The Record Newspaper 12 October 2011

the R ecoRd

By Mark reidy

PRISONERS who cannot read can now hear about the Catholic faith with the release of a new audio series designed bring inner freedom to those in captivity.

Throughout September, almost 100 copies of the CD resource Hearing God’s Call: An Audio Introduction to the Catholic Faith were distributed to every Catholic prison chaplain in Australia.

The CD is the creation of the Sydney-based Catholic Enquiry Centre, an agency of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference. The

Bindoon’s class stands out from the herd

By Sarah Motherwell

IT IS day five of the Perth Royal Show and people are trying to escape the midday heat. Screams come from Sideshow Alley and hundreds of coloured showbags brighten up the concrete alleyways.

Away from the crowds, eight teenagers lie on bales of hay in a stable, swatting flies away from their faces. One is asleep in a swag next to a cow. The rest all look tired too, but they are all beaming with pride.

The group are students from Catholic Agricultural College Bindoon, and for the past five days the showground’s stables have been home for them and their cattle.

They have come from Bindoon, 80km north-east of Perth, as part of their college’s Cattle Club, an afterschool programme that teaches students to show and handle cattle.

Graeme Maitland-Smith, dressed in moleskin trousers, cattleman’s hat and obligatory showman’s tie, proudly shows off Bulldozer, named after he kept knocking Graeme over

Continued on Page 6

centre’s director, Marita Winters, told The Record the idea for the programme came from a number of calls from prison chaplains expressing concern that there were no resources available for prisoners with low levels of literacy.

“There was reading material available for people wanting to find out more about the Catholic faith,” Mrs Winter said, “but unfortunately there weren’t any alternatives for those unable to read.”

The four-CD set, which was written by the centre’s projects manager, John Collins, with the input of the prison chaplain at Sydney’s Long

Bay jail, Fr Peter Carroll, consists of 30 sessions, each of about 10 minutes’ duration. The sessions, which consist of stories and information on Catholicism, also provide times for prayer, and are designed to help listeners understand the faith in the context of popular culture.

Mrs Winters said the response so

far from chaplains had been positive and there was optimism at the enquiry centre about the future of the programme.

“While it has been written with prisoners in mind, it is also suitable for other audiences … such as patients in hospitals, people with an intellectual disability, individuals with a visual impairment, residents in nursing homes and parish groups concerned with outreach,” she said.

Funding for the production and distribution of the resource was provided by the Bishops Conference.

Wanneroo leads way with online annual report

By roBert hiini

IN A MOVE common in business and government but a rarity in the Catholic Church, the Wanneroo parish of St Anthony of Padua has published its parish priest’s annual general meeting report online. With all not-for-profit organisations facing demands for greater accountability and business acumen, along with the criticism often levelled at Church goups about the need for greater open-

ness and transparency, the innovative move by the parish in Perth’s northern suburbs could well inspire other parishes to adopt the same reporting approach as standard operating procedure.

The annual report, which has been available on the parish website for several weeks, details happenings both large and small over the past 12 months.

For parishioners and outsiders alike, the report also provides a valuable insight into the highs,

lows, trials and joys of contemporary parish life.

While growth at the parish school “continues unabated”, numbers at Mass have “plateaued”, parish priest Fr John Daly reports.

This is a “natural part of growth” and an opportunity to consolidate parish achievements.

Fr Daly directly addresses progress implementing parish goals.

“I looked at last year’s report and to my dismay my opening comments related to my hopes

of conducting a parish census and Commitment weekend,” his report says. “Obviously this hasn’t happened; however ... we are just about ready to fulfill this obligation which has been nagging at my conscience for some time.”

Among the achievements notched up in the past year is the installation of new sound and projection equipment.

On the human resources front, newly ordained priest Fr Mark Payton spent three months with

the parish; more recently St Anthony’s welcomed a new assistant priest in Fr Kenneth D’Souza AP, a Capuchin Franciscan priest from India.

“Being parish priest of St Anthony’s is something I enjoy immensely,” Fr Daly notes in his annual report.

“Certainly, there are challenges and even difficult moments to negotiate, but that is part of life’s landscape, regardless of our calling.”

Students and staff from Bindoon Agricultural College with some of their prize-winning cattle at Perth’s Royal Show.

PHOTO: SARAH MOTHERWELL

Little ones knead their Catholic faith

By RoBeRt Hiini

JUST as lightning in the east can be seen in the west, to borrow from St Matthew’s Gospel, so the great spiritual and intellectual gifts of the Catholic faith from the east are present here in Perth.

Five children entered more deeply into the faith on Sunday, 2 October, receiving their first Solemn Holy Communion at St John the Baptist Ukrainian Catholic Church in Maylands.

In the lead up to the big day, Sr Cecilia Fystor SSMI showed the children and their families how to make their own prosfora, or round bread for consecration.

A sister of the Ukranian Catholic religious congregation, the Sisters Servants of Mary Immaculate, Sr Fystor came over from Melbourne to prepare the children for the occasion.

Church administrator, Fr Wolodymyr Kalinecki said the bread making wasn’t an official ritual but was instead, a nice way of teaching the children the unity of Christ.

A piece from each child’s prosfora was placed on the diskos, a round plate or paten, in preparation for its consecration behind the iconostasis - a screen painted with religious iconography.

Taking place the day after the children made their first Reconciliation, the children received both the body and blood of Christ - the body having been intincted in the blood and placed in their mouths with a spoon.

There are around 220 families in the parish with 50-60 turning out for each weekend Mass.

Administrator, Fr Kalinecki said that if the trend in natural disasters continues more people may return to the practise of their faith

as people realise that science does not have all the answers.

“God created the world and he gave us minds, yes,” Fr Kalinecki said. “God also left us a mystery, and that’s something we have to learn.”

In the 1995 Apostolic Letter Orientale Lumen, Pope John Paul II lauded the treasures of eastern Christianity and exhorted all Roman Catholics to get to know the treasures of eastern theology and worship. While the Sunday liturgy is conducted in Ukrainian, Saturday night, 7pm liturgies are conducted in English. Fr Kalinecki said that anyone who wants to join them for worship is welcome to do so.

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Couples to engage again

A MOVEMENT that aims to “turn good marriages into great marriages” is holding a special weekend for couples on 4-6 November.

Worldwide Marriage Encounter’s weekend will take place in Middle Swan and is open to any couple.

Margaret Cordina, who helps organise the retreats with her husband Joe, says the weekends are “designed to improve couple communication” while leaving actual communication to the couples themselves.

“We’ve been involved for 18 years and it’s been fantastic,” she said. “Anyone can get a lot out of it and it’s been really great in helping us to raise our kids.”

Couples discuss their thoughts and feelings on the presentations in the privacy of their retreat bedrooms, after reflection time alone.

Topics will include communicating without blaming, and personality styles and behaviour.

Interested couples can contact Joe and Margaret on 0424 220 625 or at WAbookings@wwme.org.au.

Sculpture for St Cecilia’s

FLOREAT-Wembley parish is looking at the possibility of erecting a sculpture at St Cecilia’s Church. The parish has approached sculptor Peter Graham and is looking at spending $4000-5000 on the sculpture of a harp - the symbol of St Cecilia’s patronage of musicians and church music.The sculpture is planned to sit on a pedastal in the church’s courtyard and will be made out of steel and stainless steel.

OCT

OCT

PRINCIPALSHIP

Preparing the prosfora, under the guiding hand of Sr Cecilia Fystor.

The First Communicants, with family members. PHOTOS: ST JOHN THE BAPTIST UKRAINIAN CATHOLIC PARISH

Housing costs a threat to human rights: Vinnies

By tim Wallace

HOUSING affordability in Australia, rated by one international survey as the most expensive in the English-speaking world, is compromising basic human rights, says the St Vincent de Paul Society.

The welfare group has joined with more than 60 other community groups, including Catholic Homes, MacKillop Family Services and Sacred Heart Mission, to high-

light the growing social problem and campaign for solutions.

There is no one single cause, according to the Australians for Affordable Housing coalition, but a report issued by the group identifies as a key problem a taxation system that favours the interests of wealth accumulation at the expense of basic housing needs.

“Tax breaks such as negative gearing and capital gains tax exemptions encourage investors

to make speculative investments in the housing market,” says the report, Australia’s Broken Housing System, “They also subsidise investors to compete with first home buyers. This activity pushes up house prices.”

Due to these two tax benefits, property investors went from claiming a collective income of $700 million in 1998-99 to a collective loss of $6.5 billion in 200809, the report says. In roughly the

same time frame (1997 to 2007) the number of public housing properties shrunk by 30,000 as the population grew by 2 million people. Solutions advanced by industry commentators, such as increasing first home owner grants and cutting stamp duty, the report says, “help people who make money from selling houses, they don’t improve the situation for those who live in them. At best they’ll provide a quick fix that doesn’t last long; at worst they

drive up house prices even further.”

Increased house prices had led to more people competing for rental properties pushing up rents. Since 2005 rents in most cities have risen at twice the rate of inflation.

The most extreme manifestation of the dysfunctional housing market was the number of Australians without a safe place to sleep, with an estimated 105,000 Australians now being homeless on any given night.

Praise be modern music technology

By RoBeRt Hiini

MICHAEL Barrett, 83, doesn’t call himself a composer; he just “writes to amuse himself”.

But when musical impresario and fellow composer Myroslav Gutej heard Michael’s version of Ave Maria 13 years ago, such was the quality, he says, that he knew he had to get it recorded.

It’s been a long road to the release of Michael Barrett’s Ave Maria on CD, but the result is an aesthetic and technical achievement. Without the use a single, real stringed instrument or human voice, the duo have recorded and released two versions of the piece – one with choir and orchestra, the other with choir and pipe organ.

Myroslav has brought Michael’s work to life through the use of digital technology, years of dogged determination and an obsessive attention to detail. The non-human origins of the sounds are near impossible to pick.

A piano and accordian player by profession, Myroslav was busking on Fremantle’s bustling Cappuccino Strip one day in 1999 when Michael approached him to write an orchestral accompaniment to the composition Michael had written the previous year.

Myroslav finished writing the accompaniment in 2002. Over the next five years he attempted to record the Ave Maria, inviting singers to his home studio. Nothing sounded quite right.

Several attempts at programming the composition failed, Myroslav

said, because the technology simply wasn’t capable of reaching the standards he set for himself.

Finally, in 2008 a software application (the Symphonic Choirs –Play Edition) enabled Myroslav to use a “limiter” to make virtual voices sound warm and human.

He undertook a painstaking analysis of the human voice and made thousands of minute adjustments. This included placing the electronically sampled voices slightly out of sync with each other and varying the pronunciation of certain syllables – just as would be

heard in a human choir’s singing.

“In the world now, there’s that kind of frenetic activity that’s in your face. Well, this is the absolute opposite of that,” Myroslav says.

“It actually lowers your heart rate when you hear it.”

The pair launched the CD local-

ly in June, selling 100 copies after playing it to a congregation of 250 after a weekend Mass. They are now taking it to the wider world. A sample can be heard at their website avemaria-music.com and copies can be bought for $6 by phoning (08) 9446 8290.

Michael Barrett and Myroslav Gutej have collaborated to bring Michael’s composition of Ave Maria to life.

PHOTO: R HIINI

Forum zeroes in on needs of reconciliation

INDIGENOUS leaders used a September forum at the University of Notre Dame Australia’s Fremantle campus to share their aspirations for how legislation can be used to achieve reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

The inaugural Indigenous Justice Forum was co-hosted by the campus’ School of Law, Law Students’ Society and campus Ministry team along with the university’s centre for Indigenous Studies.

Reconciliation Australia’s Leah Armstrong highlighted the results of a study focusing on the relationship between indigenous and other Australians.

Eighty seven per cent of Australians believe the relationship is important but only nine per cent believe there is trust between the two groups, she told an audience of over 150 guests.

A panel of indigenous leaders addressing legal pathways to reconciliation emphasised that the legal system is too often used as a tool to discriminate against indigenous Australians.

The panellists included Dennis Eggington, CEO of the Aboriginal

Legal Service of WA; Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner Mick Gooda; Glen Kelly, CEO of the South West Aboriginal Land and Sea Council and Ms Tammy Solonec, Director of the National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples.

Mr Eggington stressed reconciliation cannot be achieved while indigenous Australians continue to be mistreated and overrepresented in the criminal justice system.

Mr Gooda promoted the importance of constitutional change in the reconciliation process.

“The Australian Constitution does not mention the first peoples of Australia and still permits racial discrimination,” said Mr Gooda.

“I firmly believe the time is right here and now for the Australian people to formally recognise the special and unique place Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples hold in our nation - in our Constitution.”

UNDA Aboriginal law student and event organiser Peter Dawson said that it was important for lawyers, politicians and the broader community to discuss indigenous legal issues. Father Rooney

Master of Yuat to speak at Library

By Mark reidy

A BENEDICTINE monk, who is one of the last remaining people fluent in the Aboriginal Yuat language and tradition will share his knowledge at the Catholic Library’s open day on 5 November.

Father Bernard Rooney, who has lived at the New Norcia Monastery for over 50 years, learned Yuat language, stories, music, dances and hunting methods from elders over several decades; he will talk about his recently published book The Nyoongar Legacy

Promotional services librarian Lucia Riva told The Record the open day was an opportunity for the library to showcase its unique collection of Catholic books, movies and music, as well as its range of educational resources.

“We also have specialist collections focused on educational leadership, support for students with disabilities and an Aboriginal resources collection,” Ms Riva said.

“We will be focusing on this latter collection in conjunction with Fr Rooney’s presentation.”

Also featuring on the day will be a performance by the Wadumbah Dance Group and other activities.

The open day will run from 1–3.30pm at 50 Ruislip Street in Leederville.

The event is free but bookings are required. Please contact the library on 6380 5372 for bookings or more information.

Filipinos to gather for dead

FILIPINOS will bring out their prayers for the dead with a special All Saints-All Souls Mass on Sunday, 30 October.

The Mass is being held at St Emilie’s parish church, Canning Vale at 12 noon, in part to congratulate parish priest Fr Robert Carrillo on the successful completion of the new parish church.

Fr Carrillo will join fellow Filipino Fr Armando Carandang in celebrating the Mass, with an open invitation to any Filipino priest in

the archdiocese who wishes to participate as well.

Fr Carandang, chaplain to Perth’s Filipino community, told The Record that Filipinos were similar to Italians in their fondness for praying for the dead at cemetries and their reverence for the memory of the departed. On All Souls, people return to their homes to visit their older loved ones, he said.

Organisers will erect a temporary wall on which names of the dead may be placed.

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ROBERT HIINI

captivates school children with knowledge gained from a lifetime’s learning of Aboriginal Yuat culture. PHOTO: CATHOLIC LIBRARY OF WA

MacKillop novena attracts the punters, more welcome

ANNUAL gamblers on the Melbourne Cup could ask Mary MacKillop (an expert horserider herself) for a little heavenly direction to pick the winner on 1 November and then, of course, come to the Ballajura MacKillop Novena on the following day - 2 November - to say ‘Thank you!’

Seventy two parishioners and friends attended the inaugural novena to St Mary of the Cross MacKillop on Wednesday last week.

“As Mary MacKillop grew in her spiritual life she rarely prayed for specific intentions; rather, she chose to pray that God’s will be done in all things and strove to be equally delighted when things were not going well or not so well,” said parish priest Fr John Jegorow.

“She certainly had plenty of sorrows in her life and saw the troubles very much as the will of God.

“I’m delighted with the response. There were 22 more people than I’d hoped for.”

Among those present were eight primary school students from the parish. “I am hoping that with a

little more publicity and personal invitations to parishioners from neighbouring parishes, this novena will become one of the most popular in the archdiocese.

“We will invite people of other

Warmun Josephite wins recognition

A SISTER of St Joseph has been awarded a Pride of Australia medal for her contribution to Indigenous community development.

Sr Theresa Morellini rsj was recognised in the Community Spirit category for her work as a teacher, caregiver, counsellor and drug and alcohol worker.

A member of the Warmun Aboriginal Community leadership team, Sr Morellini moved to the Kimberley in 1973 where she taught in Wyndham and Kununurra before beginning Warmun’s community school.

“I want to pay tribute to all the sisters who have lived and worked in the Kimberley since 1964 and I accept the award on behalf of all with whom I now work,” she said on the Sisters of St Joseph website.

“Together we try to educate and build a better future for all Aboriginal people in remote areas of Australia.”

She has been the Warmun community’s Social Service Coordinator for the past few years, working closely with an Aboriginal psychologist and social service agencies. It’s not the first time Sr Morellini has received a formal accolade. She was awarded an Order of Australia Medal in 2008 for her work in the Warmun community.

Christian denominations too, as Mary MacKillop is someone for all Australians. We should not forget that Mary had great Anglican and Jewish friends and her concern embraced everyone without any discrimination”

The 45 minutes of devotions starts with the regular weekday Mass at 7pm.

A short homily focuses on an aspect of Mary MacKillop’s life. Mass is followed by exposition, silent reflection with readings on a sheet for those who want it, novena prayers and benediction.

Later, participants are offered the opportunity of healing prayers and the Sacrament of Anointing led by Fr Chris Webb and Fr Jegorow.

“The response of 45 local people on a Sunday afternoon at 3pm for 60 minutes of prayer for a novena to Our Lady of Fatima suggested that at least as many would come to honour God through Mary MacKillop and indeed they did,” Fr Jegorow said.

“We are aiming for 140 plus on the day after Melbourne Cup.”

Organ on offer to quickest parish

By RoBeRt Hiini

THE public appeal for organ donations is ever-present but not for the kind Betty and John Foley have to give away.

Their Yamaha Electone B-405 organ has been sitting in their loungeroom since New Year’s Day in 1985 and they’d love to give it a new home and lease of life.

Efforts to date have been in vain with local schools and churches politely declining their offer.

“They all say they’ve already got what they want,” Betty says. “I’d be happy just to know it’s being used to good effect somewhere else.”

Perhaps a country parish could use it, Betty says, or a local church group. “It’s got good tone and can do many things. It’s like a big toy.”

One thing she is adamant she doesn’t want is to see it picked up by a flea marketeer and sold for profit. It has too much sentimen-

tal value for that. All three of the Foley’s now-adult children learnt music, with their eldest son learning on their old, but remarkably pristine organ.

It was bought new in Melbourne in 1982 for a little over $3,000. Betty still has a card showing all the models in the range with biro markings of all their prices.

Her sister, who passed away four years ago, was also an organist, playing at St Thomas the Apostle, Claremont, at St Mary Star of the Sea at Cottesloe and occasionally at Holy Rosary in Nedlands.

Betty remembers the very exacting Mgr Edward Moss asking her to pump the pedals of the parish’s “steam powered” organ while her sister played for the congregation.

Mgr Moss eventually bought an electronic organ.

Any church or group interested in the Foleys’ organ can contact The Record on 9220 5900.

Betty Foley at home with the Yamaha Electone B-405, the organ she wants to give to a parish.

PHOTO: ROBERT HIINI

Parishioners Madi Pierre, lighting the candles for the novena, with Martina Ahraja. PHOTO: FR JOHN JEGOROW

Pet blessing marks feast day

THE question was not what animals were at Morley parish for the Feast of St Francis on 4 October but which ones weren’t?

The Infant Jesus parish conducted its inaugural blessing of animals on Tuesday to mark the feast day of one of the greatest and most popular saints in history.

St Francis of Assisi embraced a radical poverty and was one of the great reformers of the Church, but is best known for his love of nature and regard for animals.

The pet blessing was the idea of one of Morley’s younger parishioners, Ben Sigle, who approached parish priest Fr Sunny Abraham OCD with the idea.

The blessing took place after the 9am Mass, in the forecourt in front of the church. Assistant priest Fr Tadgh Tierney OCD officiated while Fr Sunny captured the event on camera. Everyone behaved, even the humans.

Some came on four legs while others were carried. One of the blessed, a daschund, came in her own carry bag because her legs are paralysed.

Pope John Paul II proclaimed in 1990 that “animals possess a soul and men must love and feel solidarity with our smaller brethren”.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church states: “Animals are God’s creatures. He surrounds them with his providential care. By their mere existence they bless Him and give Him glory.

“Thus men owe them kindness. We should recall the gentleness with which saints like St Francis of Assisi or St Philip Neri treated animals.”

However, the catechism says, it is unworthy to spend money on animals that should as a priority go to the relief of human misery. “One can love animals; one should not direct to them the affection due only to persons.”

St Andrew’s got talent, for a cause

ST ANDREW’S parish youth in Clarkson scored a musical “touchdown” with their very own St Andrew’s Got Talent night a little over a month ago.

Inspired by the television show of a similar name, a host of performers aged from eight to 30 put their tuneful gifts on display, with song, dance and instrumental numbers featured throughout.

Unlike the TV shows that inspired the event, St Andrew’s

Got Talent did not involve a panel of caustic judges. Instead, an appreciative local audience of over 200 parishioners clapped in celebration of their parish’s own homegrown talent.

Youth coordinator Tanya Finch said the event was staged to generate community spirit and to raise funds for their fledgling youth group. Such was its success, she said, she has been implored by locals to make it an annual event.

Theology at home in all spheres of Catholic life

THE place of theology in three “homes” – the academic, social and family settings – was the subject addressed by one the world’s top biblical scholars who dropped by St Charles Seminary in Guildford.

Noted biblical scholar Father Gerald O’Collins SJ, emeritus professor at the pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, visited St Charles on Tuesday 13 September.

Fr O’Collins, who has most recently published a book critical on scholarly grounds of serious flaws in the portrayal of Christianity by popular author Philip Pullman, said theology should not be confined to the academic sphere.

Nor should it be regarded as inaccessible to Catholics in general. Rather, Christians should integrate it in all aspects of their lives.

The seminary’s rector, Mgr Kevin Long, said the visit by one of the Church’s top specialists had been great for the St Charles community.

“Our seminarians felt blessed that such a world-class speaker inspired, encouraged and visited them,” he said.

On Friday 23 September, students at the seminary took a break from lessons and visited Araluen gardens in the hills of Roleystone to relax and absorb the remarkable horticultural beauty of the popular Perth site.

The visit sprang from Fr John O’Reilly and Br John Carrigg cfc reminiscing about their childhood visits to Araluen which included swimming in the pool and participating in sports events.

Father O’Reilly is the First Year formator at the seminary while Br Carrigg, a Christian Brother, is Dean of Studies.

With it being the season of Spring, on display was the picturesque scenery of the Roleystone hills, the bushland setting and gardens in full bloom.

Bindoon’s cattle class stands out from the herd

Continued from Page 1

The Year Eight student says he hopes to have a career in cowshowing one day.

This is the 15th year the Bindoon Cattle Club has exhibited at the royal show. This year’s club contingent includes 10 students, four staff members and a select group of shorthorn and cross-breed cows. At night the humans sleep at the Edmund Rice Community at Westcourt, waking up at 5am to return to the showground stables. Blue, red and gold ribbons tied to the stables are evidence of prizes the club’s heifers and bulls have won. This year’s prizes included first, second and third in the heifer class and the award for supreme shorthorn junior heifer. The students are particularly proud of placing 2nd in the largest bull class in the show. The cattle were blessed last

month by the college’s chaplain, Fr Andrew Bowrow, along with the rest of the college’s animals. Every cow, pig, horse, lamb, dog and chicken at the college is blessed annually with holy water and a personal prayer is spoken for each animal.

The cattle stables are at the heart of the Claremont showgrounds. Agriculture is the soul of the Perth Royal Show, in its 170th year, with animals and farming machinery the main attractions before the rides and show bags captured the attention of younger crowds.

Although the students said they enjoyed the rides and showbags, they loved working with cattle. Shekkira Jones, a Year 10 student, relates with excitement the news that one of the club’s heifers is being driven home to Bindoon that day, to give birth to a calf.

Craig Dilley, who is in Year 11, says he joined the Cattle Club

because there is nothing to do after classes out in the country and it gave him something different to do, as well as the opportunity to be part of the Royal Show as a competitor and to win ribbons.

Billi Marshall, a Year 10 student, has come to the Perth Royal Show with Cattle Club for the first time.

Billi’s father, Kevin, runs Cattle Club and she has grown up around farming, but says a love for cows is not necessarily a family trait. “My older sister wouldn’t touch a cow as far as she can kick it,” she says.

Billi describes herself as more of a “horse person”, but through the Cattle Club she had improved her confidence around animals.

“Working with cattle has made me more connected with my horse,” she says.

“I think if I can lead a 700-kilogram bull around a ring I can obviously handle something else.”

Festooned in ribbons, one of the Cattle Club’s prizewinners gets close attention from a Bindoon student at the Royal Show. PHOTO: SARAH MOTHERWELL

“Animals are God’s creatures .... By their mere existence they bless Him and give Him glory.” PHOTO: INFANT JESUS PARISH

PHOTO: ST ANDREW’S PARISH

PHOTO: ST ANDREW’S PARISH

Seminary rector Mgr Kevin Long and students at Araluen.

Indonesia can lead the world

By Cindy Wooden

VATICAN CITY – By promoting dialogue and defending the rights of minorities, Catholics in Indonesia will contribute to the harmony of their nation and be an example to people in other parts of the world, Pope Benedict XVI told the country’s bishops.

“Continue to bear witness to the image and likeness of God in each man, woman and child, regardless of their faith, by encouraging everyone to be open to dialogue in the service of peace and harmony,”

the Pope told the bishops. The 36 bishops of Indonesia were making their ad limina visits to brief the Pope and Vatican officials on what is happening in their dioceses.

Catholics make up about 3 percent of the population in Indonesia; Muslims account for more than 85 per cent of the population, and there are significant communities of Protestants, Hindus and Buddhists.

The Pope told the bishops, “By doing everything possible to ensure that the rights of minorities in your country are respected, you further

the cause of tolerance and mutual harmony in your country and beyond.”

While Indonesia’s constitution recognises the religious freedom of all its citizens and the country has a tradition of interreligious harmony, the growth of fundamentalist movements over the past 10 years has led to tensions and even violence, including the destruction of churches and mosques, several bishops told Catholic News Service.

Pope Benedict told the bishops, “Ensure that those whom you shepherd know that they, as Christians,

are to be agents of peace, perseverance and charity.”

Even when unjustly attacked, he said, Christians must follow the example of Jesus who “taught us to respond in all situations with forgiveness, mercy and love in truth.”

Peaceful coexistence and cooperation among Indonesia’s population of various religious and ethnic groups means the country is “wellplaced to make important contributions to the quest for peace and understanding among the peoples of the world,” the Pope said.

Like Christians everywhere, the

Five pillars for Catholics too

By Cindy Wooden

VATICAN CITY – Indonesia’s Catholic bishops want all in their country to defend the five principles on which the nation was officially founded, including belief in God, unity and justice for all.

While more than 85 per cent of Indonesia’s almost 240 million inhabitants are Muslim, “it is not an Islamic country, but one built on very solid humanitarian principles of belief in God, social justice, democracy,” said Bishop Joseph Suwatan of Manado, former president of the country’s bishops’ conference.

The Indonesian bishops were making their ad limina visits to the Vatican in late September and early October. During the visits, they update the Pope and Vatican officials about what is going on in their dioceses.

In Bishop Suwatan’s region, the northern half of Sulawesi Island, most of the people are Muslim or Protestant. Catholics are less than 3 per cent of the population, and there are significant groups of Hindus and Buddhists.

The island traditionally had been Christian, but especially with the government’s “transmigration” programmes of the 1970s and 1980s, designed to alleviate crowding in densely populated areas and give people land in remote areas, the population became more mixed.

Indonesia is the country with the largest number of Muslims in the world, but Islam in Indonesia has been deeply inculturated and reflects both the strong faith and piety of Islam and the peaceful coexistence of different peoples “that are part of the local wisdom,” he said.

Bishop Suwatan said the rise of fundamentalism and fanaticism among Muslims seen in Indonesia in the last decade is the result of influence from outside the country, particularly from the Middle East.

“The moderates are against these things - they are the majority and

we ask them not to be silent,” he said.

The bishop said his own family, like most others in Indonesia, exchange visits and gifts with their neighbours of other religions on holidays. “Usually, it’s the housewives exchanging foods and cakes,” but religious leaders also send formal holiday messages to each other and organise visits on important religious feasts.

When there is violence between members of different religious communities in any part of Indonesia, he said, the religious leaders get

together, hold a press conference to denounce the violence and, if the incident occurred in their area, visit the site and try to bring calm and understanding.

In North Sulawesi, where Christians still are the majority, “we try to take care that Christian youths do not burn the mosque” out of some kind of misguided solidarity with Christians attacked elsewhere, he said.

Bishop Leo Laba Ladjar of Jayapura, in Papua, Indonesia’s easternmost province, said traditionally his area also has been pre-

dominantly Protestant, although the number of Muslims is growing and has almost reached the number of Catholics, especially in the south.

The bishop, who is chairman of the Papua Council of Religious Leaders, said that “among the leaders there is good dialogue.

“Among the people, there are sometimes conflicts, even among Christians. There is no open conflict with the Muslims, but some Protestants are so afraid of the growing number of Muslims because there are radicals among them (the Muslims).” CNS

Catholic community in Indonesia has an obligation to share with others the Gospel message, he said.

The first way to share God’s love with humanity is to be loving and charitable, the Pope said.

“This will not only contribute to the spiritual vitality of the Church as she grows in confidence through humble yet courageous witness; it will also strengthen Indonesian society by promoting those values that your fellow citizens hold dear: tolerance, unity and justice for all citizens,” the Pope said.

CNS

Skating fall got Italian’s canonisation cause rolling

VATICAN CITY – Thanks to the healing of a young man from the United States who was severely injured in a rollerblading accident, Italian Blessed Louis Guanella will be among three new saints proclaimed by Pope Benedict XVI in late October.

William Glisson, now 30 and married, was 21 years old when he and a friend were rollerblading down the Baltimore Pike in Springfield, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia. Glisson was skating backward, without a helmet, hit a hole and fell, hitting his head.

The young man was in a coma for nine days and underwent skull surgery twice, but the doctors’ prognosis was still grave.

A family friend, Dr Noreen Yoder, gave Glisson’s mother two relics of Blessed Louis Guanella. Dr Yoder worked at a rehabilitation centre in Springfield run by the Opera Don Guanella.

According to the website of the Opera Don Guanella, Glisson was released from hospital less than a month after the accident and returned to work seven months later.

Glisson’s healing was accepted by the Vatican as the miracle needed for Blessed Guanella’s canonisation, scheduled for 23 October.

The Italian priest (1842-1915) founded the Servants of Charity, the Daughters of St Mary of Providence, and the Confraternity of St Joseph, whose members pledge to pray for the sick and dying.

Also set for canonisation are: Italian Blessed Guido Maria Conforti, founder of the Xaverian Missionaries, who lived 1865-1931; and Spanish Blessed Bonifacia Rodriguez Castro, 1837-1905, founder of the Servants of St Joseph, a congregation originally dedicated to educating poor women. CNS

Overwork, not loneliness, is priests’ big burden

By nanCy Frazier o’Brien

WASHINGTON – Monsignor

Stephen Rossetti is out to correct the myth the typical Catholic priest is “a lonely, dispirited figure living an unhealthy life that breeds sexual deviation,” as one writer once put it. And he has the data to prove it.

The research is “consistent, replicated many times and now incontrovertible” that priests as a group are happy, Mgr Rossetti told a symposium on the priesthood at The Catholic University of America.

The symposium was built around Why Priests Are Happy: A Study

of the Psychological and Spiritual Health of Priests, a new book by Mgr Rossetti. The book’s conclusions are based on a survey of 2,482 priests from 23 US dioceses in 2009, supplemented by a 2004 survey of 1,242 priests from 16 dioceses and other studies. The research found, among other things, that priests are “no more and no less depressed than anyone else in the world,” “a little bit better than the laity” in studies that measure human intimacy and “quite a bit lower than the general population” in the degree that they are experiencing emotional burn-

out, the priest said. More than 90 per cent of priests said they receive the emotional support they need, 83 per cent said they are able to share problems and feelings and only 22 per cent said they are lonely.

The vast majority of priests cited lay friends as one of their major supports.

“That’s what priests do - make relationships,” Mgr Rossetti said. He expressed concern, however, that 42 per cent of priests in the 2004 survey - “and probably more than 50 per cent today” - said they “feel overwhelmed by the amount of work they have to do.”

“We need to do something about that,” he said.

“We need to get together with the bishops and say, ‘Let’s talk about this.’”

Mgr Rossetti said the primary source of happiness for priests is “a powerful spiritual life” and “a connection to God and his people.”

“When you get closer to the Lord you build friendships,” he said. “If you don’t love the God image in the person next to you, how can you love a God you cannot see?”

Those who said they engage in private prayer for up to an hour each day are “less emotionally

exhausted, less depressed, less likely to be obese and less likely to be lonely,” he said.

He said younger priests are more likely to participate in “traditional prayer practices” such as eucharistic adoration and recitation of the rosary, but not out of a desire to return to a pre-Vatican II Church. They also are much more likely than those in the middle years of their priesthood to affirm the value of celibacy.

The priest said he is not sure why there is such resistance in the media to the idea that priests are happy, despite the evidence. - CNS

Harmony’s way ... Catholics in Indonesia can set an example for the rest of the world, the Pope says. PHOTO: CNS/BEAWIHARTA

Apple’s icon ituned into Jesuit spirit

VATICAN CITY - Like Pope Pius XI, who founded Vatican Radio and built the Vatican train station, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs recognised the importance of expanding communication, a Jesuit told Vatican Radio.

Jobs, 56, died on 5 October after a long battle with pancreatic cancer.

Father Antonio Spadaro, the new editor of the influential Jesuit journal Civilta Cattolica, told Vatican Radio that Jobs made technology part of the lives of millions and millions of people, not just technicians.

“Steve Jobs had something in common with Pius XI and that is

French bishops ask voters to see new France

PARIS – France’s Catholic bishops have urged citizens to accept their country is no longer culturally homogeneous and said they should be ready to look at candidates in new ways in the nation’s 2012 presidential election.

“Voting cannot just be dictated by habit, membership of a social class or the pursuit of particular interests; it should take account of the challenges presenting themselves and aim for what could make our country nicer and more humane to live in,” said the permanent council of the bishops’ conference in a six-page declaration.

The global financial crisis had added to existing “social and political difficulties”. Mass immigration had ended the “cultural homogeneity” of Western societies, while the spread of individualism risked damaging social life and the sense of a common good, the document said.

Catholics make up two-thirds of France’s 60 million inhabitants, although fewer than one in 10 attend Sunday Mass and 40 per cent deny any faith.

“In recent debates, certain excessive reactions have shown that intolerance toward the Catholic Church (and religions in general) isn’t just a remnant of the past,” the statement says. “As citizens in a democratic society, Catholics do not intend to be barred from speaking. In explaining what they think, they are not going against the intelligence and free judgement of those who do not share their faith. Instead, they favour calm, open application of the laws and rules that define the secular pact of our shared republic.” CNS

that he understood that communication is the greatest value we have at our disposal today and we must make it bear fruit,” the Jesuit told the radio.

Fr Spadaro said Steve Jobs had a “great ability to believe in dreams, to see life not only in terms of little daily things, but to have a vision in front of him. Basically, Steve Jobs’ most important message was this, ‘Stay hungry, stay foolish’ - in other words, maintain the ability to see life in new ways.”

The “stay hungry” quote was from a commencement address Jobs gave at California’s Stanford

University in 2005. On his own blog at www.cyberteologia.it, Fr Spadaro embedded a video of Jobs giving the Stanford commencement address and wrote about how some of his points echoed points made by the Jesuits’ founder, St Ignatius of Loyola.

Jobs told the new graduates, “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.”

Fr Spadaro said that in his Spiritual Exercises, St Ignatius wrote that one way of making an important choice is to examine how

one would go about making that decision if he knew he were about to die.

“In the cases of Ignatius and Steve, death isn’t a bogeyman,” but is present as a reminder that in the face of death, the only thing that remains is what is truly important for each person, he wrote.

“I don’t know if Jobs was a believer,” the Jesuit wrote. In the Stanford speech, he said, Jobs was “speaking simply about the interior disposition one must have when making important decisions in life, focusing on what counts. No one, believer or non-believer, can make choices

Frolic in Filipino floodwaters

US law forces Church to drop orphans

PEORIA - Citing increasing clashes between Illinois law and Church teaching, Bishop Daniel Jenky announced Catholic Charities (CC) of the Diocese of Peoria is withdrawing from all state-funded social service contracts.

To prevent disruption to the 1,000 foster care children and families now served by CC, plans call for those state-funded contracts to be transferred to a newly formed nonprofit entity called the Centre for Youth and Family Solutions. The diocese and CC will have no connection to the new entity.

CC and Catholic Social Services of Southern Illinois have been involved in state legal proceedings since Illinois recognised civil unions. At issue is the agencies’ practice of referring prospective adoptive and foster parents who are cohabiting, regardless of sexual orientation, to other agencies or the Department of Children and Family Services. The state interprets this as discriminatory to same-sex couples under the new Religious Freedom Protection and Civil Union Act, and a judge ruled the state could begin cancelling its foster care and

adoption contracts with CC. CC’s decision to withdraw from ongoing litigation and all state-funded social service contracts came after months of deliberation and prayer, said Bishop Jenky.

“I have a responsibility as bishop to assure CC operates consistently with the teachings and values of the Church,” he said. Recalling the agency’s nearly 100-year history of serving the poor and vulnerable, he said it was in keeping with that mission that CC partnered with the state to provide services to those most in need. CNS

Pakistan plague of biblical proportions

LAHORE - The vicar general of the Lahore archdiocese urged Catholics to seek divine intervention as a dengue epidemic added to what he called the “10 plagues of Egypt” that are gripping Pakistan. Following a Mass at Sacred Heart Cathedral in Lahore, Father Andrew Nisari called for families to pray daily, including the rosary, to protect people against the virus.

“The situation in this country is like the 10 plagues of Egypt. Mosquitoes have turned against humans, floods are destroying everything and our houses are plunged into darkness amid endless power cuts. The devotion to Mary can protect you as well as medicines,” he said, adding the deadly virus was currently claiming at least six lives each day.

By late September the epidemic, which began in mid-July, had killed more than 140 people. Some 14,500 people in Lahore alone have tested positive for the virus.

Special prayers were offered in churches for the recovery of three priests, one of whom is in critical condition. The virus has also affected Church workers at various agencies.

Church-run and government schools reopened in late September after being closed for 10 days for fumigation. Returning students were told to wear long-sleeve shirts and long pants.

The World Health Organisation’s Geneva mission recently sent an expert to Lahore to offer technical assistance to local experts regarding the epidemic. CN

in life if he thinks he’s immortal.” Under the headline “The talented Mr Apple,” the Vatican newspaper put news of Jobs’ death on its front page.

“Steve Jobs was one of the protagonists and symbols of the Silicon Valley revolution,” which brought changes not only in technology, but was also a “revolution of customs, mentality and culture,” said L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper.

Jobs was “a visionary who united technology and art,” the paper said. He was a man of “talent, pure talent.” CNS

BRITAIN

BBC date changes an act of “foolishness”

In a front-page commentary, L’Osservatore Romano has said it is “historically senseless hypocrisy” for the BBC to drop the dating abbreviations BC and AD on the grounds they might offend nonChristians. The Vatican newspaper said the change reflected a wider effort to “cancel every trace of Christianity from Western culture.” The British media corporation recently announced it would replace BC (Before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini, or Year of the Lord) with BCE (Before Common Era) and CE (Common Era.) “To deny the historically revolutionary importance of the coming of Christ on earth, which is also accepted by those who do not recognise him as the son of God, is an act of enormous foolishness,” the Vatican newspaper’s commentary said.

UNITED STATESY

US Pastoral - ‘not a voter’s guide’

A new introduction to the US bishops’ document on political responsibility reminds Catholics some issues “involve the clear obligation to oppose intrinsic evils which can never be justified,” while others “require action to pursue justice and promote the common good.” The brief introduction to the 2011 reissue of Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship says the document “does not offer a voter’s guide, scorecard of issues or direction on how to vote”. Rather, “It applies Catholic moral principles to a range of important issues and warns against misguided appeals to ‘conscience’ to ignore fundamental moral claims, to reduce Catholic moral concerns to one or two matters, or to justify choices simply to advance partisan, ideological or personal interests.”

PAKISTAN

Archbishop urges Pakistan cooperation

Archbishop Savio Hon Tai-Fai, secretary of the Congregation of the Evangelisation of Peoples, has called for religious cooperation in Pakistan. “As a small minority in a predominantly Muslim society, the Church in Pakistan lives and moves within a framework which calls for sensitivity and great love for our Muslim brothers and sisters,” he said. “Christian love urges us to dialogue and to promote positive and constructive relations with individuals and communities of other religions. It is uplifting to hear that tremendous effort has been made in Pakistan to witness the fact that Christians and Muslims can work and walk together in peace,” he said in a message marking a new missionary initiative of the Catholic Church in Pakistan.

Floodwaters in Calumpit, near Manila, after Typhoon Nalgae, the second to hit the Philippines in a week, brought heavy rain, prompting the evacuation of hundreds of residents in danger of landslides.

PHOTO: CNS/CHERYL RAVELO

A man fumigates for mosquitoes in Lahore, Pakistan. The dengue epidemic, which began in July, has killed more than 140 people.

PHOTO: CNS/MOHSIN RAZA

Treat child refugees as children first: Vatican

By Kristin GoBBerG

VATICAN CITY – Where “public opinion and political expediency” have led to harsher treatment of refugees and asylum seekers, there is still a special obligation to assist child refugees, said Archbishop Silvano Tomasi of the Vatican.

In 2008, he said, 11,292 applications for asylum were lodged by unaccompanied minors in 22 member states of the European Union.

With the violence across North Africa and the Arab world this year, “hundreds of unauthorised lone boys are making their way across Europe.”

The Archbishop said where minors arrive “under false pretences as forerunners to trigger family reunions or as victims of smuggling and trafficking,” special attention must be paid to the possibility they are being exploited by adults.

“ In this context, processing children’s applications for asylum

should be given a greater priority,” he said.

“Unaccompanied minors must be treated first and foremost as children and their best interest must be a primary consideration independent of the reason for their flight,” he said.

“The increased visibility acquired by unaccompanied minors claiming asylum in developed countries calls for a renewed attention to their need of protection and the development of practical measures to help

them adjust to the new environment.”

Archbishop Tomasi said unaccompanied child refugees should not be placed with adults in detention facilities, and cited research that showed minors who seek spiritual guidance find an important source of motivation and support in religion.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees defines unaccompanied minors as under 18 years or under a country’s legal age of majority,

“separated from both parents, and not with and being cared for by a guardian or other adult.”

Archbishop Tomasi said, “Creative compassion becomes possible if there is a genuine sense of solidarity and responsibility toward needier members of our human family.

Refugees are not anonymous numbers but people, men, women and children with individual stories, with talents to offer and aspirations to be met.”

Horn of Africa risks ‘lost generation’

By Carol Glatz

VATICAN CITY – Not only are millions of lives at risk in the Horn of Africa due to hunger and drought, those who escape famine risk becoming a lost generation due to a severe lack of stability, education and resources, said a top Vatican official.

“The millions of displaced people on the move now in an effort to survive will tomorrow become refugees, illegal immigrants, without a nation, without a home, work and a community,” said Guinean Cardinal Robert Sarah, the president of the Pontifical Council Cor Unum.

“A whole generation risks being lost,” he said.

The only way to guarantee a future after the humanitarian crisis abates, he said, is to create schools where skills, communities and futures are built.

The cardinal launched an appeal for a school to be built in every village.

“Where there is an education, there is a possible future, there will be work for tomorrow and families will form,” he said.

The Church has a long tradition of education and forming moral consciences, so Catholics should be especially dedicated to this initiative, he said.

Cardinal Sarah led a panel of speakers presenting ideas that came out of a Vatican-sponsored meeting with major Catholic charitable organisations on the situation in the Horn of Africa.

Pope Benedict XVI, who appealed for increased aid, wanted the meeting so Catholic agencies could review the current situation and look at ways the Church is responding to the humanitarian emergency, the Cardinal said.

Cor Unum also invited a representative of the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury for the meeting as the Pope had received a letter from Archbishop Rowan Williams expressing his concern over the situation unfolding in the Horn of Africa.

“Faith communities have a distinctive role to play” in addressing such crises because they are already a part of the local communities and help with long-term development, which in turn helps communities to become more resilient to future catastrophes, Archbishop Williams wrote in a separate message to

Pope calls for prayers and aid for Africa

POPE Benedict XVI has asked the international community to continue aid to the drought and famine-stricken Horn of Africa and for individuals to offer prayers and donate money to help the millions facing death.

“I invited everyone to offer prayers and concrete aid for their many brothers and sisters so harshly tried, and particularly for the children who die in that region each day because of sickness and a lack of water and food,” the Pope said.

Cardinal Sarah. The Archbishop wrote that he hoped the meeting would mark the start of “new opportunities for ecumenical collaboration” as well as concrete action that would continue to

Attending the general audience were Cardinal Robert Sarah, president of Pontifical Council Cor Unum, and Bishop Giorgio Bertin of Djibouti, apostolic administrator of Mogadishu, Somalia. They were joined by representatives of Catholic charities from around the world including the US bishops’ Catholic Relief Services and a representative of the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury to participate in a Vaticansponsored meeting on the situ-

positively impact vulnerable communities.

According to the United Nations, 13 million people in the Horn of Africa are in urgent need of emergency aid, particularly in Somalia,

ation. Pope Benedict said the meeting was designed to “verify and give further energy to the initiatives aimed at facing this humanitarian emergency.”

The worst drought in six decades has hit Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia, already suffering because of lack of central government and ongoing conflicts. The drought killed crops and animals, triggering a famine and leaving at least 10 million people in need of aid, according to Caritas Internationalis.

where thousands of people risk death. Caritas Internationalis has helped 1.1 million people in the region, especially the most vulnerable like the elderly, women, children and the disabled, said Michel

Roy, the confederation’s general secretary. Through its appeal campaign, Caritas Internationalis has raised 31 million euros (about US$41.7 million) and was expecting to raise a total of 60 million euros (US$80.7 million) to provide emergency food aid, clean water, sanitation, drought-resistant seeds, and develop water conservation systems, he said.

Ken Hackett, outgoing president of the US bishops’ Catholic Relief Services (CRS), said the agency’s short and long-term projects have made a real difference in people’s lives. Those communities helped in past crises are much better off than people in areas CRS was unable to reach, he said.

“Our contributions, while very significant over the years, are only a small part of what needs to be done” because the scope of problem is so great, he added.

“Sunday is the Lord’s day ... and also God’s gift to us”: Cardinal Arinze

By sueann Howell

CHARLOTTE, NC - Christians must keep Sunday holy and know “religion is not an option”, Cardinal Francis Arinze told attendees at the Diocese of Charlotte’s eucharistic congress.

Religion was “not an accessory footnote,” he said. “It is the duty of the human creature in front of God the creator.”

Cardinal Arinze spoke about the importance of Sunday Mass and the observance of Sunday as the Lord’s day in an increasingly secularised world.

“Sunday is the Lord’s day, the day of Christ, the day of the Church and also God’s gift to us,” said the Cardinal.

“The eucharistic celebration is central to Sunday. It is important to see Sunday as source, summit

and centre of Catholic life,” he said. The congress included a eucharistic procession through downtown Charlotte; Mass and confession; eucharistic adoration and educational programmes in both English and Spanish for children and adults.

Speaking to a crowd of more than 2,500, Cardinal Arinze emphasised why Christians should keep Sunday holy despite the challenges and dis-

tractions they face. “All time, all history belongs to God.

“Every instant should be spent in adoring and praising him and rejoicing in his presence. Nevertheless, it remains true that God has singled out a day in the week when humanity should pay special attention to him,” he said.

“The Third Commandment is very clear: ‘Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.’ The day of the

Lord is therefore not just a day of rest for man.

“It is primarily a day in which man manifests his gratitude to God the creator by adoration, praise, thanksgiving and by admiration of the wonders provided by God. And the Church does this especially by the eucharistic celebration,” which is “’the fount and apex of the whole Christian life,’” he said, quoting Lumen Gentium

Internally displaced Somalis waiti for relief food in Mogadishu.

PHOTO: CNS/FEISAL OMAR

The Spring

God’s Creation of

Western Australia blossoms

Western Australia’s legendary wildflowers caught the eyes of Midland parishioners Kieran and Gail Ryan on a 4300-kilometre road trip through the state’s northwest. The stunning beauty that the couple encountered was a vivid testimony to the beauty of the natural world created by God …

PHOTOS

KIERAN RYAN

“ WE need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature – trees, flowers, grass –grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and sun, how they move in silence … We need silence to be able to touch souls.

Blessed Teresa of Calcutta

THINK of all the beauty still left around you and be happy.

Anne Frank

THOU shalt also be a crown of beauty in the hand of Jehovah, and a royal diadem in the hand of thy God. Isaiah 62:3

OUT of Zion, the perfection of beauty, God hath shone forth.

Psalm 50:2

HONOUR and strength are before him: strength and beauty are his sanctuary.

Psalm 96:6

I GAVE in and admitted that God was God.

CS Lewis

THE ideals that have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been kindness, beauty and truth. The three subjects of human efforts, possessions, outward success, luxury, have always seemed to me to be contemptible.

Albert Einstein

I BELIEVE in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

CS Lewis

Man of the Rethinking GK Chesterton

The reputation of GK Chesterton (1874-1936) been difficult to assess, because so many of his fans from the Catholic right have tended to emphasise his apologetics. Yet the evergreen social and political ideas of the author known mostly for his Father Brown mystery stories are winning a wider circle of admirers that defy conventional categories, writes Jay Parini.

IT HAS been over half a century since Maisie Ward’s major biography of GK Chesterton (1874-1936) appeared in 1943. Since then, Chesterton has largely been a darling of Anglophiles, conservatives, and orthodox Roman Catholics. And oh, yes, read by mystery-story lovers everywhere for his Father Brown series.

More recently, however, he has begun to find a sympathetic audience in wider literary circles, as evidenced by GK Chesterton, Ian Ker’s detailed and compelling new biography from Oxford University Press, and a generous collection of his writings this year from Everyman’s Library, selected by Ker, senior research fellow at Oxford University. In my view, it’s time Chesterton was taken seriously as a major critic and biographer, a thinker of sharp wit and deep learning.

His work includes nearly every type of writing—poetry, philosophy, literary criticism, biography, political and social argument, playwriting, detective fiction, and Christian apologetics. Yet he was, in the main, a journalist at heart, pumping out weekly columns for a variety of papers, especially The Daily Mail, on every conceivable subject, and his devoted audience included the likes of Mahatma Gandhi, who was “thunderstruck” by Chesterton’s fierce independence of thought.

Writers often gravitated toward Chesterton, including George Bernard Shaw and HG Wells, both ardent socialists but good, if contentious, friends during his lifetime. Indeed, Chesterton debated Shaw in public on several occasions, and Chesterton’s own idiosyncratic but highly suggestive history of the world (The Everlasting Man, 1925) might be considered a riposte to Wells’ The Outline of History (1919). Among later writers, TS Eliot and JRR Tolkien admired him, while WH Auden took the trouble to edit a selection from Chesterton’s non-

fiction in 1970. The reason for the interest is simple: few writers have ranged so widely and so well in aphoristic prose that repays thoughtful rereading. At his best, as in Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (1906), Chesterton ranks among the finest critics of English literature.

His studies of Victorian fiction and poetry still command our attention, and his Autobiography (1936) is among the treasures of that genre—a genial if rambling production that brings English life and letters during the early decades of the 20th century into vivid relief.

fied more with the beer-drinking masses than snobs with glasses of sherry. His lifelong interest in the Middle Ages was less about a love of feudalism and hierarchy than a warm identification with peasants and craftsmen.

As Ker notes, he held in high regard the idea of “self-government,” which he saw in the mediaeval guild system, of which Britain’s trade unions were but “a ghost.” There is what Ker calls a “defence of the common man” that ran through Chesterton’s writings — and separated him from most other writers of his era.

erary historians. Chesterton’s ideal critic was an oppositional, even quarrelsome figure, one who tore down false idols and found value in unexpected places; he argued frequently that criticism does not exist to say what authors already understood about themselves. Rather, “it exists to say the things about them which they did not know themselves.” In that spirit, far from being a defender of conventionality, Chesterton was a natural anarchist, a beery supporter of small-scale government.

Far from being a defender of conventionality, Chesterton was a natural anarchist, a beery supporter of small-scale government.

Yet Chesterton’s reputation has been difficult to assess, in part because so many of his fans from the Catholic and political right have tended to emphasise only his Christian apologetics, as in Orthodoxy (1908). Yet even that is a more complicated work than often portrayed, with little of the theological rigidity and sense of moral stricture one associates with the term. For instance, Chesterton took a detour at one point to discuss the Fenians, Irish rebels against British rule, whom most regarded as terrorists. With his usual enjoyment of paradox, he argued “the lawlessness of Ireland is a Christian lawlessness, founded on reason and justice.”

Chesterton was a lifelong Christian who, as Ker shows, moved inexorably from the Anglo-Catholicism of his childhood to Rome (he was received into the Roman Church in 1922). Even then, he remained complicated and ironical, reassessing such major figures in the history of Christianity as Thomas Aquinas and Francis of Assisi.

In truth, Chesterton was a natural democrat who identi-

As Chesterton put it, the “merely educated can scarcely ever be brought to believe that this world is itself an interesting place. When they look at a work of art, good or bad, they expect to be interested, but when they look at a newspaper advertisement or a group in the street, they do not, properly and literally speaking, expect to be interested. But to common and simple people this world is a work of art, though it is, like many great works of art, anonymous.”

In his early study of Dickens, he admired the author’s “carnival of liberty”: the “buffoonery and bravery of the spirit of the Middle Ages,” the “large jokes and long stories and brown ale.” By contrast, “The Pre-Raphaelites, the Gothicists, the admirers of the Middle Ages, had in their subtlety and sadness the spirit of the present day.” Like Chaucer, Chesterton explained, Dickens “loved story within story, everyman telling a tale...”

The study of Dickens was seminal, sparking a revival of interest in the novelist, granting respectability to a figure whose popularity with the masses had diminished his standing among critics and lit-

In his essays (and the Father Brown stories), he mounted an attack on capitalism and the class system. He abhorred Britain’s class society, which he believed was dominated, in the modern age, by soulless materialism.

As for the aristocracy: “The typical aristocrat was the typical upstart” whose family was “founded on stealing” and whose “family was stealing still.”

One hears this characteristic note of prickly opposition in the very first sentence of the Autobiography: “Bowing down in blind credulity, as is my custom, before mere authority and the tradition of the elders, superstitiously swallowing a story I could not test at the time by experiment or private judgement, I am firmly of the opinion that I was born on the 29th of May, 1874, on Campden Hill, Kensington; and baptised according to the formularies of the Church of England in a little church of St George opposite the large Waterworks Tower that dominated that ridge.”

In other words, for Chesterton, hardly any firm ground exists. So he bows in “blind credulity” to “mere authority” and the “tradition of elders,” though he seems to do so for whimsical reasons. He teases the reader at every turn, pulling out rhetorical rugs wherever he can, seeming to side with religion, then undercutting it as superstition; playing with “believing” in his birthplace and dates while denying any direct

Chesterton’s legendary good cheer was not baseless optimism: it arose from a deep conviction that the human imagination is glorious and has its origins in divine realities.

ILLUSTRATION:

ELIZABETH BOGONI

experience of the “facts.” But he makes sure to place the church of his baptism under the shadow of a waterworks, thereby showing himself already in a contrary stance toward modern life, with its ugly mechanical systems. In a way, all of Chesterton’s writing plays with paradox in this way.

Perhaps that is why he had a healthy disregard for “facts,” not unlike Oscar Wilde, who complained that the English “were always degrading truths into facts.” Chesterton tried in his criticism (which was largely biographical in flavour) to get at the character of a figure before worrying too much about specific details (his critics often pointed to factual errors in his work, although those were rarely deal-breaking, merely a sign of sloppiness).

Like Dickens and Wilde and so many other British writers before and after him, Chesterton

was popular in the United States, where he made a good deal of money by lecturing. He cut a memorable figure, with his flowing cape and walking stick, and his 6-foot-4-inch frame, weighing in at nearly 136 kilograms. And not unlike Dickens, he left America with mixed emotions.

On the one hand, he condemned

afraid of curiosity,” and full of “vivacity.” Above all, Americans had an abundant power of wonder. And, for Chesterton, wonder was accompanied by joy: “The mass of men,” he wrote at the conclusion of Orthodoxy, “have been forced to be gay about the little things, but sad about the big ones. Nevertheless (I offer

He made a lot of money in America but, not unlike Dickens, left it with mixed emotions.

the materialism, the worship of success, and emphasis on conformity. Yet he admired the fact that Americans had “a very real respect for work” and for “the dignity of labour,” and had no attachment to the English idea of leisure, which had been elevated to a kind of ideal in the Old World. He also liked the fact that Americans were childlike, “not

my last dogma defiantly) it is not native to man to be so. Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul.”

It is the quality of wonder

that so many readers and critics have lost sight of in the priggish, conservative Chesterton they seem to prefer. This man was an eagle, flying high over the barren landscapes of modernism, and his astute challenges to mundane views challenge us to rethink thoughtless positions on a variety of subjects.

His good cheer was not baseless optimism: It arose from a deep conviction that the human imagination is glorious, has its origins in divine realities, and refuses to lie down. He believed, in a strange way, in belief itself as the ground of experience. As he once said, “Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”

Jay Parini is a novelist, poet, and professor of English at Middlebury College in the US.

A heroine who flies in modernity’s amoral face

A complex tale from the pen of Charlotte Brontë is a profound insight into love and marriage, hardly to be dismissed as the product of a puritanical mindset, writes Catherine Parish.

ANOTHER movie version of Jane Eyre has come and gone at the cinema. Jane Eyre is one of my favourite novels, so I read the film reviews and wait for the DVD release because I am inevitably disappointed. But I almost bestirred myself to see this latest version at the cinema on the strength of one review. My hackles rose as I read. Not only did the reviewer comprehensively bag Timothy Dalton in the BBC production as the worst Rochester ever (blasphemy!) but averred disparagingly that Jane is a timebound, anachronistic product of Charlotte Brontë’s puritanical mindset, especially obvious in Jane’s incomprehensible refusal to ‘live in sin’ with Mr Rochester.

It is so sad, that marriage is so misunderstood and debased now by both women and men.

I have always seen Jane as an authentic Christian protofeminist. If Jane Eyre speaks with Charlotte Brontë’s voice, it is a voice that clearly and passionately believes in the equality and dignity of women as persons, and therefore equally responsible as adults for their decisions.

It follows that Jane, poor, plain and powerless as she seems, may not then be a dupe to be swayed by physical passion alone, a pawn or a ‘trophy’ to be had at the whim of a rich and powerful man. Nor may she earnestly embrace an essentially loveless marriage though it appear to be for a higher good.

This is one of the great strengths of the book and explains a good deal of its enduring attraction. Jane will not give herself to wealthy Mr Rochester unlawfully because her well-formed conscience dictates otherwise. No more will she become St John Rivers’ wife as a condition for accompanying him to his mission. She will go as his sister, as a workhorse for the Lord, but not as his wife, a slave for Rivers. She sees both as wrong because both men demand she diminish herself by imposing their will upon her in contravention to her very firm beliefs and conscience – which both men are in their fashion asking her to renounce. Hence she sees both demands as unjust and unworthy of her human dignity.

The unwed relationship Rochester proposes is unjust not only to Jane but to Rochester’s still living wife. Jane knows it will diminish and eventually destroy them all because of its irreconcilably disordered foundation.

Equally, Rivers plans a disor-

with Catherine Parish

dered relationship, a marriage almost under false pretences because of his love for another woman which does not do justice to his true love, or to Jane.

Both Rochester and Rivers are in their way proposing unfaithfulness. She recoils knowing not just she but all will be losers in any such venture.

The argument and counterargument between Jane and Rochester, and then between Jane and Rivers, reveals a cogent view of the place of the woman in a love relationship and her right not only to love, but to respect and being loved as an equal partner, not a plaything or a servant. The public and legally enshrined nature of a valid and free marriage is not an end but a vital starting point

It is so sad, that marriage is so misunderstood and debased these days by both women and men.

and protection for a successful love partnership in which each is free to commit and willingly gives the self totally to the other in accordance with God’s law.

This is the strength of the book, not a time-bound shortcoming. Far from anachronistic, it is startlingly relevant and incisive about the complexity and challenge of love between man and woman and how properly to approach it.

Jane’s understanding resonates deeply with our Catholic understanding of the Sacrament of marriage that elevates, validates, nurtures and protects the beautiful love relationship between man and woman.

She knows how easily human sexuality can be debased by selfishness, lust and greed. She knows it is a total giving of the self to another, each in their respective roles but on equal terms, openly and in good standing before God.

She knows a good and true marriage is a bulwark for human happiness, not an obstacle to it. A great pity that such thought is considered anachronistic. It seems very much a tale for our times – and our daughters and sons.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

ProPhet without a CouNrtY

WHO was Alexander Solzhenitsyn? Why should non-Russian audiences pay attention to his writing?

Alexander Solzhenitsyn is one of the most important figures of the 20th century, both in terms of his status as a writer and in terms of the crucial role he played in the collapse of the Soviet Union and its evil communist empire.

As a writer, he was justly awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, unlike many other unworthy recipients. His novels One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, First Circle and Cancer Ward exposed the evils of socialism and totalitarianism. Solzhenitsyn is a noble heir to the tradition of Russian fiction epitomised by the Christian humanism of Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

His epic and seminal historical work, The Gulag Archipelago, possibly his magnum opus, documented the brutality of the Soviet regime’s treatment of dissidents.

All in all, Solzhenitsyn’s corpus constituted a damning indictment of the injustice of communism and undermined the Soviet Union’s political and moral credibility; it contributed significantly to the rise of dissident resistance within the communist empire and to the rise of political opposition to communism in the West.

In historical terms, Solzhenitsyn deserves a key place of honour as a major player in the final defeat of Soviet communism. As an intellectual, he is one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century; as a cultural warrior, he is an inspiration for everyone fighting for the culture of life in our nihilistic times; as a political critic, he is one of the most articulate advocates of the Christian alternative to the dead-ends of Big Government socialism and Big

Business globalism, a champion of the subsidiarist principles at the heart of the Catholic Church’s social doctrine.

One of the major themes of your biography is that Solzhenitsyn was a prophet, first in the Soviet Union, and then in the capitalist West. How did Solzhenitsyn have the ability to diagnose the deeper problems of his time?

Clearly, non-Russian audiences should pay attention to Solzhenitsyn as a great writer, and as a great hero in the cause of political freedom.

He is, however, also a prophet. He predicted the downfall of the Soviet Union as early as the 1970s when most so-called “experts” assumed the Soviet bloc would be part of the global political picture for many decades to come.

Even more importantly, Solzhenitsyn prophesied the unsustainability of global consumerism and the impending catastrophe that awaited a culture hellbent on hedonism at the expense of human community and the natural environment.

The current chaos in the global economy serves as a timely warning that Solzhenitsyn’s prophecies are coming true before our eyes. Solzhenitsyn’s socio-political vision, which harmonises with the social teaching of the Catholic Church, is full of the sort of Christian wisdom that the modern world can scarcely afford to ignore - or, at least, the sort of wisdom that it ignores at its peril.

You discuss in the book how Solzhenitsyn believed that both the Soviet Union and the West suffered from the same spiritual and ideological maladies that would eventually doom both societies. How is this so?

Solzhenitsyn’s diagnosis of the spiritual and ideological maladies of the communist Soviet Union and the capitalist West rested on the insistence that both systems shared the same fundamental materialism.

At root, the Soviet Union and the capitalist West were united by a secular fundamentalism rooted in an essential philosophical materialism that excludes God and religion from political and economic life. The ideologies of Mammon and Marx are equally godless and are equally inimical to religion in general and to Christianity in particular. Such systems are not merely wrong, they are ultimately evil.

eyes to the ugly reality of communism.

He met with dissidents of various political and theological hues during his years of imprisonment, and these helped him to ask the necessary questions about the nature of political justice and moral philosophy that enabled him to grow beyond the confines and constraints of Marxist ideology.

Solzhenitsyn had already rejected communism as an ideology before embracing Christian orthodoxy, but his conversion enabled him to move forward into a worldview that harmonises with the Catholic Church’s teaching on subsidiarity.

John Paul II’s social and political vision, expressed most eloquently in his 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus

Solzhenitsyn’s vision is essentially the same as that espoused by John Paul II, and by John Paul’s illustrious predecessors Leo XIII and Pius XI in Rerum Novarum and Quadrogesimo Anno respectively.

He foresaw the impending catastrophe that awaited a culture hell-bent on hedonism at the expense of human community and natural environment.

Solzhenitsyn’s devastating critique of the hedonism and decadence of the modern West, particularly in his controversial Harvard address in 1978, heralded the fact that he was a prophet not merely of the evils of communism, but also of the evils of atheistic materialism in all its guises.

For much of his life, Solzhenitsyn was a committed communist, even when he suffered in the gulags of the Soviet Union. How did he come to embrace Christianity? What influence did faith have on his writings and outlook?

As with most people of his generation, Solzhenitsyn was utterly brainwashed by the communist education system and became a dogmatic Marxist and an atheist. It would take his personal experience of the brutality and injustice of the Soviet regime to open his

You note that Solzhenitsyn had deep respect for Blessed Pope John Paul II. What similarities did the two men share, besides being two key historical figures in the downfall of the Soviet bloc? Did Solzhenitsyn hope for reunion between the Eastern and Western Churches?

Solzhenitsyn and John Paul II shared the same experience of communism in the sense that both men lived as dissidents in communist regimes, the former in the Soviet Union and the latter in Poland. As such, they recognised each other as kindred spirits and as fellow warriors in the battle against communist tyranny.

When I met Solzhenitsyn at his home near Moscow, he spoke fondly of his meeting with John Paul II and stated explicitly that the Pope had played a crucial role in the downfall of communism. He also told me of his respect for

Each of these popes advocated the principle of subsidiarity, which places the family at the heart and foundation of political and economic life, and favours small business over big business, and small government over big government. In his own belief that subsidiarity must form the keystone upon which any healthy society is based, Solzhenitsyn’s political creed is essentially the same as that of the Catholic Church.

Solzhenitsyn lamented that the Russian Orthodox Church stood aloof from the socio-political questions affecting modern life and thought that the Orthodox Church could learn from the Catholic Church in this regard. He did not necessarily favour union between the Orthodox and Catholic Churches, however, believing that the heritage and destiny of Russia was inextricably bound up with the specific spiritual tradition of Orthodoxy.

Interestingly, you describe how Solzhenitsyn’s localist, agrarian political and economic views shared a lot in common with the distributism of Catholic thinkers such as Hilaire Belloc, GK Chesterton

Once thought of mainly as a critic of communism, Alexander Solzhenitsyn saw the same errors at the heart of both capitalism and its ideological foe. He also foresaw the unsustainability of global consumerism. In this Zenit interview, his biographer, Joseph Pearce, believes Solzhenitsyn’s monumental writings can tell us much today about our own spiritual, cultural and political condition.

Honouring Blessed JPII correctly in the liturgy

Dear Father, now that Pope John Paul II has been beatified, what will this mean as regards liturgical celebrations? For example, will we have Masses in his honour? And when is his feast day?

UNLIKE canonisation, which allows Masses in honour of the saint and other acts of public devotion to be celebrated throughout the world, beatification is more limited. Usually, Masses are allowed in the country where the new Blessed lived, or in houses of the religious congregation to which he or she belonged.

In the case of Blessed John Paul II, the Vatican’s Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacraments issued a “Decree on the Liturgical Observance of the Cult of Blessed John Paul II, Pope” on 2 April 2011, setting out what is to be done.

and EF Schumacher, yet he came to those views independently of these thinkers. What personal experiences formed his ideas?

During my visit with Solzhenitsyn, I commented on the affinity he shared with Belloc, Chesterton and Schumacher, particularly with regard to the localism and agrarianism of their socio-political views. He mentioned that he held each of these men in high regard but that he had come to his own views independently.

Solzhenitsyn’s localism and agrarianism are rooted in the lessons to be learned from the grievous errors of the Soviet Union and from the wisdom to be gleaned

from Russian history. With regard to the former, the Soviet Union’s pursuit of giantism, which destroyed small government and small business and increased the power of the centralised state, had proved disastrous. He reacted against such evil in the direction of commonsense, seeking the restoration of strong local government and the revitalisation of small business.

In addition, Solzhenitsyn’s own political works, such as Rebuilding Russia and Russia in the Abyss, drew heavily on the lessons to be learned from Russian history as a guide to the future. In this historical perspective, his approach parallels that of Hilaire Belloc, whose

Servile

What is your recommendation for those wishing to start reading Solzhenitsyn?

At the risk of being guilty of self-promotion, I would say that my biography is a good place to start. It serves as an introduction to his life and thought, and offers a panoramic overview of his writings. Then I would recommend One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich as a short and densely powerful introduction to the full horrors of life under communism.

- www.zenit.org

The decree begins by acknowledging that the beatification of this Pope has an “exceptional character” and an “extraordinariness” and that numerous requests have been made to the Congregation regarding the cult of the Pope. Its provisions are as follows.

During the year following the Beatification, a Mass of Thanksgiving may be celebrated anywhere in the world on a day or days, and in a place or places, to be determined by the bishop of each diocese. This may be celebrated on a Sunday.

Likewise, in religious institutes, it is up to the Superior General to determine the days and places for the Thanksgiving Mass for the whole religious family.

A special Opening Prayer is to be used. An unofficial translation of the prayer reads:

“O God, who are rich in mercy and who willed that the Blessed John Paul II should preside as Pope over your universal Church, grant, we pray, that instructed by his teaching, we may open our hearts to the saving grace of Christ, the sole Redeemer of mankind. Who lives and reigns …”

This prayer makes reference to the great loves of the Pope and it incorporates the titles of his first two encyclicals: Redemptor Hominis, Redeemer of Man, and Dives in Misericordia, Rich in Mercy.

The other prayers and readings of the Mass are taken from the Common of Pastors, for a Pope, and the specific ones to be chosen are indicated in the decree. The first reading is Isaiah 52:7-10; the Responsorial Psalm is Psalm 96 (95), verses 1-2a, 2b-3, 7-8a, 10; the Alleluia verse is John 10:14; and the Gospel is John 21:1517. If the Mass is celebrated on a Sunday, these texts may be used for the first reading,

Q&A

By Fr John Flader

the Psalm and the Gospel. In the Diocese of Rome and in the dioceses of Poland, a Mass in honour of John Paul II is to be celebrated each year on 22 October, the feast day of the new Blessed. This is the day on which the Pope began his pontificate in 1978. The Mass is to be celebrated as a liturgical memorial, meaning that it must be celebrated unless some other celebration of higher rank, such as a Sunday, falls on that day.

Apart from Rome and Poland, the Bishops conference, a diocesan bishop, or a Superior General for a religious institute, can request from the Congregation an optional memorial of the new Blessed. When a Mass is an

Such is his popularity, within a week of his beatification the new archdiocesan seminary in Washington was named after him.

optional memorial, the individual priest is free to celebrate this Mass or some other one.

Can churches be dedicated in honour of the new Blessed?

Where a liturgical memorial of Pope John Paul has been inserted in the local calendar, as in Rome and Poland, churches may be dedicated in honour of him without any special permission. In these churches, the Mass in honour of Blessed John Paul is raised to the rank of a liturgical feast, so that the Gloria is always said. In other places, an indult of the Holy See is required to dedicate a church.

Such is the popularity of Pope John Paul that within a week of his Beatification the new Archdiocesan Seminary of Washington DC in the United States was named after him.

It is likely that many churches, schools and other institutions will be dedicated to him around the world in the coming years. And it is to be hoped that the Australian bishops will obtain permission to celebrate the Mass of the beloved Pope in this country.

State examined the lessons of history as a means of illuminating the present and prophesying the future.

The writer in his study in Vermont after being banished from his homeland in 1974.

Orthodox crosses dot a frozen landscape. Alexander Solzhenistyn chronicled the disappearance of millions into what he termed the Gulag Archipelago. For his work he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970.

Couples preparing for marriage need the truth. All of it.

THE VOCATION of marriage is, at one and the same time, noble, sublime and fraught with continual challenges, some quite serious, that married couples need to overcome in unity. Without unity in a marriage, without the unique kind of symbiosis that only a man and woman living in fidelity to each other are capable of, the task of navigating the often-treacherous shoals of life is made even more difficult, especially where children are present.

Children who receive conflicting messages from parents, with one telling them that one thing is permissable or laudable, while the other effectively takes an opposite position, will naturally gravitate to whatever is easiest, but not to what is automatically right, moral or best. To get children to Mass and to participate in the communion of the Church, especially in their teenage years, when a father effectively treats a mother’s desire for this to happen as unimportant, is an example of children receiving conflicting signals.

Because of a father’s authoritative influence in teenage years this is why so many marriages, where the husband and/or father effectively treats the mother’s desires in such matters as irrelevant, are effectively undermined. The suffering of thousands of Catholic mothers has been great because of the ignorance of their husbands in such affairs. All too often it has been the man of the family who, through indifference or ignorance, undermines Christian family life to the detriment of his marriage, his children and, in the end, to society.

The Church’s vision of marriage is like nothing else in this world precisely because it is of another, eternal, order of existence. The Church’s vision of marriage is also a vision of the relationship between Christ and the Church because the Church is the betrothed of the Lord. The intimate union of love between a man and a woman in the exclusive fidelity and fruitfulness of marriage is a living icon, in the eyes of the Church, of nothing less than the interior life of God. This is one reason why the Church has historically been so attentive to marriage, focusing so much of its moral and magisterial attention on its nature, its purpose and its end. The Church sees in marriage something that touches the eternal, something that expresses the inner reality of God’s nature as love.

Those who prepare couples for marriage in the Church and tell them a new car is sufficient reason to begin to use artificial contraception ultimately undermine marriage.

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This is why Catholic priests and marriage educators who, as they prepare couples for marriage, instead contradict the beauty and richness of the Church’s insight into human nature and the link between fertility and openness to new life have already begun to undermine marriages. They undermine the future. By telling couples that artificial contraception is acceptable they witness that the lives God may wish to send into the world through marriage are not important at all. Like the ignorant father, they may see nothing terribly wrong in what they are doing but in a very real sense they are eroding the essential unity of marriage.

Those who prepare couples for marriage in the Church and tell them that an overseas holiday, a long-desired renovation of the family home or a new car is a sufficient or legitimate reason to begin to use contraception are no longer faithful to marriage. While certain unusual and rare situations may necessitate resorting to contraception, getting the hard cash for a new dishwasher is not one of them. To the extent that priests do this, and cases are known to have occurred, their role as priests and as official representatives of Christ has lapsed into irrelevance. It is worse when a priest publicly affirms the Church’s teaching but states that privately he would offer contrary advice. It becomes harder to see how such figures may be relevant any more, other than in a purely mechanical sense.

The baptised who are preparing for marriage can find all the reasons in the world why they should begin to practise artificial contraception by turning for guidance to our culture. The problem with Catholic clergy or Catholic marriage educators who, meaning well but in ignorance sanction the Pill for marriages is that they were raised on a diet of television and popular culture and have absorbed it. Instead of setting out to liberate the culture, they allowed it to deform their vision of man, of woman, of marriage, of human life, of God – and of a child. Every priest is meant to model his priesthood on Christ the Good Shepherd, but priests who define away the moral law and generally advise couples that artificial contraception is permissible cease to be shepherds in any clear, understandable sense. The unending connaturality of love at the heart of the embrace between God and man is not conditional, and not dependant on transient, fashionable views.

What are Catholic couples to do? Find someone they can trust, who will introduce them to the fullness of the mystery of love. They must also love the priests who missed out on formation in this most important area. They must pray for them and their conversion. If in doubt, they can reflect what while God will be delighted with the gift of any child they can return to him, he has no real use for a dishwasher.

Peace in the Cathedral

I MUST take issue with “Anger in the Cathedral” (Letters, 5 October). We are exhorted by the Archbishop on the front page of The Record of the same date to bring the good news of Christ to the world. St Mary’s Cathedral does just this as a living, breathing part of both the archdiocese and the City of Perth. I have heard countless stories of people returning to the Church after visiting our Cathedral as well as the many of all faiths or none who have found solace within.

The Blessed Sacrament Chapel (previously the Sanctuary) gives prominence without clutter and visual distraction to the core element that makes the Cathedral a Catholic church – the body of Our Lord present in the tabernacle. Tastefully situated in the chapel are padded kneelers and chairs for those who wish to come closer to pray to and listen to God.

The “plastic chairs” are used on weekends and during large Masses or services by the choir so that they may engage the congregation. St Augustine of Hippo said, “He who sings well prays twice”. The chairs are arranged so this praise and love of God may be achieved. They are “see-through” so as not to distract from our raison d’être: the presence of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

The closeness of the Cathedral to Royal Perth Hospital provides much relief to patients there. Many visitors come from RPH for comfort and prayer (many are praying for, or coming to terms with, those who have lost their fight for life). Others get great comfort from looking out on the Cathedral from their hospital beds.

We have a Cathedral that invites believers and non-believers alike to partake of the presence of God and praise and love him. Others, admittedly, come to gaze at the architectural splendour of the building; they cannot help but learn much about the truth of salvation and the love of God. The 2500-3000 partici-

pants at Mass on a weekly basis and the hundreds on a daily basis, I am sure, feel they are attending more than a ‘mere meeting hall.’

Finally and briefly, as with spiritual development, the physical building needs to be maintained and continuously improved – this requires, from time to time, the attendance of artisans and tradesman who, in their way, aware of it or not, are doing God’s work.

Tony Meyrick PERTH

Marriage call a trumpet blast

WHAT can I say about Archbishop Hickey’s stand on the same-sex marriage issue as reported in The West Australian and The Record last week, except that I admire his boldness and courage speaking out on such a hot issue in the midst of the politically correct agendas.

Thinking aloud, as Archbishop Hickey called it, was more like a trumpet blast to action that I hope all Catholics will support. I do, and I hope all bishops facing the same problems here and in other countries will take up his example.

Archbishop Dolan of New York has also taken a bold stand against the Obama administration’s agenda on the same issue. It was reported recently that Archbishop Dolan, president of the US Conference of

Catholic Bishops, had written to President Obama warning him his administration would “precipitate a national conflict between Church and state of enormous proportions if it does not end its campaign against the Defence of Marriage Act, the institution of marriage it protects, and religious freedom.”

It is clear that governments are using their tax powers to manipulate the Church to compromise its moral teaching.

I believe that with bold leadership like that of Archbishop Hickey and Archbishop Dolan, the Church can and will withstand the assault against its faith and morals.

Eddie Russell PERTH

Flock not helped by Shepherd

I WOULD like to concur with the letters of Hugh Clift, E McHugh and Father Deeter to the editor in The Record (28 September) regarding Anglican Dean John Shephard preaching at St Mary’s Cathedral.

The dean’s views are widely known and should have been enough for the sermon not to have taken place. Fr Deeter rightly points out that watering down our core belief achieves nothing but adds to the confusion and loss of faith.

We need our clergy to be strong leaders, to be uncompromising in such core beliefs as the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection and the redemptive nature of the Crucifixion, or faith will be lost for some. Actions speak louder than words. Allowing this to take place makes me wonder if those responsible are saying the Dean is right and Catholics’ core beliefs can be up for debate.

It seems others were instrumental in the organisation of this but ultimately the Archbishop has the responsibility. Surely this would not be the legacy he would like to give.

C Kiernan Millendon

Pope’s expansive ecology accentuates the positivist

Benedict XVI’s considered approach to environmentalism might well be the most significant legacy of his papacy, writes Tim

‘THE reformer is always right about what is wrong,” wrote GK Chesterton. “He is generally wrong about what is right.” Pope Benedict made a similar point in Germany last month. “I would like to recall one of the developments in recent political history, hoping that I will neither be misunderstood, nor provoke too many one-sided polemics,” the Pope said during his Bundestag address. “I would say that the emergence of the ecological movement in German politics since the 1970s, while it has not exactly flung open the windows, nevertheless was and continues to be a cry for fresh air which must not be ignored or pushed aside, just because too much of it is seen to be irrational. Young people had come to realise that something is wrong in our relationship with nature, that matter is not just raw material for us to shape at will, but that the earth has a dignity of its own and that we must follow its directives.”

What led him to this observation was the oppressive atmosphere of positivism, a philosophy so pervasive most of us wouldn’t even know it by name  (the very definition of ideology, if you want to get Marxist about it). Positivism, at the risk of simplification, is the domi-

nant scientific/rationalist view in Western societies, endemic across the political spectrum. It was pioneered by Auguste Comte, a French Enlightenment thinker probably unheard of by most Ausralians due to him not being mentioned in Monty Python’s philosophers’ song.

Positivist reasoning, the Pope said, was an important dimension of human knowledge. But “the positivist reason which recognises nothing beyond mere functionality resembles a concrete bunker with no windows, in which we ourselves provide lighting and atmospheric conditions, being no longer willing to obtain either from God’s wide world. And yet we cannot hide from ourselves the fact that even in this artificial world, we are still covertly drawing upon God’s raw materials, which we refashion into our own products. The windows must be flung open again, we must see the wide world, the sky and the earth once more and learn to make proper use of all this.”

“In saying this,” Benedict continued, “I am clearly not promoting any particular political party – nothing could be further from my mind. If something is wrong in our relationship with reality, then we must all reflect seriously on the whole situation and we

Wallace.

are all prompted to question the very foundations of our culture ... The importance of ecology is no longer disputed. We must listen to the language of nature and we must answer accordingly. Yet I would like to underline a point that seems to me to be neglected, today as in the past: there is also an ecology of man. Man too has a nature that he must respect and he cannot manipulate at will. Man is not merely self-creating freedom. Man does not create himself. He is intellect and will, but he is also nature, and his will is rightly ordered if he respects his nature, listens to it and accepts himself for who he is, as one who did not create himself. In this way, and in no other, is true human freedom fulfilled.”

Benedict’s comments might surprise those who prefer to think of environmentalism as communism in hemp clothing and/ or an expression of empty paganism. But Christianity managed to co-opt the good things in paganism (easter eggs, for example). The Pope’s expansive approach to the ecological question might well be his most important legacy. Environmentalism, in short, is not a threat but an opportunity – one requiring the capacity to distinguish baby from bathwater.

Good Samaritan clause doesn’t go far enough

If the duty to assist is not enshrined in law, then doing nothing might be considered morally justifiable, writes Melissa

Kelly.

SOME weeks ago, Mark Reidy wrote about proposed amendments to part 1(D) of the Civil Liability Act (2002), known as the Good Samaritan clause.

This clause protects from prosecution any person who comes to the aid of another when their life is in danger. In other words, the Good Samaritan cannot be sued for any consequences resulting from a rescue attempt.

However, the clause doesn’t legally oblige a bystander to help or notify an emergency service. Many European countries have Good Samaritan laws which include the legal concept of duty to rescue.

It requires a bystander to notify an emergency service of a lifethreatening situation if doing so will not endanger his life.

This enshrines in law the principle of the parable of the Good Samaritan from Luke’s Gospel, hence the name of the legislation, and expands on teaching in Jewish law about regard for our neighbour.

It helps change the question from “What will happen to me if I stop to help this man?” to “What

will happen to this man if I do not stop to help him?” The proposed amendment more correctly reflects Good Samaritan legislation as it has already been enacted overseas, and is a truer reflection of the parable for which it is named.

It incorporates the ethics of duty of care and what is often called ‘the Golden Rule,’ which is that one should treat others as one would wish to be treated.

I became aware of our lack of duty to rescue laws when I became very ill with severe anxiety and clinical depression after many years of struggling to get services for my son who is autistic and the subsequent break up of my marriage.

I experienced grief and sadness that had become overwhelming, and thought death was the only way out of my suffering.

After a suicide attempt, I was found by my ex-husband, who had brought our son home.

Because we were divorced, my former husband did not owe me a duty of care in the eyes of the law and was therefore legally free to walk away, leaving our then 15 year old autistic son alone in the house

with what could very well have been the dying body of his mother.

I remained in a coma for another 24 hours before I awoke.

As the law currently stands, my former husband was under no legal obligation to assist or notify, but my faith and my humanity tells me there is a moral obligation which cannot be ignored.

Because we were divorced, my former husband did not owe me a duty of care in the eyes of the law.

My experience is one which shows that the nature and consequences of depression are still widely misunderstood.

Depression is a clinical disease, not a terminal illness.

Part of the profile of depression is suicidal thinking, which without treatment often becomes compulsive. When these thoughts are expressed, it doesn’t mean that the

person should be left to die. Their thinking reflects their depressive illness. People with depression can and do recover, and go on to lead useful and productive lives. They deserve a second chance.

What Grant Jesser’s widow and I both want is legislative change to ensure that our stories would have different legal outcomes.

If the legislation is amended to make phoning for assistance a minimum requirement, with legal penalties attached for failure to do so, then the question ‘do I phone or do nothing?’ is taken out of someone’s hands and made irrelevant.

Spurred on by my experience, and the appalling case of Kalgoorlie man Grant Jesser, who was attacked by three separate assailants and left to die, I wrote a submission to the Attorney-General, Christian Porter and sent a copy to Premier Barnett. I have now received replies from both which are very encouraging.

The parliamentary secretary to the Attorney-General, Michael Mischin, has written to say that although there are significant legal and practical difficulties to consider, the attorney-general has

indicated a willingness to refer this matter to the WA Law Reform Commission. This would follow consultation with the WA Police, the Director of Public Prosecution and the judiciary.

The Premier has also stated that if it can be demonstrated that the proposals can withstand legal scrutiny, the state government, through the Attorney-General, would be prepared to refer the matter to the Law Reform Commission.

Linda Jesser and I welcome this move with great hope.

As the suicide rate in Australia is now a staggering one every four hours, and public violence is increasing alarmingly, I hope that legislation will be enacted which reflects the compassion of the original Good Samaritan.

If duty to assist or notify isn’t enshrined in law, I believe it makes failure to assist or notify legally, and therefore morally sanctioned.

My hope is that the amendment will be known as Grant’s Law, in memory of Grant Jesser.

Melissa Kelly teaches English as a second language and is an advocate for the disabled.

Soulless ego is New Atheism’s refuge

In atheism, an anthropological mutation so radical has occurred it endangers human experience, writes Dr Tracey Rowland.

WITH the New Atheists, the debate about God becomes a debate about what it means to be human. I believe that the atheists are wrong because their accounts of love and reason are so emaciated that it is impossible to defend human dignity by any reference to them.

Let’s consider what Richard Dawkins says about love. He defines it as a kind of irrationality mechanism built into the brain, conferring advantage in mating and rearing the young.

Humans, he argues, are survival machines - robots blindly programmed to preserve selfish molecules known as genes. We exist for the benefit of our DNA rather than the other way around. Life, he says, is just bytes of digital information. We are built as gene machines and we are cultured as meme machines.

Thus, the atheists’ human is a creature of fate. Her deepest personal relationships are explained by an irrationality mechanism in the brain. It was, however, one of the achievements of Christianity to liberate people from the fear of fate by offering them a revolutionary new concept of the person as a creature with a free will and a rational intellect.

As David Bentley Hart observed, “Christians built a whole new civilisation on their belief in the power of the gospel to transform the human will from an engine of selfish cruelty into a vessel of divine grace capable of love of one’s neighbour.”

The love of neighbour principle fostered the care of widows and orphans and unwanted babies, and in particular the less popular female babies were no longer left to die of exposure on hillsides.

Even Wikipedia acknowledges the hospital was an invention driven by Christian mercy and Byzantine innovation. By the mediaeval period the Benedictine monks and the Hospitaller Order of St John ran some 2,000 hospitals across Europe.

At the same time the Franciscans and Dominicans built universities because they believed there is a symbiotic relationship between

faith and reason. Faith without reason can end in fundamentalism - and any Christian with at least a Year 10 education would deplore this. But reason without faith is narrowly instrumental - it can’t tell us anything about values.

The greatest of all the European universities, including Oxford,

reaction. But in his enthusiasm to destroy all Christian values he threw out the rational intellect and free will of Christian anthropology, concluded that human beings are no more than a bundle of drives and urges, and rejoiced in the return of the pre-Christian idea of fate.

The neo-Nietzscheans and their

have ended up with the cult of the celebrity and that people pay a fortune for a pair of Dolce e Gabbana underpants because they have seen a poster of David Beckham wearing them. This is the sad condition of the homeless ego. For the Christian, however, life is not an episode of a reality televi-

The secularist stake seems like a good idea but these have been the most prolifically homicidal in history.

Cambridge and the Sorbonne, were all Christian foundations.

In the 18th century it became fashionable to separate faith and reason. Philosophers began to speak of “pure reason” uncontaminated by religious myths. Later, Friedrich Nietzsche declared this notion of “pure reason” was itself a myth, that all we have are myths, and he preferred the Greek myths to the Christian ones because he hated Christian morality.

Given the version of Christian morality he received from his maiden aunts, I can well understand his

fellow atheists have not only gone to war against God in their fight for limitless freedom, they have evacuated the human person of any self who might enjoy that freedom.

Sexual relations hollowed out into their materialist shell become mutual manipulation; political relations hollowed out into their materialist shell become brutal power; and market relations hollowed out into their material shell give us consumerism and status anxiety.

If our horizons are determined by our behaviour as meme machines, it is no wonder that we

sion survival contest. It’s more of an epic in which the quest is to obtain real freedom linked to real love and real goodness. Atheists will tell you the quest is not merely futile but a symptom of retreat from rationality in order to satisfy an infantile desire and that people who are into this sort of thing cause wars. But in the Encyclopedia of Wars some 1763 wars are documented, of which 123 have been classified to include religious elements. This amounts to less than seven per cent of all wars.

Secondly, the standard atheist

“solution” to the fear of tribalism is to expand the powers of the state, which becomes our saviour by fostering secularism. This may seem like a good idea, but it is an historical fact that for the last couple of hundred years every serious attempt to do this has gone terribly wrong. Secularist states have been the most prolifically homicidal in history.

Secularists always end up erecting rival sacred calendars and rival political liturgies. The political effectively becomes a parody of the theological.

For those who worry about tribalism, I would recommend the Belgian film, Joyeaux Noel set in the trenches of the Somme. In the midst of a war caused by nationalism, which was a return to the idolatry of the state and its tribe, there was a moment on Christmas Eve when young men decided that they were Christians first, and French, German, English, Scots or whatever second. They left their trenches, exchanged gifts, and their chaplains celebrated Midnight Mass.

The movie shows how Christian universalism can transcend tribalism in its embrace of the universal and the particular.

Conversely, the myth of atheistic rationality fails to liberate and incite to love. The principle of the survival of the fittest and its ontology of violence generates a cruel social ethos.

The cultural logic of atheism is the advance of a new ruling class, comprised of entrepreneurs and bio-technologists, who will try to perfect the human product by technological means.

In the ideas of the atheists there has been an anthropological mutation so radical as to endanger the basic elements of human experience. Free will is replaced by the fate of genetic determinism, the intellect is truncated to a device for satisfying desire, and life becomes a product and a commodity.

I believe the atheists are wrong because human life cannot be this meaningless.

Tracey Rowland is Dean of the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family in Melbourne

THURSDAY

THURSDAY, 13 OCTOBER

Mother’s Prayers Mass

10am at Our Lady Queen of Apostles Parish, Tribute St, Riverton. For mothers, fathers and grandmothers, grandfathers coming together to pray for their children and grandchildren. Fellowship afterwards. Enq: Veronica 9447 0671.

Healing Mass in Honour of St Peregrine, Patron Saint of Cancer 7pm at St John and Paul, Willetton. Holy Mass followed by veneration of the relic of St Peregrine and anointing of the sick. Enq: Jim 9457 1539.

FRIDAY

FRIDAY, 14 TO SUNDAY, 16 OCTOBER

Spiritual Retreat

6pm at Our Lady of Mercy Parish, cnr Girrawheen Ave and Patrick Ct, Girrawheen. Spiritual Master: Fr Ignatious Prasad, director of the Theological and Philosophical College and Rector of the Major Seminary. Experience a personal encounter with the Lord and be filled with peace and blessed with joy. Enq: Secretary 9342 3562 or Fr Sam 042 6506 510.

SATURDAY

SATURDAY, 15 OCTOBER

Talk and Healing Service by Alan Ames

6pm at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Parish, 82 Collick St, Hilton. Begins with Mass followed by talk and healing service. Enq: George 9275 6608.

SATURDAY, 15 TO SUNDAY, 16 OCTOBER

“Group Fifty Annual Retreat” – Charismatic Renewal Group

9.30am at Retreat House at the Redemptorist Monastery, 150 Vincent St, North Perth. Retreat Master: Fr Michael Brown. Sleep in available. Enq: Elaine 9440 3661.

NEXT WEEK

SUNDAY, 16 OCTOBER

Lord of the Harvest Parish

50th Anniversary

10.30am at St Michael Parish, Lindsay St, Beacon. Begins with Mass, followed by lunch at Beacon Country Club. All past and present parishioners and ex-locals invited. RSPV and enq: Michelle 9686 6056 or bingarra@bigpond.com.

Vocations Enquiry Day – St Charles’ Seminary 9.30am at St Charles’ Seminary, 30 Meadow St, Guildford. Begins with morning prayer and seminarians’ testimonies over morning tea. Mass celebrated at 11.30am. St Charles’ traditional Sunday lunch will be provided. Website: www.stcharlesseminary.org.au. Please register by 9 October. Enq: Helen 9279 1310, admin@seminary-perth.org.au.

Schoenstatt Spring Fair 9.30am-2.30pm at 9 Talus Dr, Armadale. Fun, food, homemade goodies stalls, prizes and much more. Enq: Mary 040 0553 140.

FRIDAY, 18 TO SUNDAY, 20 OCTOBER

“Creation - The web of Life”

Reflective Weekend 6pm at St John of God Retreat Centre, 47 Gloucester Cr, Shoalwater. This reflective weekend will provide you with an ethic of environmental sensitivity as you further develop the model of stewardship in God’s creation. Finishes 1.30pm Sunday. Enq: Sr Ann 9310 8248 or 040 9602 927 or Sr Kathy 041 8926 590.

SATURDAY, 22 OCTOBER

Fifteenth Anniversary - Immaculate Heart of Mary Group

3.30pm at Sts John and Paul Parish, Pinetree Gully Rd, Willetton. Includes procession of Our Lady, rosary and benediction. Followed by supper in church hall. Enq: Anna aab610@hotmail.com.

CHOGM - Unity Commands the Blessing

7.30pm at St Mary’s Cathedral, 17 Victoria Sq, Perth. The CHOGM prayer initiative culminates with a combined denominations service to pray blessings and protection on the coming together in Perth of the leaders of 54 Commonwealth nations. Enq: Flame Ministries International 9382 3668.

PANORAMA

What’s on around the Archdiocese of Perth, where and when

UPCOMING

TUESDAY, 25 TO FRIDAY, 28 OCTOBER

Feast Day of St Jude – Celebration 9am at St Jude’s Parish, Prendiville Way, Langford. Triduum from Tuesday to Thursday beginning with Mass, followed by Novena prayers. Friday, 28, the feast day of St Jude: Healing Masses at 9am and 7pm. Enq: Secretary 9458 1946.

FRIDAY, 28 OCTOBER

Medjugorje Evening of Prayer

7-9pm at Our Lady Queen of Peace Parish. Cnr Beatrice St and Phillips Gr, Innaloo. Includes Eucharistic adoration, rosary, benediction and holy Mass. Free testimonial DVDs. Enq: Eileen 9402 2480 or 040 7471 256 or medjugorje@ y7mail.com.

SATURDAY, 29 OCTOBER

Mercedes College Perth - Graduating Class of 1990 Reunion

7.30pm Rosie O’Grady’s, Northbridge, cnr James and Milligan Sts. Enq: kathleen.bryce@yahoo. com.au.

Disciples of Jesus Celebration Ball 7.30pm at Rendezvous, Scarborough. Annual ball - beautiful food, live music. Cost: $70. Enq: Janny 0420 635 919 or Margaret 040 8689 873.

SUNDAY, 30 OCTOBER

Farewell to Fr Michael Brown

“A time to remember”

10am at Edel Quin Centre, 36 Windsor St, East Perth. A day to reflect with gratitude on the ministry of Fr Michael to the Secular Franciscan Order in WA. Begins with morning tea followed by morning prayer at 10.30am. Mass at 2.30pm. Bring a plate to share for lunch. Enq: Angela 9275 5658. Sisters of St Joseph of the Apparition –Meeting

2.30pm at Christ the King Parish, cnr Lefroy and Moran Sts, Beaconsfield. Discuss progress of Klong Lan project. Bring plate to share. Enq: Germaine 042 1306 006 or 9335 1639.

FRIDAY, 4 NOVEMBER

Vigil for life with Archbishop Hickey

9.30am at St Brigid’s Parish, cnr Great North Highway and Morrison Rd, Midland. Begins with Mass followed by a rosary procession to nearby abortion clinic. Peaceful and prayerful vigil witnessing to the dignity of human life. Enq: Helen 9328 2926.

FRIDAY, 4 TO SUNDAY, 6 NOVEMEBER

Prayerful Weekend Retreat for Women

7pm at the Little Sisters of the Poor, 2 Rawlins St, Glendalough. Includes: prayer, rosary, Mass, reflections and time to experience a life of service. Women aged 18-40 yrs old. Free. Enq: Sr Marie 9443 3155 or admin.perth@lsp.org.au.

SATURDAY, 5 NOVEMBER

Day with Mary

9-5pm at St Thomas More Parish, cnr Dean and Marsengo Rds, Bateman. Day of prayer and instruction based on the Fatima message. 9am video; 10.10am holy Mass; Reconciliation, procession of the Blessed Sacrament, Eucharistic adoration, sermons on Eucharist by Bishop Sproxton and on Our Lady, rosaries and stations of the Cross. BYO lunch. Enq: Franciscan Sisters of the Immaculate 9250 8286.

SUNDAY, 6 NOVEMBER

All Souls’ Day Memorial Service

2.30pm at Pinnaroo Valley Memorial Park Crematorium Chapel. Please note, the memorial service will not include Mass. Enq: Whitford’s parish office 9307 2776.

WEDNESDAY, 9 NOVEMBER

Council of Christians and JewsCommemoration Kristallnacht

4.30pm at Sylvia and Harry Hoffman Hall, Carmel Primary School, Woodrow Ave, Yokine. ‘Night of Broken Glass’ - guest speaker: Professor Kenneth Chern, former US Consul General to Perth. Light refreshments. Enq: Marie ccjwa@aol.com.

SATURDAY, 12 NOVEMBER

St Padre Pio day of Prayer

8.30am at St Anthony Parish, Dundebar Rd, Wanneroo. Begins with DVD. 10am – exposition of Blessed Sacrament, rosary, divine mercy, adoration and benediction. 11am – Mass with confession available. 12pm – bring a plate to share for lunch. Enq: Des 6278 1540.

NEXT YEAR

MONDAY, 9 JANUARY TO MONDAY, 16 JANUARY 2012

Summer School

The Royal School of Church Music in Australia (RSCM) will be hosting a summer school for all denominations next year. The programme will include workshops for church musicians and singers to help them inspire their congregations towards a more enjoyable and meaningful participation in Church liturgy. Enrolments are now open and interested parties can find out more by going to www.rscmaustralia.org.au. Enq: Deirdre 9457 4010.

SATURDAY, 25 FEBRUARY 2012

A Reunion for Holy Cross Primary School, Kensington

Any ex-students or family members, please contact Julie Bowles (nee O’Hara) on 9397 0638 or email jules7@iinet.net.au.

REGULAR EVENTS

EVERY SUNDAY

Gate of Heaven Catholic Radio

Join the Franciscans of the Immaculate from 7.309pm on Radio Fremantle 107.9FM for Catholic radio broadcast of EWTN and our own live shows. Enq: radio@ausmaria.com.

Pilgrim Mass - Shrine of the Virgin of the Revelation 2pm at Shrine, 36 Chittering Rd, Bullsbrook. Commencing with rosary followed by benediction. Reconciliation is available before every celebration. Anointing of the sick administered during Mass every second Sunday of the month. Pilgrimage in honour of the Virgin of the Revelation, last Sunday of the month. Side entrance to church and shrine open daily between 9am-5pm. Enq Sacri 9447 3292.

EVERY FIRST SUNDAY

Divine Mercy Chaplet and Healing Prayer

3pm at Santa Clara Church, 72 Palmerston St, Bentley. Includes adoration and individual prayer for healing. Spiritual leader Fr Francisco. All welcome. Enq: Fr Francisco 9458 2944.

St Mary’s Cathedral Youth Group –Fellowship with Pizza

5pm at Mary’s Cathedral, 17 Victoria Sq, Perth. Begins with youth Mass followed by fellowship downstairs in parish centre. Bring a plate to share. Enq: Bradley on youthfromsmc@gmail.com.

EVERY SECOND SUNDAY

Healing Hour for the Sick

6pm at St Lawrence Parish, 392 Albert St, Balcatta. Begins with Mass, exposition of the Blessed Sacrament and prayers. Enq: Fr Irek 9344 7066 or ww.stlawrence.org.au.

EVERY THIRD SUNDAY OF THE MONTH

Oblates of St Benedict Meeting

2pm at St Joseph’s Convent, York St, South Perth. For all interested in studying the rule of St Benedict and its relevance to everyday life. Afternoon tea. Enq: Secretary 9457 5758.

EVERY FOURTH SUNDAY OF THE MONTH

Holy Hour for Vocations to the Priesthood, Religious Life 2-3pm at Infant Jesus Parish, Wellington St, Morley. The hour includes exposition of the Blessed Eucharist, silent prayer, scripture and prayers of intercession. Come and pray that those discerning vocations can hear clearly God’s call.

EVERY MONDAY

Evening Adoration and Mass

7pm at St Thomas Parish, Claremont, cnr Melville St and College Rd. Eucharistic adoration, Reconciliation, evening prayer and benediction, followed by Mass and night prayer at 8pm. Enq: Kim 9384 0598, claremont@perthcatholic.org.au.

EVERY TUESDAY

Bible teaching with a difference 7.30pm at St Joachim’s parish hall, Victoria Park. Exciting revelations with meaningful applications that will change your life. Bring Bible, a notebook and a friend. Enq: Jan 9284 1662.

Novena to Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal 6pm at the Pater Noster Church, Marmion and Evershed Sts, Myaree. Mass at 5.30pm followed by benediction. Enq: John 040 8952 194.

Norma Woodcock’s Teaching Session

7-8pm at St Benedict’s school hall, Alness St, Applecross. Be empowered by the Gospel message each week in a personal way. How can we live meaningful and hope-filled lives? AccreditedCEO: Faith Formation for ongoing renewal. Catholic Education staff: $10 for accreditation. Cost: donation. Enq: 9487 1772 or www.normawoodcock. com.

EVERY WEDNESDAY

Holy Spirit of Freedom Community

7.30pm at The Church of Christ, 111 Stirling St, Perth. We are delighted to welcome everyone to attend our Holy Spirit of Freedom praise meeting. Enq: 042 3907 869 or hsofperth@gmail.com.

Bible Study at Cathedral

6.15pm at St Mary’s Cathedral, 17 Victoria Sq, Perth. Deepen your faith through reading and reflecting on holy scripture by Fr Jean-Noel. Meeting room beneath Cathedral. Enq: Marie 9223 1372.

Holy Hour - Catholic Youth Ministry

5.30pm at Catholic Pastoral Centre, 40A Mary St, Highgate. Begins with Mass, 6.30pm holy hour of adoration, followed by $5 supper and fellowship. Enq: cym.com.au or 9422 7912.

EVERY FIRST WEDNESDA OF THE MONTH

Holy Hour Prayer for Priests

7.30-8.30pm at Holy Spirit Parish, 2 Keaney Pl, City Beach. All welcome. Enq: Linda 9341 3079. Novena to St Mary of the Cross MacKillop

7-7.45pm at Blessed Mary MacKillop Parish, cnr Cassowary Dr and Pelican Pde, Ballajura. Begins with Mass, novena prayers and benediction. Followed by healing prayers and anointing of the sick. Next one: 2 November. Enq: Madi 9249 9093 or Gerry 041 7187 240.

EVERY SECOND WEDNESDAY OF THE MONTH

Chaplets of the Divine Mercy

7.30pm at St Thomas More Catholic Parish, Dean Rd, Bateman. A beautiful, prayerful, sung devotion accompanied by exposition and followed by benediction. Enq: George 9310 9493 or 9325 2010 (w).

EVERY THURSDAY OF THE MONTH

Divine Mercy 11am at Sts John and Paul Church, Pinetree Gully Rd, Willetton. Pray the rosary and chaplet of divine mercy, and for the consecrated life, especially here in John Paul Parish. Concludes with veneration of the first class relic of St Faustina. Please do come and join us in prayer. Enq: John 9457 7771.

St Mary’s Cathedral Praise Meeting

7.45pm every Thursday at the Legion of Mary’s Edel Quinn Centre, 36 Windsor St, East Perth. Includes praise, song and healing ministry. Enq: Kay 9382 3668 or fmi@flameministries.org.

EVERY FIRST THURSDAY OF THE MONTH

Prayer in Style of Taize

7.30-8.30pm at Our Lady of Grace Parish, 3 Kitchener St, North Beach. Includes prayer, song and silence in candlelight – symbol of Christ the light of the world. Taize info: www.taize.fr Enq: secretary 9448 488 or 9448 4457.

Group Fifty – Charismatic Renewal Group

7.30pm at The Redemptorist Monastery, 150 Vincent St, North Perth. Includes prayer, praise and Mass. Enq: Elaine 9440 3661.

EVERY FIRST FRIDAY OF THE MONTH

Communion Reparation All-Night Vigil

7pm-1.30am at two different locations: Corpus Christi Parish, Lochee St, Mosman Park and St Gerard Majella Parish, cnr Ravenswood Dr and Majella Rd, Westminster (Mirrabooka). In reparation for outrages committed against the United Hearts of Jesus and Mary. Enq: (Mosman Park) Vicky 040 0282 357 and Fr Giosue 9349 2315 or John 9344 2609.

Healing Mass 7pm at St Peter’s Parish, Inglewood. Praise and worship, exposition and Eucharistic adoration, benediction and anointing of the sick, followed by holy Mass and fellowship. Celebrants: Fr Dat and invited priests. 6.45pm Reconciliation. Enq: Mary

Ann: 0409 672 304, Prescilla: 043 3457 352 and Catherine: 043 3923 083.

Holy Hour for Vocations to the Priesthood and Religious Life

7pm at Little Sisters of the Poor Chapel, 2 Rawlins St, Glendalough. Mass followed by adoration with Fr Doug Harris. All welcome. Refreshments provided.

Catholic Faith Renewal Evening

7.30pm at Sts John and Paul Parish, Pinetree Gully

Rd, Willetton. Songs of praise, sharing by a priest followed by thanksgiving Mass and light refreshments afterwards. All welcome to attend and bring your family and friends. Enq: Kathy 9295 0913, Ann 041 2166 164 or catholicfaithrenewal@gmail.com.

Healing and Anointing Mass

8.45am Pater Noster Church, Evershed St, Myaree. Begins with Reconciliation followed by 9am Mass of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, anointing of the sick and prayers to St Peregrine. Enq: Joy 9337 7189.

EVERY FIRST SATURDAY OF THE MONTH

Healing Mass

12.35pm at St Thomas Parish, cnr Melville St and College Rd, Claremont. Spiritual leader: Fr Waddell. Enq: Kim 9384 0598, claremont@perthcatholic.org.

au.

EVERY FOURTH SATURDAY OF THE MONTH

Voice of the Voiceless Healing Mass

12pm at St Brigid Parish, 211 Aberdeen St, Northbridge. Bring a plate to share after Mass. Enq: Frank 9296 7591 or 040 8183 325.

GENERAL

FREE DIVINE MERCY IMAGE FOR PARISHES

High Quality Oil Painting and Glossy Print – Divine Mercy Promotions. Images are of very high quality. For any parish willing to accept and place inside the church. Oil paintings - 160 x 90cm and glossy print -100 x 60cm. Enq: Irene 922 1247 or 9417 3267 (w).

Sacred Heart Pioneers

Is there anyone out there who would like to know more about the Sacred Heart pioneers? If so, please contact Spiritual Director Fr Doug Harris 9444 6131 or John 9457 7771.

St Philomena’s Chapel 3/24 Juna Drive, Malaga. Mass of the day: Monday 6.45am. Vigil Masses: Mon-Fri 4.45pm. Enq: Fr David 9376 1734.

MARY MACKILLOP 2012 CALENDARS AND MERCHANDISE

2012 Josephite Calendars with quotes from St Mary of the Cross and Mary MacKillop merchandise. Available for sale from the Mary MacKillop Centre. Enq: Sr Maree 041 4683 926 or 08 9334 0933.

SSRA’s Parish Missions

Saturday, 15 to Sunday, 16 October: Our Lady of Mercy Parish, cnr Girrawheen Ave and Patrick Ct, Girrawheen. All Masses. Saturday, 22 to Sunday, 23 October: St Brigid’s Parish, 69 Fitzgerald St, Northbridge. All Masses. Sunday, 30 October: St Bernadette’s Parish, 49 Jugan St, Glendalough. 9am Mass.

SSRA’s City Missions

Tuesday, 1 to Wednesday, 2 November: All Saints Chapel, Allendale Sq, 77 St George’s Tce, Perth. 12.10pm and 1.10pm Masses.

SSRA and the Community of the Archdiocese of Perth’s Traditional Latin Mass Centre

Saturday, 5 November, St Anne’s Parish, 11 Hehir St, Belmont. 9am Mass with veneration and blessing with relics. Cost: free. Enq: Giovanny 0478 201 092 or ssra-perth@catholic.org.

Saints AND Sacred Relics Apostolate Parish Missions - October change of dates

Saturday, 29 to Sunday, 30 October - St Brigid’s Parish, 69 Fitzgerald St, Northbridge, all Masses; Saturday, 5 to Sunday, 6 November - St Bernadette’s Parish, 49 Jugan St, Glendalough - all Masses. Enq: Giovanny 047 8201 092 or ssraperth@catholic.org.

Saints AND sacred Relics Apostolate – Latin Feast of all Holy relics

SSRA Perth invites interested parties: parish priests, faithful association leaders, etc, to make contact to organise relic visitations to their own parishes, communities, etc. We have available authenticated relics, mostly first-class, of over 200 Catholic Saints and Blesseds, including Sts Mary Mackillop, Padre Pio, Anthony of Padua, Therese of Lisieux, Maximilian Kolbe and Simon Stock. Free. Enq: Giovanny 047 8201 092 or ssra-perth@ catholic.org.

St Denis 60th Anniversary

St Denis Catholic Parish in Joondanna will celebrate its 60th Anniversary on 16 December 2011. We are collecting photos, memorabilia and stories for display during the celebration. Enq and arrangements: Barbara on 040 1016 399 or emmanuelcentre@westnet.com.au or 9328 8113(w).

RELIGIOUS PRODUCTS

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 Rd, 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 Ct (off McCoy St), Myaree. Ph 9329 9889 (after 10.30am Mon to Sat). We are here to serve.

KINLAR VESTMENTS

Quality handmade and decorated vestments: albs, stoles, chasubles, altar linen, banners, etc. 12 Favenc Way, Padbury. By appointment only. Ph Vickii on 9402 1318, 0409 114 093 or kinlar.vestments@gmail.com.

ACCOMMODATION

HOLIDAY ACCOMMODATION

ESPERANCE 3 bedroom house f/furnished Ph 08 9076 5083.

FURNITURE REMOVAL

ALL AREAS. Competitive rates. Mike Murphy Ph 0416 226 434.

WALK WITH HIM

16 S 29TH SUNDAY IN

ORDINARY TIME

Gr Isa 45:1. 4-6 I am the Lord Ps 95:1, 3-5, 7-10 Give the Lord my glory

1 Th 1:1-5 faith in action

Mt 22:15-21 Paying taxes

17 M St Ignatius of Antioch, bishop, martyr (M)

Red Room 4:20-25 Strength from faith Lk 1:69-75 A mighty saviour Lk 12:13-21 Not enough room

CLASSIFIEDS

Deadline: 11am Monday

SETTLEMENTS

ARE YOU BUYING OR SELLING real estate or a business?

Why not ask Excel Settlements for a quote for your settlement. We offer reasonable fees, excellent service and no hidden costs. Ring Excel on 9481 4499 for a quote. Check our web site on www.excelsettlements.com.au.

TAX SERVICE

Quality tax returns prepared by registered tax agent with over 35 years’ experience. Call Tony Marchei on 0412 055 184 for appt. AXXO Accounting & Management, Unit 20/222 Walter Rd, Morley.

BOOK BINDING

NEW BOOK BINDING, General Book Repairs; Rebinding; New Ribbons; Old Leather Bindings Restored.Tydewi Bindery 0422 968 572.

DEATH ANNIVERSARY

BRIAN JOSEPH CANNY 9th Anniversary 18 October 2011: In memory of our dearly loved husband, father, pa and great pa - Janet, David, Janine, Paul, Greg and families. May his soul rest in peace.

18 Tu ST LUKE EVANGELIST (Feast)

Red 2 Tim 4:10-17 Be on your guard

Ps 144:10-13, 17-18 Creatures thank you Lk 10:1-9 The harvest is rich

19 W Ss John of Brebeuf and Issac Jogues, priests, and companions, martyrs (O); St Paul of the Cross, priest (O)

Gr Rom 6:12-18 By grace, not by law

Ps 123 The name of the Lord Lk 12:39-48 Unexpected hour

TRADE SERVICES

BRENDAN HANDYMAN SERVICES

Home, building maintenance, repairs and renovations. NOR. Ph 0427 539 588.

PR OPERTY MAINTENANCE

Your handyperson. No job too small. SOR. Jim 0413 309 821.

BRICK RE-POINTING Ph Nigel 9242 2952.

PERROTT PAINTING Pty Ltd

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

PICASSO PAINTING Top service. Ph 0419 915 836, fax 9345 0505.

FOR SALE

CHEAP, VARIOUS CATHOLIC/ PROTESTANT Books New/2nd hand/DVDs/CDs 9440 4358.

COOK WANTED

CASUAL COOK POSITION IS AVAILABLE at the Redemptorist Monastery, North Perth. The position is 5 days per week - 5 hours per day. For all enquiries please call Bernadette on 9328 6600. Resumes can be sent to : bernadette.glass@themonastery. org.au.

20 Th Rom 6:19-23Eternal life in Christ

Gr Ps 1:1-4, 6 The Lord’s law Lk 12:49-53 Division, not peace

21 F Rom 7:18-25 Who will rescue me?

Gr Ps 118:66, 68, 76-77, 93-94 I am yours Lk 12:54-59 Judge what is right

22 S Rom 8:1-11 Set you free

Gr Ps 23:1-6 Clean hands, pure heart Lk 13:1-9 Fruit next year

ACROSS

1 Member of a religious order

5 “Behold, I am with you ___…”

8 Possible Easter month

10 Monk/author Thomas ___

11 Home of St Rose

12 Prayer time

13 Wife of Abram

15 Diocese of Honolulu home

16 David is their patron saint

18 An element of moral culpability

20 The ___ calf

24 They were found in Juan Diego’s cape at Guadalupe

25 He blamed the Christians for burning Rome

26 “He is ___!”

28 Tribe of Israel

30 “___ et Orbi”

32 A biblical judge

33 Administrative arm of the Catholic Church

34 Worship place in Jerusalem

35 Joseph interpreted these

DOWN

2 Letters above the Cross

3 “For where your ___ is, there will your heart be also.” (Mt 6:21)

4 Communion banister

5 Charity

6 Focal place of the Mass

7 Certain mount

9 Son of Jacob

11 Seventh century pope

14 French clergyman

16 He was Simon, originally

17 “…many ___ and wonders were being done by the apostles” (Acts 2:43)

19 St Philip’s surname

21 The whole earth had one before the Tower of Babel

22 Mother-in-law of Ruth

23 AKA Hadassah

26 Kind of reverend

27 Lot moved to this city (Gen 13:12)

28 An end to repent?

29 ___ to Emmaus

31 “…but do not perceive the wooden ___ in your own?” (Mt 7:3)

LAST WEEK’S SOLUTION

The Catholic Verses

Dave Armstrong

RRP $32

With humility and care, Dave Armstrong explains ninety-five key Bible passages that confound all who would use Scripture to criticise the Church and her doctrines. These are the verses that have drawn so many serious believers, including Armstrong, out of their Protestant congregations and into the Catholic Church. Armstrong shows that a fair-minded reading of each of these passages supports the Catholic position on the key issues that divide Protestants from Catholics, such as the nature of baptism, the communion of saints, the Eucharist, the Church and the authority of the Pope, the Bible and tradition, the salvific role of faith, good works, relics, purgatory, and much more.

A History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans

John Lingard

RRP $45

This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc that were either part of the original artefact, or were introduced by the scanning process.

A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland, Volume II

William Cobbett

RRP $48

This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc that were either part of the original artefact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important and it is why it is back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.

Edmund Campion, a Biography

Richard Simpson

RRP $110

The Life of Edmund Campion were printed off from time to time, as they appeared in the Rambler in the years 1861 and 1862. When the Rambler changed into the Home and Foreign Review, this work was dropped, and was only resumed in November 1866. Campion has had so many biographers that a new one may be expected to state his reasons for telling again a tale so often told. This biography is very simple in view of many researches among different archives.

THE FATHERS KNOW BEST YOUR ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO THE TEACHING OF THE EARLY CHURCH

Jimmy Akin

RRP $36

The Fathers Know Best: Your Essential Guide to the Teachings of the Early Church is a unique resource. It introduces you to the teachings of the first Christians in a way no other work can. It is specially designed to make it easy for you to find the information you want and need. This groundbreaking work presents the teachings of early Christians in a way unlike any other book. It flings open the doors of the crucial but little-known age covering the birth of Christianity and the triumphant march of the gospel throughout the ancient world.