619.

Every 1st Sunday of Month

DIVINE MERCY

Commencing with 3 o’clock Prayer at Santa Clara Parish, Bentley, followed by the Chaplet, reflection and Benediction. All friends and neighbouring parishes invited. Tea and coffee provided. Enq: Muriel 9458 2944.

Every 2nd Wednesday of Each Month

CHAPLETS OF THE DIVINE MERCY

7.30 pm at St Thomas More Catholic Church, Dean Road, Bateman. All welcome to a beautiful, prayerful, and sung devotion. Enq: George 9310 9493 home or 9325 2010 work.

Every Thursday

JOURNEY THROUGH THE BIBLE

7.30pm, Acts 2 College of Mission and Evangelisation, Osborne Park using The Bible Timeline; The Great Adventure can be studied towards accredited course or for interest. Resources provided. See http://www. acts2come.wa.edu.au/ or Jane 0401 692 690.

CALL FOR VOLUNTEERS

Jesuit Volunteers Australia calls for part-time volunteers to respond to the needs of people in the community who live in marginalised circumstances. At the heart of this program is a reflective process, based on Gospel values, which underpins the work of the volunteers. Enq: Kevin 9316 3469 or kwringe@iinet.net.au, www.jss.org.au

BOOK DONATIONS WANTED

We urgently need donations of Altar Vessels, Catholic books, Bibles, Divine Office, Missals, Lectionaries, Sacramentaries etc. Telephone: (08) 9293 3092.

Vatican official warns of increasing food insecurity

VATICAN CITY (CNS) - A Vatican representative warned of increasing food insecurity in the world and called for a greater global commitment to long-term agricultural improvement. Mgr Renato Volante made the remarks in an address on November 27 to the 35th special session of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation in Rome.

The FAO was discussing reform of its own structures to better respond to food crises around the globe. Mgr Volante said the FAO should underline the essential importance of agriculture in development, and not merely promote short-term management of food resources. “Too often strategies are adopted which pursue particular goals rather then a holistic vision which ranks the human needs first. Such an attitude produces negative effects in the rural sector, especially where poverty, underdevelopment, malnutrition and environmental degradation are more evident,” he said.

Brother who worked with sick is beatified in Cuba

CAMAGUEY, Cuba (CNS)Brother Jose Olallo Valdes, a member of the Hospitaller Brothers of St John of God who worked among Cuba’s poor and sick in the 19th century, was beatified at an outdoor Mass attended by thousands of joyous people and broadcast nationwide. Cardinal Jose Saraiva Martins, former prefect of the Vatican Congregation for Saints’ Causes, beatified the Cuban brother during a threehour Mass on November 29 in the Plaza of Our Lady of Charity.

Stewardship

SECOND SUNDAY OF ADVENT

John the Baptist’s call to repentance is echoed in the US Bishop’s pastoral letter on stewardship: “Christians must beg God for the grace of conversion: the grace to know who they are, to whom they belong, how they are to live – the grace to repent and change and grow, the grace to become good disciples and stewards.”

For further information on how stewardship can build your parish community, call Brian Stephens on 9422 7924.

Walking with Him Daily Mass Readings

7 S 2ND SUNDAY OF ADVENT

Vio Isa 40:1-5.9-11

A way for the Lord

Ps 84:9-14 A voice of peace

2Peter 3:8-14 New heaven and earth

Mk 1:1-8 Prepare a way

8 M THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY, Solemnity Wh Gen 3:9-15.20 ‘Where are you?’

Ps 97:1-4 Sing a new song

Eph 1:3-6.11-12 Chosen in Christ Lk 1:26-38 Deeply disturbed

9 T

Vio Isa 40:1-11

10 W

Prepare a way

Ps 95:1-3.10-13 Sing to the Lord

Mt 18:12-14 A hundred sheep

Vio Isa 40:25-31

My destiny hidden

Ps 102:1-4.8.10 Bless God’s name

Mt 11:28-30 Humble in heart

11 T St Damasus I, pope (O)

Vio Isa 41:13-20

The hand of the Lord

Ps 144:1.9-13 Everlasting kingdom

Mt 11:11-15

John is the Elijah

12 F

Vio Isa 48:17-19

Ps 1:1-4.6

Mt 11:16-19

The Lord, your God

The good, the wicked

Never satisfied

13 S St Lucy, virgin, martyr (M)

Red Sir 48:1-4.9-11 Elijah the glorious

Ps 79:2.3.15-16.18-19 Rouse your might

Mt 17:10-13 Elijah has come

MISSION MATTERS

Missionary reflection on the 2nd Sunday of Advent Yr B “…A voice cries in the wilderness…”

Like John the Baptist, our missionaries are the voices speaking out for those who suffer unimaginable hardship and oppression in the man-made‘wilderness’ of poverty and violence throughout the world. Like John the Baptist, this ‘voice’ for the victims of injustice, this ‘voice’ for God’s Kingdom, leads many of our missionaries to suffer persecution and martyrdom. Please pray that this ‘voice’ , this voice of hope, will continue to resonate throughout our broken world during this season of Advent. Call the Mission Office on 9422 7933 should you want to explore this idea further.

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ACCOMMODATION NEEDED

Female overseas student, 23 yo, with 3 mth old baby, needs accomm and support with a family, preferably north of the river for approx. 12 mths. Ph Lydia at Pregnancy Assistance, 9328 2929.

BUILDING TRADES

■ THE PAINTERS REG NO 5846

"We take the pain out of painting” Residential & Commercial. Phone Jim: 0412 123 630

■ BRICK REPOINTING

Phone Nigel 9242 2952.

■ PERROTT PAINTING PTY LTD

For all your residential, commercial painting requirements. Phone Tom Perrott 9444 1200.

■ BRICKLAYING

20 years exp. Quality work. Ph 9405 7333 or 0409 296 598.

■ PICASSO PAINTING

Top service. Phone 0419 915 836, fax 9345 0505.

BOOK REPAIRS

■ REPAIR YOUR LITURGICAL BOOKS

General repairs to books, old bibles & missals. 2ndhand Catholic books avail. Tydewi Bindery 9293 3092.

COMPUTERS

Make the most out of your computer with oneon-one tutoring on basic IT applications like HTML, CSS Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. PC maintenance also available. Call Collin on 0438 643 070.

BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY

Work from home - Call 02 8230 0290, or visit website www.dreamlife1.com

HOLIDAY ACCOMODATION

■ MANDURAH

Townhouse in Resort Complex. Fully furnished. Sleeps 6. Phone 9381 3495 or email valma7@bigpond.com

■ DUNSBOROUGH

Beach cottage, 3 bedrooms, sleeps 7, 300m to Quindalup beach. Great price for Dunsborough! Tel: Sheila 9309 5071 / 0408 866 593 or email: shannons3s@optusnet.com.au

MUSIC

■ GUITAR LESSONS

Learn to play the guitar and bring out the musician in you. Learn what you want to learn and at your own pace. Call Collin on 0438 643 070.

■ ORGAN

Yamaha El 25 in excellent condition. $2000 ono. Contact St Luke’s Parish, Woodvale 08 9409 6291

FURNITURE REMOVAL

■ ALL AREAS

Mike Murphy 0416 226 434.

PERSONALS

■ CHRISTIAN SINGLES

Widowed, Divorced or Never married. All age groups. Meet-for-Drinks, Dinner Seminars and Individual Dates. Phone 9472 8218. Tues-Fri 10am - 6pm. www.figtrees.com.au

■ SEEKING LADY

Guy 40s tall, n/smoker, education, social drinker, conservative, loyal, creative, likes reading, cafe food styles, walking and swimming. Down to earth. Reasonable ambitions, dry SOH, seeks lady friendship view to long-term relationship. Marriage if culturally compatible and complementary. Some or more Christian values. Phn 0419 543 093.

RELIGIOUS PRODUCTS

■ KINLAR VESTMENTS

‘Modern meets tradition.’ Quality hand-made & decorated. Vestments, altar cloths, banners. Vickii Smith Veness. 9402 8356 or 0409 114 093.

■ CATHOLICS CORNER

Retailer of Catholic products specialising in gifts, cards and apparel for baptism, communion and confirmation. Ph: 9456 1777. Shop 12, 64-66 Bannister Road, Canning Vale. Open Mon-Sat.

■ RICH HARVEST  YOUR CHRISTIAN SHOP

Looking for Bibles, CDs, books, cards, gifts, statues, baptism/communion apparel, religious vestments, etc? Visit us at 39 Hulme Court (off McCoy St), Myaree, 9329 9889 (after 10.30am Mon to Sat). We are here to serve.

■ ALL SAINTS HANDCRAFTED ROSARIES AND CHAPLETS

View our current range of original Rosaries, chaplets and bracelets for all occasions. Custom orders in the beads and colour of your choice are welcome. Contact Elisa on 0421 020 462 or email allsaintscreations@iinet.net.au

■ OTTIMO

Shop 108 TRINITY ARCADE (Terrace Level) 671 Hay St, Perth. Ph 9322 4520. Convenient city location for a good selection of Nativity sets, cards, books, CDs, Christian gifts and fashion accessories. Opening hours 9am-6pm MondayFriday.

SETTLEMENTS

EFFECTIVE LEGAL, family owned law firm focusing on property settlements and wills. If you are buying, selling or investing in property, protect your family and your investment, contact us on (08) 9218 9177.

The Record Bookshop

Gift ideas to keep Christ inChristmas

DVD of the Week!

DEMOGRAPHIC WINTER

THE DECLINE OF THE HUMAN FAMILY

DVD: 56 MINUTES

A ground breaking film that draws on experts in many disciplines – demographers, economists, sociologists, psychologists, civic and religious leaders, parliamentarians and diplomats – to reveal in chilling soberness the dangers facing society and the world economies, dangers far more imminent than global warming and at least as severe. For those concerned about the future and well being of our planet.

$32.95 + P/H

SAINTS

LIVES AND ILLUMINATIONS

BY RUTH ANDERSON

This book is designed for young readers and it brings to life the lives of forty Christian saints of the first millennium with beautiful illustrations and easy to read life stories. For those interested in sharing inspiring stories of faith with their children.

$16.95 + P/H

SLEEPY JESUS

A charming, lyrical retelling of the events of the first Christmas night. This simple and charming book with warm, childfriendly illustrations, introduces young children to the wonder of the Christmas story in an unsentimental fashion. This revamped edition features extra ‘sparkle and squidge’ - a glittery padded cover encasing a board book format. $9.95 + P/H

DEACONS AND THE CHURCH MAKING CONNECTIONS BETWEEN OLD AND NEW

BY JOHN N COLLINS

Is the Deacon a minister for our times? This book is essential reading for deacons, for those considering the ministry and for those responsible for them. As the role of deacons becomes more integral to the Church more questions are being raised about their ministry. By exploring the relevance of the ancient diaconate and the diversity surrounding the new, this book explores the new channels that this ministry is creating.

$19.95 + P/H

SIX CHRISTMAS PLAYS

Kids of all ages will love these plays. They are fun to read and fun to perform. Using a variety of settings and characters, they will help you present the meaning of Christmas in churches, schools, and anywhere else that people gather to hear and celebrate the stories of Jesus’ birth.

$6.50 + P/H

TEDDY PRAYERS CHRISTMAS BOOK

In this beautiful book, Faith Teddy tells the story of the first CHRISTMAS. Along the way, kids are encouraged to pray and learn the importance of PRAYER!

$9.95 + P/H

THE DEACON READER

EDITED BY JAMES KEATING

This book is an excellent instrument for deacons and those preparing for the diaconate to develop a deeper understanding and love of their vocation, but will also give anyone who reads it an expanded appreciation of the gift this ministry is to the Church.

$19.95 + P/H

MAJELLAN CHRISTMAS CARDS

Assorted Packet of 10 various Christmas religious themes. $5.50 + P/H

SILENT NIGHT: A CHRISTMAS STORY

A beautiful hardbook book for children, it tells the story of how the hymn ‘Silent Night’ was written. The story is centred in a small village that is faced with disaster on Christmas Eve. Through the singing of the hymn, catastrophe is averted, and the song ‘Silent Night’ enters into legend.

$17.95 + P/H

CONSCIENCE: AN OWNER’S MANUAL

BY JAMES PENRICE

Just as any appliance will work properly only when it is used and maintained according to the manufacturer’s intent, so it is with our conscience. We all have many voices within us urging us to do various things. How do we discern between them? This manual is designed to help readers make the right choices.

$14.95 + P/H

A BOOK OF ACTIVITIES FOR CHILDREN

A delightful and fun-filled selection of puzzles, drawings, colouring-in pages, secret messages and a countdown Advent calendar that will entertain children from 4-10 while teaching them why Jesus is the true meaning of Christmas.

$7.95 + P/H

FOLLOW THE STAR

This

along with

$7.95 + P/H