The Record Newspaper 13 April 2006

THEY LOVE DAN BROWN: Opus Dei members see the opportunity Page 4

Wednesday April , 

Perth, Western Australia Western Australia’s Award-winning Catholic newspaper

FOR THE OTHERS: Perth Caritas hold a Parliamentary breakfast Page 5

TWO FOR THE YOUNG: kids pages with lots of fun! Pages 16 & 17

One

theologian

Weigel

MP’s secret visit turns spotlight on Viets

■ By Paul Gray

Apriest under house arrest in Vietnam has urged a visiting Australian member of parliament to reveal that Vietnam’s Communist authorities are trying to stop the Catholic Church from ordaining new priests.

The parliamentarian, Victorian state MP Luke Donnellan, met the priest while on a secret four-day mission to Vietnam in March.

Fr Thadeus Nguyen Van Ly, who has spent 15 years in jail and is currently under house arrest in Hue in central Vietnam, told Mr Donnellan that the Vietnamese Government is trying to stop a new generation of priests from emerging.

Mr Donnellan recently returned from a visit to Fr Ly in central Vietnam. An earlier application by Mr Donnellan for a visa from the Vietnamese Government to visit Fr Ly had not been granted.

Subsequently, the MP made the visit secretly. Describing his trip in an interview with The Record, Mr Donnellan said he had found Fr Ly in surprisingly good health and good spirits, considering the extremities of detention the priest has been subjected to.

“After his last arrest, his family in Australia were concerned that he had been poisoned,” Mr Donnellan said. “So I was worried about how I would find him. “In fact, he’s

incredibly energetic,” Mr Donnellan said. “He’s been doing an enormous amount of meditation.” The main message Fr Ly wanted to communicate to the Australian MP concerned restrictions on the Church’s ability to train new priests.

“He did not want to talk about his treatment in jail, which is not an issue for him,” Mr Donnellan said. “But he did want to talk about the Church’s inability to train young men for the priesthood.”

Of particular concern is the vetting process which the Vietnamese Communist Government imposes on the Church in relation to new priests, Mr Donnellan said.

This is a two-stage process. Seminarians nominated by the Church must first be approved by

the Government. In the second stage, seminarians must undertake two to three years of indoctrination in “Marxist thinking.”

“If they don’t do too well at this, or if the Government is not happy with them for some reason, then they are not allowed to be ordained,” Mr Donnellan said.

Another priest Mr Donnellan visited while in Vietnam, Fr Loi, had been ordained despite not being approved by the Government.

Fr Loi has subsequently spent seven years in jail, Mr Donnellan said.

In his present state of house arrest, Fr Ly is not allowed to visit either of the main Vietnamese capitals, Hanoi or Saigon. Other restrictions on his life include offering

help to the poor and the sick. The Government has told the priest he is allowed to help no more than 10 AIDS victims.

Mr Donnellan said the communist Government had also recently prevented Fr Ly from organising relief for flood victims in his region.

Fr Ly’s last stint in jail was a fiveyear term from 2001 to 2005. He has been under house arrest since.

“All Fr Ly is asking for is basic religious rights. He has been doing a lot of writing based on the Vietnamese Constitution which says there should be religious rights.”

In fact, Mr Donnellan said, “proper religious and democratic rights do not exist in Vietnam.” Mr Donnellan said that in paying his

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secret visit to Fr Ly, he had “stepped under the radar” of local officials. Mr Donnellan had told officials that he was in Vietnam for a holiday. The MP believed this was the only way he could make contact with the priest.

When Mr Donnellan made an earlier request for a visa from the Vietnamese Government for the same purpose, he said the Government did not say “yes or no.”

Instead the request was handled in what Mr Donnellan said was “a very diplomatic way.” In the course of this, it became “absolutely” clear to the MP that the Vietnamese Government did not want him to visit Fr Ly.

Mr Donnellan said he believed that the communists’ strategy was to control religious dissidence at the grass-roots level in Vietnamese society by regularly locking up and restricting the operations of wellknown religious leaders, such as Fr Ly.

Mr Donnellan said there is strong solidarity today between Buddhists and Catholics in Vietnam, with both groups campaigning for more religious freedom, and both facing intense restriction of their rights from the Communist Government.

Mr Donnellan said he could think of no better use of his public position as an Australian MP than to draw attention to such abuses as those happening in Vietnam.

Gay bill ‘duplicitous’

■ By Paul Gray

Canberra Archbishop Francis Carroll has signalled the Church’s strong opposition to the Australian Capital Territory’s proposed Civil Unions Bill.

The bill, expected to be passed into law by the Government of the ACT in May, has been widely interpreted as instituting “gay marriage.”

Announcing the bill in late March, the ACT Government had stated that after the Civil Unions bill is made into law, “other jurisdictions” (e.g. states and territories) could “recognise an ACT civil union as evidence of a ‘marriage-like relationship’.”

But Archbishop Carroll said in a media release: “Same sex unions mimic marriage so closely that the unique place of marriage is obscured and would soon disappear.

“To redefine marriage in this Orwellian way is an unnecessary and harmful intervention from government, and will be seen as such by the community at large.”

The Federal Government, which has power under the Australian Constitution to overturn laws passed by federal territories including the ACT, has also signalled its opposition to the proposed law, at least in its original form.

Archbishop Carroll described certain aspects of the proposed ACT law as “provocative,” particularly in allowing people living outside the ACT to join in ACT-registered civil unions, and in applying lesser age requirements than for marriage.

Archbishop Carroll said he believed the government must support the “unique vocation” of men and women getting married, having and raising children.

“Marriage between a man and a woman is one of the foundation stones of our society,” he said. “Protecting and nurturing this relationship and the family which forms from it should be the aim of any government seeking to legislate in the best interests of Mums and Dads, their kids and the community.”

The Federal Government has also attacked the proposed ACT law, accusing the ACT Government of being “duplicitous” for claiming that civil unions are not the same as marriage.

Commonwealth Attorney-General, Mr Philip Ruddock, said comments by ACT Chief Minister Jon Stanhope were not in keeping with the actual wording of Mr Stanhope’s own legislation. While Mr Stanhope had said on ABC radio that “civil unions are not marriage,” the ACT’s Civil Unions bill states that “in an Act or statutory instrument, a reference to a marriage includes a reference to a civil union.”

Fr Thadeus Nguyen Van Ly Investigating: Victorian MP Luke Donellan speaks with factory workers in Vietnam.

A day at the beach

■ By L Geaney

During week five of term, most of the staff from Sacred Heart School, Beagle Bay, attended an induction in Broome.

The students had a planned week of sport, computing, taichi, face painting, video watching and environmental health. On Shrove Tuesday, as a special treat, after having pancakes for breakfast, the

remaining teachers and students took off to Middle Lagoon for an excursion. Once at the beach the children couldn’t wait to get into the water and enjoyed swimming and body surfing. A very healthy morning tea and lunch capped off a lovely day at the beach.

Everyone had a great time - the weather was kind and the students caught a barney (goanna) in the mangrove creek.

- Kimberly Community Profile

The Record wish all our readers a happy and holy Easter

Since 1998 the little catechism “I Believe” has served religious, catechists, families and young adults as an aid to learning and teaching the Faith.

This new edition, revised in collaborationwith the Vatican’s Congregation of the Clergy, is a great help for all those who want to better understand the basics of the Catholic Faith and who are looking for a clear guide for their journey with and towards God.

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The new edition follows still more clearly the structure of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, with numerous references to it.

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The first part of the book is based upon the Apostles Creed. Each article of the Creed is explained in a separate chapter and beautifully illustrated with examples from the Bible. The second part is devoted to the Sacraments, the life of Jesus, prayer in the Christian life and an explanation of the Lord’s Prayer. Beautifully illustrated throughout

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Prayer festival

■ By Sylvia Defendi

“Contraception

and the Decline of Civilisation’’

“Europe is contracepting and aborting itself to death and disappearance, and Islam is filling up the religious and cultural vacuum brought about by the de-Christianisation of the continent”, says Raymond de Souza, Founder and Director of Saint Gabriel Communications International and Australia’s first full-time lay Catholic Apologist.

After six months working in France as Dean of the Chavagnes International College, Raymond visits Australia to address this critical issue for the survival of Christian Civilisation: The disappearance of the Family among Christian nations and the growth of Islam.

Wed 26th - Catholic Youth Ministry, 40A Mary St, Highgate, at 7.30 pm

Thu 27th- St Joseph’s parish, 19 Hamilton St, Bassendean, at 7pm

Fri 28th- St Bernadette’s parish, 7:15 pm cnr Leeder and Jugan Str, Glendalough.

For other capitals, please send an email to: Office@SaintGabriel.com.au

The Catholic Prayer Festival, a key event in the Catholic Youth Ministry calendar, will be held from April 20 to 23, at Eagle’s Nest, Gidgegannup. Based on the recent encyclical “God is Love,” by Pope Benedict XIV, the festival provides

participants with a selection of talks and occasions for prayer, activities and faith sharing. “The festival is a celebration of the breadth and depth of the Catholic Faith, and an opportunity for all Catholics to pray and worship God together,” said CYM Youth Coordinator Robert Hiini. As Pope Benedict XVI stated, “Being Christian is not the result of an

ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.” Completed registration forms can be downloaded at www.cym.com.au, and must be received at the Catholic Pastoral Centre, 40/A Mary St, Highgate, 6003, by April 15.

For further information call CYM on: 9422 7912

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

Do I guarantee that when people come to do business with me, they will be treated with courtesy, sincerity, professionalism and ef ciency?

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

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

Is it true that every year for the last 17 consecutive years

I ve been Australia s top selling Hyundai dealer?

Is it true that if somebody buys a used car from me, I will pay for a pre-purchase RAC or similar inspection?

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

Beagle Bay Pastoral Worker, Edward Khaemba, with students from Sacred Heart School, Beagle Bay during their excursion to Middle Lagoon. Photo: L Geaney

Book offers evangelisation window

With the Da Vinci Code movie due to open next month, members of Opus Dei in Australia are far from ducking for cover.

■ By Paul Gray

Two senior members of the organisation - dubbed a “secretive” one in the bestselling novel The Da Vinci Code - this week told The Record that they are viewing the launch of the movie as a unique opportunity for spreading the Catholic message in general, and the Opus Dei message in particular.

The “secretive” adjective used to describe Opus Dei is one widely accepted at face value by antiCatholic critics within the secular media, and by some Catholics.

This was flatly contradicted by Opus Dei priest Fr John Flader and by the Manager of the Sydneybased Opus Dei Information Office, Mr Richard Vella, in separate interviews ahead of the movie.

“We are being landed with a great opportunity for evangelisation,” Fr Flader told The Record. “Let’s take

advantage of it.”

Mr Vella, a lay “numerary” member of the Opus Dei, agreed. “The interest generated by the Da Vinci Code helps us to give out the real story,” he said.

“We are looking forward to the movie as a time for good,” said Mr Vella.

Mr Vella, who is Dean of Studies at Sydney’s Warrane College at the University of NSW, says the Da Vinci Code has been a constant topic of conversation with students since the novel’s publication in 2003.

The results of this are far from being all bad, he says. One student who came to the College as a professed agnostic read the Da Vinci Code, but ended up joining the Church.

“When he read the book and its descriptions of the Church and Opus Dei, he thought: ‘it can’t be this bad.’ This led to him asking a lot of questions about the Church.”

An initially negative attitude

towards Opus Dei is common among students coming to the College, Mr Vella said.

“Most students come to university with little knowledge of the Church or of Opus Dei. Just about every one of them has read the Da Vinci Code

“I usually break the ice by explaining that I’m not a murderer and I’m not going to drug them.”

“Over the time that they’re here, many of them come to see that we are ordinary people who are just having a go at being holy. I emphasise ‘having a go’,” Mr Vella added.

Positive stories like that of the student who became a Catholic are counter-balanced, in Mr Vella’s view, by the fact that the novel gives a distorted picture of the historical person of Jesus of Nazareth.

“This is dangerous because many people are not informed. The book is fiction, but it is written in a quasifactual way.

The “number one” problem with the book, as far as Mr Vella was concerned, is “the claim that Jesus Christ was not God, but only a man.”

“This is not just an attack on Catholics, or on Opus Dei, but on every Christian who has ever lived, Protestant or otherwise. It’s saying that we’ve all been duped. This is just laughable.”

Fr Flader, who is also director of the Sydney archdiocese’s Catholic Adult Education Centre, says ignorance of the facts about Jesus and the history of the Church is a problem which the fictionalised distortions of the Da Vinci Code make worse.

He says he spoke to one university-age student who estimated that two-thirds of the students in

his year level believed that what the Da Vinci Code says about Jesus and Mary Magdalane is true.

This refers to the novel’s claim that Jesus fathered a child with Mary Magdalene who was spirited away by his followers after the Crucifixion.

Fr Flader said that he enjoyed the novel when it came out and anticipates the movie will also be engaging.

“It was well-put together,” he told The Record

“If the film is half as good as it could be, it will be a great thriller - but you have to remember, it’s fiction.”

Fr Flader said he agreed with the Australian author Frank Mobbs, who recently told a Catholic Adult seminar: ‘for heaven’s sake, read the book and see the film, because if we don’t, we can’t take advantage of the fact that people will be asking questions, and then we can’t lead them to the truth’.”

For those seeking facts about the history that has been fictionalised in the Da Vinci Code, Flader recommended books such as The Da Vinci Hoax by Carl Olson and Sandra Miesel, Decoding Da Vinci by Amy Welborn and Mr Mobbs’ short volume, The Incredible Da Vinci Code

Fr Flader also recommended looking at the US press room section of the American Opus Dei website www.opusdei.org

Fr Flader said the book has already had a large impact on the number of people visiting Opus Dei’s website for information, with “hits” on the American site increasing by around 30 per cent since the book’s launch.

Mr Vella said the Da Vinci phe-

nomenon shows a keenness to read and a hunger for mystery among people living in today’s society.

“The figure of Jesus Christ is still a hot topic,” he said. “We won’t be organising boycotts of the movie or slamming the publishers or anything like that,” Mr Vella said.

“In fact, I’m looking forward to the time when the movie comes out as a time for doing good. It will be a positive teaching moment,” he predicted.

For information on Opus Dei in Australia: www.opusdei.org.au

As mentioned on Page 1 of this edition, The Record will be organising another of its special public meetings in the near future, this time on the Da Vinci Code. Watch The Record in coming weeks for details - the editor

Departing 16 June 2006

Centre Director “The Living Centre” [HIV/AIDS Pastoral Care]

The Centre is located in Burswood, Perth and assists people either infected with or affected by HIV/ AIDS. The Centre’s mission is to enable the members to optimise their emotional, social and spiritual well-being. The Centre is funded by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Perth and the Sisters of St John of God. The Centre has an independent governing Board, and operates on a completely multi-faith and inter-denominational, non-discriminatory basis.

The Director will have responsibilities for:

The direct provision of pastoral care support to the members.

Increasing awareness of the Centre and its services, networking with, and marketing to other agencies involved in the service provision to the HIV/AIDS community.

The management of the service, staff and administration.

While not essential; previous experience in the management of a similar service and knowledge of HIV/AIDS or other chronic disease issues, would be highly regarded; however, this should not deter any interested candidates from applying for the position.

A remuneration package equivalent to the SACS Award Level 7 will be negotiated with the successful applicant depending on his or her skills and experience. Salary packaging and the private use of a motor vehicle can be included within the remuneration package.

Applications addressing the above criteria with CV and referees should be mailed to: Deputy Chairman (Private & Confidential) “The Living Centre”

PO Box 73 Burswood, Western Australia 6100.

Telephone: 9470 4931

Applications close at 5pm Friday 28th April 2006.

Some backfire? Some Australian members of the personal prelature Opus Dei see The Da Vinci Code’s potential for interesting people in the Church.

Friends turn out for Caritas at parliament

Archbishop Hickey, Perth

Easter is for eternity

It is my prayer, my hope and my request that every Catholic spend some time this Easter thinking about eternity.

Every Catholic knows, and so do many other people, that life is eternal. When a loved one dies we become ever more certain that there will be some sort of reunion in the life that follows death. We don’t understand exactly what it will be like, and we won’t understand until we get there, but we know that there is life after death.

As somebody once said, “Anyone who doesn’t believe in life after death simply hasn’t been looking at the evidence.”

This eternal life deserves your attention, and it is this eternal life that I ask you to think about during Easter. And I ask you to think about it in relation to this earthly life.

Almost everyone thinks, or at least has an intuition, that eternal life will be good, even glorious. It is something we can look forward to during this life, and especially as this life approaches its end.

It would be strange, then, if this

life had no meaning in relation to the next life. It would be strange if there was no connection between them, strange if this life was just an isolated event that happened for no good reason before we settled down to the joys of eternity.

That is an impossible idea, and if we were not certain that it is an impossible idea, the Resurrection of Jesus would quickly change our minds.

And yet, many people live this life as though there is no connection, as though the choices we make in this life will not be the choices we repeat in the next. In the silence of their hearts – where they rarely listen – even these people expect they will know God when they encounter him in the next life.

But their invitation from God is to know God in this life so that there will be the mutual recognition of established friendship as we enter the next.

If we do not seek God in this life – which is the very purpose of this life – we may discover that we are unwilling to look for him

The inaugural Project Compassion Parliamentary Breakfast was held on April 4 at Parliament House, and included representatives from the Catholic diocese, schools, parishes and corporate supporters.

“The occasion served to belatedly launch Project Compassion 2006, provide feedback on the work of Caritas Australia and thank those who support the work of Caritas Australia, including the state government,” said Caritas national director, Jack de Groot.

The Hon Margaret Quirk MLA, on behalf of Premier Alan Carpenter, hosted the event, which honoured the presence of Archbishop Barry Hickey and Mr de Groot.

She acknowledged the work of Caritas Australia and drew on the importance of the Church’s commitment to charitable

in the next. That would leave us in the horrible nothingness that is usually called hell.

When we seek God here on earth, he always rewards us with signs of his immense love which we can enjoy here and share with others. The Church has all the aids necessary to make your search successful now and for all eternity.

Think about it, and make this a very happy Easter.

FINANCE OFFICER

DIOCESE OF BROOME

The Catholic Bishop of the Broome Diocese is seeking to appoint a Finance Officer to be responsible for the financial records management in the Diocese.

This position requires a person with appropriate qualification and / or experience in possession of the following :

•Bookkeeping/accounting experience

•Accounting experience with knowledge of MYOB

•Understanding of the organisational structure of the Catholic Church

•Demonstrated management and organisational skills

•High level IT skills

The successful applicant will be able to demonstrate formal qualification for the role and/ or experience in a similar position. A comprehensive package including accommodation, location allowance and car is provided in response to an applicant who is prepared to support the Catholic ethos of the position and meet the selection criteria and duty statement which are listed on

www.jolin.com.au/consulting/proapps.html

Commencement : June 2006

Applications can be made by post, fax, e-mail or on-line.

Applications to : Senior Consultant - Jolin Consulting PO Box 356 Joondalup WA 6919

Fx: 08-9304 0081 or jjw@jolin.com.au

Applications close 4.00 pm on Monday May 1

activities as articulated in Benedict XVI’s encyclical “Deus Caritas Est.”

Mr de Groot presented the Caritas Australia program for 2006-7, stating that over $16.5 million will be delivered to PNG and other parts of the Pacific, Asia, Africa and indigenous communities in Australia.

Mr de Groot especially mentioned the generosity of Western Australians through parishes, schools and alliances with groups such as St John of God Health Care.

Local diocesan director Ann Fairhead said “It was a special opportunity to thank those whose support enables us to provide life changing empowerment to those traumatised and living in poverty in countries around the world.”

Donations to Caritas Australia can be made by calling 08 9422 7925

Royal Perth Hospital

Clinical Pastoral Education

Specialised training in pastoral care, Pastoral formation and pastoral supervision

We are now accepting applications for training in 2006

● Internships commencing June 7 - November 10

● Winter CPE Quarter June 7 - August 11

● Spring CPE Quarter August 28 - November 10

● Part-Time CPE (Thursdays)

Details from: Director of Clinical Pastoral Education Centre for Pastoral Care and CPE

Royal Perth Hospital PO Box Y3137

East St George’s Terrace

PERTH 6832 WA

Telephone: (08) 9224 2482

Archbishop Hickey

Focussing on generosity: Caritas national director Jack de Groot and Archbishop Hickey represented the agency and the Church at the first WA Parliamentary Project Compassion breakfast. With them is Margaret Quirk MLA, who hosted the breakfast on behalf of Premier Alan Carpenter.

A tree that heals hurts

■ By Kim Hodgson

Bateman parishioners are giving up more than just chocolate this Lent. A healing tree has been set up to encourage parishioners to forgive others, rebuild relationships and heal hurts.

Parishioners wrote their promises down and attached these as leaves to the tree. During Lent we are asked to give up something to help us to draw closer to Jesus. While it is easy to give up chocolate

Youth seminar

Working for McPeanuts, a seminar for young people who are employed or are considering employment, will be run at the Sts John and Paul parish hall, Willetton on April 30, from 1 to 4.30pm.

The Ecumenical seminar, run by the Young Christian Workers and the Council of Churches of WA, will address employment related issues of concern to youth and their parents, such as, changes to workplace agreements and the rights of youth workers.

The seminar will also include information on the changes being implemented under the Workchoices Act and participants will have the opportunity to explore the ways in which they view employment.

While there is no fixed cost, a donation would be appreciated.

RSVP by April 28, on: 9422 7900, or by emailing, reception@highgate-perthcatholic.org.au

For further information, contact Mr Terry Quinn on: 94227926

or donate money, it is harder to forgive others who have hurt us, or let go of grudges.

The healing tree allows us to give up our hurts in a physical way, bringing healing to ourselves and others, and over the past few weeks the tree has blossomed.

The leaves of the tree will be burnt around the parish’s reconciliation service to symbolise a releasing of all our hurts so God can heal them, and we can make a new start, as part of our preparation for Easter.

Deep

Bishop Donald Sproxton, Perth

Time to celebrate God’s intervention

Recently I caught an intriguing line from a song on the radio. The song was about a young man protesting his love for the woman of his life. Somehow as the man sings of his love, he counts the number of things he believes, concluding with the belief in the love of his woman.

What got my attention and set me thinking was the line, “I don’t believe in an interventionist God”.

To a degree, I agree with the songwriters’ credo. Intervention can have different meanings. We have had the experience of having someone intervening in our lives without our asking and without recognising our freedom. This sort of intervention is destructive and fails to acknowledge our human dignity.

The other, more positive kind of intervention, is where a person seeing the need of another, makes an offer to help, all the while respecting the freedom of the other to accept. This mode of action is the divine way as revealed in the Scriptures. To the extent that this is how God involves himself in our history, he is an interventionist God.

Easter is the holiest of the holy feasts of the Church. It is the time to joyfully celebrate the intervention of God that brought true freedom for humanity. The offer to each of us to be free and to act without the chains of past sin and failure bringing us down is being made again to us.

We are celebrating as well the awesome respect of God for our freedom of will, as he offers liberty of heart and mind without

Bishop Sproxton

denying us the choice to accept this gift of salvation or to reject it.

May the Risen Christ be the reason for your joy and hope this Easter.

What a child might learn

■ By Megan Levy

Last Christmas and Advent some of us gathered at Saint Patrick’s Basilica, Fremantle, to pray for our families. Father John Sherman omi, our Parish Priest, provided us with the following prayer:

O God, our Father, bind our families together. Banish anger and destroy bitterness within them, nourish forgiveness among them and develop a strong sense of peace. Bestow upon parents wisdom and patience, so that they may exercise the spirit of genuine Christ-like love and bring forth from their children their greatest virtues and the best that is in them. Instil in their children self-respect and right ideals, so that they may obey their parents and grow in their love and come to know the joy of their companionship. Open ears to hear the truth another speaks; open eyes to see the reality beneath another’s appearance and make family affection reflect the genuine sign of Christ’s love for all humanity.

These beautiful words brought to mind a memory of a very loved friend, who thinks that we should treat our children just as we treat our “bestest” friends with respect, acceptance and sense of humour, and in this spirit she shared with me two thoughts from the depths of her heart.

First she told me that she had been a victim of domestic violence and that this seriously affected her life. The love and appreciation she could never find in her parents threw her into a sterile search for love disguised as sex, going from one relationship to another without finding meaning and least of all love, especially because she herself did not know what love was about.

Against all odds and predictions as she had been diagnosed as unable to conceive, she got pregnant. The father of her son deserted both but for her since the very moment she conceived her loneliness melted away and the void in her heart started to fill up. Her pregnancy was a prelude to the wonderful adventure of motherhood.

Abandoned and fearful she was tempted by the idea of abortion to save her neck before society, however the option she took was even better. She chose life, and in doing so as she could feel her baby growing in her womb she also encountered meaning and love, and this

turned her life completely around. What she had never known before “unconditional love,” came to her from God in a bundle of joy. She was sterile and her heart was bare, but for God everything is possible and as she chose life, God chose her to love and serve him in motherhood.

Secondly, she gave me a copy, which I now share with you, of her “code of parental skills”, and she told me how well she could understand the negative feelings in the first 8 lines, because she had experienced them herself, and how the rest of positive ones were what she saw in the way her friends at school were treated by their parents.

Her deep longing for that kind of “loving care” made her determined to give her child the best of her by following “the code” below, not only to be a good mother but to repay her child for the unconditional love she had never felt before, a love which can only come from God.

Children Learn what they Live

If a child lives with criticism

He learns to condemn

If a child lives with hostility

He learns to fight

If a child lives with ridicule

He learns to be shy

If a child lives with shame

He learns to feel guilty

If a child lives with tolerance

He learns to be patient

If a child lives with encouragement

He learns confidence

If a child lives with praise

He learns to appreciate

If a child lives with fairness

He learns justice

If a child lives with security

He learns to like himself

If a child lives with acceptance and friendship

He learns to find love in the world.

This brought also to mind the words of Viktor L. Frankl: No matter how much we might have suffered, nothing gives us the right to mistreat others

So, do as my friend, if you had a difficult childhood give it to God and do your best so your children may not live what you lived.

Fr John Hannah omi, also at St. Patrick’s Basilica gave us, last Advent, this beautiful message for our hearts:

Life is a gift from God, the way we live our lives is our gift to God.

symbolism: Frederick Lau placing his offering on the healing tree. Photo: Beverley Bucat

New life teaches us to love, and we can pass on the favour to the young.

Fr Hynes returns to the Lord

■ By Jamie O’Brien

Family and friends gathered last week for the funeral of Fr Reg Hynes, who had only recently celebrated his 70th anniversary to the priesthood.

The 96-year-old priest was born in Waterloo, near Bunbury, on November 22, 1910 and ordained to the priesthood in Rome in 1936.

More than 200 people gathered for the funeral Mass at St Bernadette’s Parish in Glendalough concelebrated by Archbishop Hickey, Auxiliary Bishop Donald Sproxton, Bishop Peter Quinn and approximately 50 priests.

Fr Hynes’ niece, Cathy De Bona, gave the eulogy and recalled many of her family’s memories of her uncle.

Among other talents, Fr Hynes was a decent, and somewhat creative, cook.

“He was very good at making his own jam and scones and no fruit was ever wasted.

“No water was ever wasted either.

“Waste water has put on his grapes, spring onions and tomatoes that he grew in the garden.

“I remember him mentioning that he made bread on a Sunday - the dough would have been left to rise in the boot of his car,” she said.

His studies for the priesthood were commenced at St Columba’s Seminary, Springwood, NSW, and he subsequently transferred to Propaganda Fide College, Rome where he was ordained to the priesthood for the then Abbacy Nullius of New Norcia on February 9,1936.

He served in Wongan Hills and Trayning parishes of the New Norcia ecclesiastical territory until its absorption into the Archdiocese of Perth in December 1971.

Following the suppression of the New Norcia Abbacy Nullius, Fr Hynes became a priest of the Archdiocese of Perth and served in the parishes of Boulder and Beverley.

He retired from active ministry in December 1982.

Two of Fr Hynes’ nieces, Bernadette and Angel Hynes, are Sisters of St Joseph.

Fr Hynes also has a nephew, Laurence Hynes of Waterloo.

At the time of his death Fr Hynes was the senior priest of the Archdiocese.

Always a great conversationalist, Fr Hynes kept up his reading through the years and showed a great interest in everything.

As he moved more into his advanced years he awaited the call of the Lord whom he has served so faithfully throughout 70 years of priesthood.

- information also supplied courtesy of the Vicar General, Fr Brian O’Loughlin Fr Reg Hynes

Vinnies officer welcomes mental health initiative

Prime Minister John Howard’s $1.8 billion commitment to mental health is good news for people living with a mental illness, said the Chief Executive Officer to the national council of the St Vincent de Paul Society of Australia.

Vinnies have backed Mr Howard’s call on State Labor Governments to invest in supported accommodation options for people living with a mental illness.

‘The Federal Government’s funding package is a welcome response

to community concerns about the plight of people living with mental illness,’ said Margaret Morton.

‘People with mental illness, their families and carers are in desperate need of the respite services that this package will provide. We are also pleased to see vital funding for community awareness and living skills programs.’ The St Vincent de Paul Society encourages all State Governments to cooperate with the spirit of this initiative by matching the Federal Government’s commit-

ment. State funding is necessary to provide needs-based supported accommodation options that include clinical and community support provisions.

“People with mental health issues have faced a vacuum of clinically and community-supported accommodation for decades,” said Ms Morton.

“Today’s announcement is a first step towards ending years of shameful neglect by successive State and Federal governments. We call on

State Governments to fund a variety of needs-based accommodation services for the treatment and rehabilitation of people living with and recovering from mental illness.’

Vincentcare, a Special Work of the St Vincent de Paul Society, offers a variety of housing options, from hostels for the homeless to selfcontained units and shared houses, in tandem with life skills programs that cover social activities, healthy eating, referrals and programs specially developed for youth.

Dominic’s sons and daughters to gather

■ By

Sylvia Defendi

Religious and lay Perth Dominicans will join thousands across the globe to celebrate the 800th anniversary of Dominican foundation, on April 29, Feast of St Catherine of Sienna.

The Dominican sisters of Western Australia will mark the anniversary by gathering at 2pm at Holy Rosary Parish, Woodlands, for afternoon tea, followed by sung evening prayer at 4.30pm.

Dominic Guzman from Prouille, South France, founded the Dominican Sisters in 1206. These women became the centre of prayer and support as Dominic and his travellers preached the Good News worldwide. Today there are 32,000 apostolic sisters, 5,000 contemplative and thousands of lay Dominicans in 101 countries. “Many people have been educated by the Dominicans or have supported the sisters in Australia,” said lay Dominican, June Ross.

“Please bring photos or memorabilia to share and pass this invitation to your friends and family, who may have been associated with Dominican schools or parishes here or in other countries,” said Ms Ross.

For further information email domsiswa@globaldial.com.au

The World

A ‘simple pastor’ bares his soul

Pope tells youths Nazi brutality helped him decide to become a priest

■ By Cindy Wooden

In a meeting with young people, Pope Benedict XVI said he decided to become a priest after witnessing the brutality of the Nazi regime in his native Germany.

While his vocation came naturally to him, the Pope said he had to seriously ask himself about priestly celibacy and had doubts about whether he could be a simple pastor to simple people.

The Pope’s reflections, the most personal since his election to the papacy a year ago, came during a question-and-answer session on April 6 with some 40,000 Rome youths in St Peter’s Square.

The annual pre-Easter event included songs, dance, prayers and testimonials. This year it also featured short film clips of Pope John Paul II, who initiated the youth meetings many years ago.

Pope Benedict, seated in a chair in the late-afternoon sun, fielded questions from young people on topics like science and faith, sexuality and marriage and the development of his own vocation.

The Pope said he grew up “in a very different world” of Nazi Germany. “The Nazi regime told us in a loud voice: ‘In the new Germany, there will no longer be priests or consecrated life. We don’t need that anymore. Find another profession,’” he said.

“But precisely in hearing these strong voices, I understood, looking at the brutality of this system and its

inhuman face, that there was a need for priests,” he said.

As a boy, Pope Benedict was enrolled by school officials in the Hitler Youth movement, but at a certain point he stopped going to meetings.

He said his own vocation was driven by two other factors: an appreciation for the beauty of the liturgy and “the beauty of knowledge,” including knowledge of God and the Scriptures.

Naturally, he said, there were problems to resolve in the path to the priesthood.

“I asked myself if I would have the capacity to faithfully live celibacy for

my entire life,” he said.

He also recognised that by nature he was more theoretical than practical, and that being a good priest involved pastoral contact.

“There was a need to be always available for young people, the elderly, the poor, and to be simple with the simple people. So I asked myself if I would be able to live all this and not just be a theologian,” he said. The young people in the square reacted in different ways to the Pope’s spontaneous remarks. While groups of grade-schoolers giggled on the steps of the basilica, older youths listened attentively.

Responding to a question about

sexuality and marriage, the Pope said it was important to remember that marriage “is not an invention of the Church.” For millennia, he said, cultures have recognised that men and women are created for love and marriage. The problem today, he said, is that a consumer society has falsified these traditional values and wants to prevent people from living according to God’s plan.

“So we have to have the courage to create islands, oases, and then great areas of Catholic culture, in which one lives this design of the Creator,” he said. The greatest challenge of our age is secularism, a way of presenting the world as if God does not exist, he

said. In answer to a question about science and faith, the Pope cited “the great Galileo,” who saw a connection between the world created by God and the science of mathematics. Naturally, the Pope said, no one can devise an experiment to prove that a single intelligence created the world, but such a conclusion seems more and more compatible with what people know through reason.

The greater the human capacity to understand the world through science, “the greater appears the intelligent design of creation,” he said.

In that sense, he said, faced with the question of God’s existence, the Church has chosen the more rational and human path - recognising a great intelligence behind all creation - and rejected “irrational” explanations that would see creation as a chance occurrence.

The Pope added that the real challenge to the faith is the question of evil in the world and its compatibility with the plan of the creator.

“And here we really need the God who became flesh and who shows us that God is not only mathematical reason ... but also love,” he said.

Each of the young people was given a Bible upon arriving at the meeting, and the Pope encouraged them to “read it and reread it in a personal dialogue with God.”

At the end of the encounter, the Pope walked with a group of youths who carried the World Youth Day cross to the tomb of Pope John Paul II in the crypt of St Peter’s Basilica. After praying silently, he stepped aside to let the youths kiss the tombstone and say their own prayers.

In the square, giant TV screens showed the images from the crypt, prompting a long wave of applause. CNS

Family important for business Conversion is continual

Papal preacher says even committed believers struggle to follow Jesus

Even the most active, committed Christians must struggle each day to convert and to follow Jesus more closely, said the preacher of the papal household.

Capuchin Father Raniero Cantalamessa, offering a Lenten meditation to Pope Benedict XVI and top Vatican officials on April 7, said that while conversion from nonbelief to belief is primary, conversion is an ongoing process.

With nonbelievers, he said, “Christ is outside and knocks on the doors of the heart in order to enter. But when it comes to successive conversions - from one state of grace to a higher state, from tepidness to fervour - the opposite happens: Christ is inside and knocks on the doors of the heart in order to get out.”

The “heart of stone” that the Bible condemns can describe not only those who refuse to believe in God and in the immensity of God’s love demonstrated in the death

and resurrection of his Son, Father Cantalamessa said.

“It can happen that the Holy Spirit ends up being imprisoned and walled up in the heart of stone” of a believer who sets limits on what he or she allows God to do, the preacher said. The Capuchin told the Pope and Vatican officials that the love of God inside of them often is like a tree planted along a city street; the struggle to grow cracks the sidewalk.

In the lives of most serious believers, he said, Jesus is not locked up in a cell, but is more or less “on parole. He is free to move around, but only within precise limits.”

Too often even believers say, “prayer, yes, but not if it encroaches on my sleep, relaxation, reading,” he said. They claim they will be obedient, but not if it limits their freedom, he said. They promise to be chaste, but still will watch questionable television programs or movies, he added.

Only when believers open their hearts completely to God’s love can they look at the crucifix and see not pain, but the power of God, he said. CNS

First Arab Catholic woman to be member of Israeli parliament

■ By Judith Sudilovsky

Israel will have its first Catholic Arab female member of Parliament when Nadia Hilou is sworn in on April 17 at the opening of the Knesset’s 17th session.

The social activist for early childhood education and women’s rights won the seat reserved for a woman candidate on March 28.

Hilou, 51, national vice president of the Na’amat women’s organisation, said she first decided to enter politics in 1995 with the signing of the Israeli peace accords with the Palestinians.

She said she chose to run on the Labor Party ticket rather than with one of the Arab parties because she believes she can accomplish more as a member of a large political party. She described herself as a “woman of action.”

“You can make changes when you are in a big party. You can

have more influence, you can serve better,” she told Catholic News Service in a telephone interview. “I will continue in politics my work of 30 years regarding social issues, including the status of woman and equality and integration for the Arab sector. There is a clear gap from which Arab society is suffering.” With former labour union head Amir Peretz now at the helm of the Labor Party, it is the first time the Labor Party - or any party - has put social issues at the

head of its agenda, said Hilou. One of Hilou’s main goals is the passing of a bill for free education - including university studies - for all. That would also allow more women in the workforce, she said.

If the government is not able to provide funding for free higher education, her plan would include government interest-free loans, which would then be paid back at the end of the studies based on the assumption that the recipient is able to find employment that pays an average salary, she said.

If the recipient is unable to earn such a salary, then the loan would become a grant, she said.

Many young Arabs in Israel complete their academic studies only to discover they cannot find suitable employment in their field and are forced to work in lowerpaying jobs.

It is also important to work toward the integration of Arab women in the workforce while still following the tenets of societal traditions, added Hilou. Establishing peace with Palestinians is a personal issue, she said. She has family members living in the Palestinian territories.

Pope Benedict XVI waves during a meeting with some 40,000 young people in St Peter’s Square at the Vatican April 6. Photo: CNS

Nadia Hilou

The World

No new revelations in found Gospel

Found ‘Gospel of Judas’ paints alternate portrait of Jesus’ betrayer

■ By Mark Pattison

A gnostic writing long thought to have been lost, the Gospel of Judas, was put on display on April 6 at the National Geographic Society in Washington. The document, a third-century Coptic translation of what had originally been written in Greek before 180 AD, paints Judas in a more sympathetic light than his well-known role as Jesus’ betrayer in the canonical Gospels.

In it, Jesus said Judas would “exceed all” of the other disciples, “for you will sacrifice the man that clothes me” - a reference to Judas’ impending betrayal of Jesus. It is also an allusion to gnostic belief that held the spirit in higher esteem than the body, and that, through liberation from Jesus’ body, his spirit would be freed. The Gospel of Judas was mentioned in a book condemning heresies that was written by St Irenaeus, bishop of Lyon, France, in 180 AD.

The find, though, was touted at an April 6 press conference as one of the three most significant discoveries of sacred writings of the past century, along with the Dead Sea Scrolls, thousands of fragments of biblical and early Jewish documents discovered between 1947 and 1956, and the Nag Hammadi Library, a collection of 50 texts found in Egypt in 1945.

In the Gospel of Judas, “Judas is portrayed as the only disciple who knows Jesus’ true identity,” said Gregor Wurst, a professor of Catholic theology at the University of Augsburg in Germany and one of the chief translators of the Gospel of Judas from the Coptic.

Passionist Father Donald Senior, president of the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago,

said it was doubtful the Gospel of Judas would shed new light on the New Testament Gospels or serve as a source of inspiration to rival them. The New Testament canon “was not chosen by some elites” without regard to how early Christians used the sacred texts available to them, Father Senior said. The canonical Gospels had already enjoyed wide use because they “nourished” early Christians, he added. But as to whether the Gospel of Judas would give insight into gnostic thinking, Father Senior said the answer was “emphatically yes.” He later said there would always be questions about why a member of Jesus’ inner circle would betray him.

Marvin Meyer, a Bible and Christian studies professor at Chapman University in Orange, California and another chief translator, said it was interesting to note that - as opposed

to the canonical Gospels, which are Gospels “according to” - this document is a Gospel “of.” It is clear that neither Judas nor the Evangelists actually wrote the books that bear their names, Meyer said. But what is less clear is whether the Gospel of Judas is “a Gospel ‘about’ Judas or a Gospel ‘for’ Judas.”

The Gospel of Judas, which contained three additional Coptic documents, was unearthed in El Minya, Egypt, in the 1970s. The fragile pages stayed for 16 years in a bank safedeposit box in Hempstead, New York, where they deteriorated.

The documents then changed hands on a couple of occasions, and later spent some time in the freezer compartment. Because of the deterioration, only about 80 percent of the documents have been restored. - CNS

- Interview: Page 20

Kosovo Christians benefit from ‘European’ school

German Jesuit teaches Christian values in Muslim Kosovo

■ By Regina Linskey

To teach Christian values in predominantly Muslim Kosovo, Jesuit Father Walter Happel uses a secular facade.

The German priest is executive

the world in brief

Cardinal murder inquiry

director of a Prizren, Kosovo, private school. In its brochure for the public, it is portrayed as a school that teaches “in the European sense”; it does not mention Christian values. Language and science classes are emphasised; the school does not offer religion classes.

But the school is called LoyolaGymnasium Prizren, named after St Ignatius of Loyola. Its donors include Renovabis, a German Catholic movement; the German dioceses of Cologne and Limburg;

The 1993 murder of a Mexican cardinal was drug-related, warranting a reopening of the investigation by Mexican authorities, said Washington Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick at a congressional hearing. He also asked the US government, which is holding several Mexican suspects and witnesses in the case, to aid Mexican authorities in the investigation.

Cardinal Juan Posadas Ocampo of Guadalajara, Mexico, was “a martyr in the war against drugs,” said Cardinal McCarrick on April 6 in testimony before the House Subcommittee on Africa, Global Human Rights and International Operations.

The initial Mexican ruling that Cardinal

and the Italian bishops’ conference. And, he even had a Christmas tree in the school this year, Father Happel told Catholic News Service in an April 4 interview during a visit to Washington.

The facade is necessary because only seven years ago the ethnic and religious fighting in the region pitted majority separatist Albanian Muslims against minority Christian Serbs. Today, Kosovo is a disputed territory in Serbia under the administrative control of the United

Posadas was accidentally killed in a crossfire between rival drug gangs was “a travesty of justice,” said the US cardinal. The House subcommittee has been pressuring the U.S. Justice Department to explain why it does not want to allow Mexican authorities to question the Mexican suspects and witnesses it is holding or to turn them over to Mexican authorities.

Letter dropped

Dropping a tradition of his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI is not issuing a letter to the world’s priests on Holy Thursday, a Vatican spokesman said.

Father Ciro Benedettini, assistant director of the Vatican press office, said on April 6 that no papal letter would be released this year.

New Vatican underground: Mayor

Rome mayor says new underground entrance planned for Vatican Museums

A projected new entrance to the Vatican Museums will feature a giant glass pyramid and underground shops and restaurants, Rome Mayor Walter Veltroni announced.

The subterranean entrance will stretch several blocks, in an effort to accommodate the long lines of visitors and protect them from the elements, Veltroni told a Rome press conference on April 3.

“We will no longer see those interminable lines of people who have to stand waiting for hours, no matter what the weather,” Veltroni said. The new entrance, built primarily on Italian territory, would connect at the Vatican walls with the existing museum entrance, which was enlarged a few years ago. Veltroni said city planners were already working with Vatican officials to coordinate the architectural arrangement.

Veltroni said the above-ground pyramid at the entrance site would help illuminate the underground complex and would evoke the famous pyramid at the entrance of the Louvre in Paris. The new entrance will open at Piazza Risorgimento, where a new subway stop is envisioned. The underground facilities will include information areas and bookshops for tourists, as well as “archaeological windows” featuring ancient artifacts.

Veltroni said an international competition would probably be held to decide the architectural design.

Nations. Blatant war might have cooled, but tensions are still hot. And the prospect of teaching religious education in a school opens a debate Father Happel chooses to avoid.

“Ninety percent of the population in Kosovo is Muslim. The extreme Muslims are trying to implement religion classes in public schools ... so if we, as a private school, teach religion classes, we are opening up the doors for extremist Muslims” to teach an extremist curriculum in

He did not say why the Pope had decided to discontinue the practice. In 1979, a few months after his election, Pope John Paul II began writing the Holy Thursday letter as a sign of his special concern for the priesthood and the burdens of pastoral ministry.

Over the years, the letters covered such topics as priestly vocations, morale among the clergy, spirituality and priestly celibacy. The Pope’s last letter to priests focused on the importance of the Eucharist; he signed it three weeks before his death in April 2005.

Pyramid discovered

Archaeologists have discovered a giant 1,500-year old pyramid directly below the site where Mexico City Catholics have been re-enacting the crucifixion of Christ for more than 150 years.

public schools, said Father Happel. “We cannot say” ‘Christian mission,’ he said, but “traditional European values are “Christian values.”

Despite all the Christian touches, 80 percent of the school’s students are Muslim. Father Happel said he started the school with a mission to educate and instill courage into two marginalised populations in Kosovo - the girls and the Catholics. “Educated people are not manipulated as easily as uneducated people,” he said. CNS

What was long thought of as a hill overlooking the city turns out to be a dirtcovered pyramid measuring 165 yards on each of its four sides. Squatters have even built houses on the hill, destroying part of the pre-Columbian structure. The pyramid, located on the capital’s south side, was built by the same people who built the mysterious city of Teotihuacan around AD 400-500, and its base is about the same size as that archaeological site’s famous Pyramid of the Moon, researchers said.

The ruins of Teotihuacan lie an hour’s drive northeast of Mexico City. On Good Friday, more than a million people will flock to the hill in the Iztapalapa neighbourhood to watch the annual re-enactment of Christ’s final hours, when a man chosen to portray Christ is hung from a cross atop the hill.

This lead section of the pieced-together Coptic text called the Gospel of Judas reads: “The secret account of the revelation that Jesus spoke in conversation with Judas Iscariot during a week, three days before he celebrated Passover. Photo: CNS

Youth receive WYD cross

■ By Michelle Jones, in Rome and Mark Reidy, in Perth

Caroline Watson of Palmyra was one of six Western Australian and 60 Australian youth delegates to receive the World Youth Day Cross and Icon from Pope Benedict XVI last Sunday April 9.

The cross was handed to the Australian contingent by representatives of 2005’s host city, Cologne.

The Australian delegates, representing 24 Dioceses, were joined by the Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell at the handover ceremony after the Palm Sunday Mass celebrated by Pope Benedict XVI.

The passing of the Cross and painting officially signified the beginning of Australia’s role as host of the world’s largest youth event, which will be held in Sydney in 2008.

But before reaching Australian shores the 3.8-metre wooden Cross and its accompanying icon will

travel through Africa and Oceania.

Fr Don Kettle, Director of Perth Catholic Youth Mission, said that Caroline had been excited at the opportunity to represent Australia at the Rome ceremony.

The six other WA delegates joining Carole are Yasmin Fogliani (Broome), Jacopo Pioli (Mosman Park), Emma Kaye Nolan (Rangeway), Hoanh Hoang (Geraldton), Peter Valega (Dianella) and Vicki Burrows (Bedford).

After the ceremony the Australian Embassy to the Holy See hosted a reception welcoming the Sydney 2008 World Youth Day delegation to Rome and honouring Australian Jesuit Fr Gerald O’Collins, who was invested as a Companion of the Order of Australia.

At the reception one of those at the handover, Fr Chris Ryan, an Australian priest who is a member of the Missionaries of God’s Love, told The Record that two prayers had sprung to his heart.

“When the Cross was handed to us, my first prayer was ‘please

Bishop Saunders, Broome

don’t let us drop it,’” Fr Chris said. “Then my prayer became ‘Lord, may World Youth Day change the face of the country.’ It was a deeply moving experience.”

Australian Ambassador-designate to the Holy See, Anne Maree Plunkett, assured delegates of the support of the Australian federal and state governments and thanked them for their loving service to the youth of Australia and beyond.

She noted that Fr O’Collins was being honoured for his service to the Church through theological scholarship and his influential contribution to ecumenical relations.

The author of over 45 books, Fr O’Collins has lectured at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome since 1974.

At the presentation he acknowledged the inspiration he had received from Pope John Paul II, “who did not quit on his pilgrimage through life to God.”

For information on World Youth Day in Sydney 2008 see www.wyd2008.org

Remaining true to the light

This year we have enjoyed a wet summer such as you imagine we would always have in the tropical north. The active monsoon has swept across the top in an unusually consistent manner dampening country left dry in previous years.

Easter is traditionally the time when the seasons change in the Kimberley. Experienced gardeners plant their seed beds and prepare the soil for a period of perfect horticulture. For them Easter divides the year between the old and the new. In the spiritual garden of our lives Easter is a useful reminder that before Christ there is only chaos. With Christ there is purpose and direction. This is the cause of our great joy and the impetus for our wonderful ceremonies. The words “Christ Our Light” usher us into the Church at the Easter Vigil while on the Sunday morning we pray that we may “know him in the breaking of the bread and follow him in his risen life”.

Of harrowing concern is the realization that there are large numbers of Australians, a fair share of them in the north, who do not know Christ and do not

follow him. Living in a tourist town where the principal pursuit is mindless hedonism, it is very often alarmingly obvious that belief and the practice of the faith are minor considerations in the daily play of things. However, what is important is to state that this sorry state of affairs is not overwhelming - not for those who enjoy the benefit of Grace and a supportive faith community. Saint Paul reminds us in the Sunday scripture that “You must know how even a small amount of yeast is enough to leaven all the dough”.

(1Cor5:6) It is with this conviction in mind that we pray earnestly and

May Perth CL seminar due

■

By

Mark Reidy

Bateman couple, Martin and Rachael Dunn, were so impressed by their experience of a “Celebrate Love”(CL) weekend; they became presenters of the course.

“Our marriage has been so enriched by our involvement with CL”, Rachael said, “…the practical tools we learnt are wonderful for bringing us back into a closer, more intimate relationship.”

consistently for the unbelievers in this world, ushering in the light that leads people out of darkness and into a deep relationship with Christ.

The recent publication on the life of Father Nicholas Emo by Sr. Brigida Nailon CSB is not merely the tale of a great adventure set in the Kimberley missions but it is also a testimony to resounding faith in the face of enormous odds. His determined construction of the bush church at Cygnet Bay dedicated to Our Lady of the Aborigines was a beacon of hope and a statement in faith. Nothing could deter this faithful servant of the Gospel - not betrayal nor dishonesty, not bushfires nor isolation, not opposition nor unfaithfulness. Nicholas made it his business to sail through every difficulty and challenge comforted by his faith and lifted up by his closeness to Jesus the Christ.

For each of us, the celebration of Easter should be a reminder of how empty were our lives before Christ transformed us. With Him we are prepared for a purposeful life in His service. Without doubt his love will sustain us and his presence will give us courage.

The Dunns will be one of four couples presenting the CL seminar in May this year. It will be the third course conducted in Perth after successful weekends in October 2004 and April 2005.

CL is a two day, non-residential seminar, designed to lead husbands and wives into a greater intimacy and deeper understanding of selfgiving. Through presentations and self-directed questionnaires, the weekend is designed to rekindle the passion of being “in love” and help couples understand marriage as an endless gift to one another.

The seminar examines the interwoven nature of the emotional, sexual and spiritual aspects of marriage and explores the obstacles that can impede the full potential of intimacy.

The course draws on the insights of Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body who described marriage as a union of self-giving. He emphasised that if the gift of self is not practised in every aspect of a marriage, then love is not being given a fertile ground in which to grow. CL seeks to assist couples in fulfilling the fullness of this intimacy.

The course format is constructed in a way that allows couples to adapt the content to their own level of need or desire. There are no group discussions or counselling and all sharing is carried out pri-

vately between husband and wife. The weekend is suitable for couples of all ages, whether they have been married for one month or sixty years. It is presented in the context of the Catholic faith but couples of all faiths and practices are welcome.

National Directors and coauthors of CL, Sydney couple Byron and Francine Pirola, have been delighted by the response to the first two seminars conducted in Perth. “Perhaps the best testimony to the practical usefulness of the seminar”, Francine said, “was the fact that most of the twenty or so couples who attended the first seminar, were actively involved in either hospitality, promotion, presentation or prayer support of the second one… In our busy world people don’t do that unless they are pretty enthusiastic about their own experience.”

Since its inception in Sydney in 1994 over 800 couples have attended the course Australia wide, including over 200 last year. In May this year CL will make its international debut when a weekend will be held in London for 40 couples.

The next CL seminar in Perth will be held on the weekend of May 20 & 21 at Mercy College, Koondoola. For bookings and information contact: Brad and Mary Prentice on (08) 9401 0596 or online at celebratelove.com.au

Bishop Saunders

Rachel and Martin Dunn

Celebrating: Peter Valega, at left, and other West Australian members of the WYD delegation spell out ‘WA’ in the grounds of the Australian embassy after the handover ceremony. Also pictured are Yasmin Fogliani, Jacopo Pioli, Emma Nolan, Hoanh Hoang, Vicki Burrows and Caroline Watson, who is the horizontal West Aussie. The logo for WYD Sydney 2008, below, was also unveiled.

It’s easy to become complacent because we hear the story every year but the Crucifixion was...

A terrible way to die

By Mike Aquilina

The Gospels say little about the business of crucifixion. “And they crucified him” is all St Mark offers (15:24), with no word of how it was done or how the cross tortured its victim.

The early Christians offered little more when they recited the Creed: “He was crucified under Pontius Pilate, suffered, died and was buried.’

The Crucifixion comes at the climax of the Christian drama. Yet tradition records the matter as little more than a fact. “They crucified him.” “He was crucified.” History provides no coroner’s report, no painstaking medical reconstruction.

Perhaps our first Christian ancestors could not bear to say any more. They had seen men crucified. They could walk to the outskirts of town if they wanted to count the cost - in blood and pain and humiliation – of their salvation.

Unlike Christians through most of history, we today have not grown up with the experience of public executions and public torture. Still, like the family of any murder victim, we feel the need to know the truth about our Saviour and brother - not least because we believe He died for our sake.

Over the past 16 years, US surgeon Jack McKeating has applied his professional skills to this problem reviewing the historical and archaeological evidence in light of recent medical research.

“Any serious Christian has to take an active interest in the passion of Jesus Christ,” McKeating says.

“Unfortunately, we’re often too dispassionate about it. We tend to think of it in unreal terms, as an abstraction. But it involved a real person who underwent an absolutely brutal experience out of love for me.”

McKeating traces his interest to the late 1980s, when he worked away from home as a fellow in surgical oncology.

“I was in a Bible study group with three other surgeons,” he recalled, “a fundamentalist, a Methodist, a Baptist and me.” One morning, one of his colleagues brought On the Physical Death of Jesus Christ: a 1986 study from the Journal of the American Medical Association.

That study gathered the descriptions of crucifixion from ancient sources. It analysed the skeletal

The end began when executioners extended the condemned man’s arms and bound them to a wooden beam. Sometimes, they would also drive nails through the man’s wrists at the highly sensitive median nerve. The executioner relied on the element of surprise for the first hammer blow. The victim was unlikely to have experienced such pain before.

remains of crucified men, and it considered all the data in light of current medical research.

The JAMA study led McKeating to the classic text in the field, A Doctor at Calvary, an exhaustive account written by French Catholic surgeon Pierre Barbet. Barbet completed his book in 1949 after decades of research.

McKeating praises both studies for their scholarship and their unflinching care.

“Anyone who studies the matter has to start with these sources,” he said. “But keep in mind that it is a start. As we advance in medicine, we are able to learn still more about our Lord’s passion.

How did crucifixion usually happen? Applying their medical knowledge to the historical data, doctors such as McKeating, Barbet and the JAMA team have attempted to reconstruct the events.

Maximum pain

The ancient Romans had a special genius for torture. It helped them keep order in a vast empire. The public spectacle of extreme suffering - repeated with some regularity - served as a deterrent to wouldbe rebels and insurgents.

Crucifixion was the utmost refinement of the Roman art of torture. The Jewish historian Josephus called it “the most wretched of deaths.” It was designed to cause the most pain in the most parts of the body over the longest period of time.

More realistic: Popular belief has Jesus crucified through the palms of the hands but scholarship says it was almost certainly through the wrists, as is portrayed in this statue - and this part of the process alone was agony.

Photo: CNS

Blooming plant pollens on the shroud can be traced to an area 9.6 to 14.4 kilometres east and west of Jerusalem. Two of the species bloom in Jerusalem only in March and April when Passover occurs and the time of year when Christ died.

Mites vacuumed from between the shroud and its backing cloth are peculiar to ancient Egyptian burial linens.

Dr. Alan Whanger, professor emeritus at North Carolina’s Duke University Medical Centre, said his overlay technique matches the blood stains on the face of the shroud with those on the Sudarium of Oviedo. The latter is believed to be the missing face cloth described in St John’s Gospel. The blood type is also AB. Type AB blood is rare in the world but common among Jews in Palestine.

The shroud’s distinctive joining seam closely resembles unique textiles found at tombs in Masada, the palace-fortress destroyed in AD 73. The nearly invisible style of seaming was unknown in medieval Europe.

Shroud of Turin backs Hollywood and history

Critics of Mel Gibson’s block buster hit The Passion of the Christ charged that the movie was excessively violent. The beatings, the scourging and the crucifixion were “over the top,” they said.

Gibson’s reply was simple: This is what really happened. This is not gratuitous violence, but is necessary for viewers to appreciate what Jesus Christ went through for our sins. But was Gibson’s interpretation, as one TV panel of film crit-

By Joanne Schmidt

ics asked, Hollywood or history?

The Gospel accounts don’t include every nuance of Christ’s passion, but a silent witness provides graphic detail: the image on the Shroud of Turin.

Ever since 1996, when the carbon-14 tests declaring the shroud a medieval artifact were discredited,

there has been a resurgence of interest in this religious relic. While few publicly agree with researchers such as Dr Gilbert Lavoie that the shroud testifies to Christ’s resurrection, scientists and researchers cite strong evidence of its authenticity.

“I’m Jewish, and I’m not going to convert to Christianity,” Barry Schwortz, official documenting photographer for the Shroud of Turin Research Project, said, “but I believe the Shroud of Turin is authentic based on real science. I believe the image came from wrap-

ping the man Jesus after the crucifixion.

What do we know?

Its documented history began in 1355 when Knight Geoffrey de Charnay placed it in a local church in Lirey, France. But Oxford historian Ian Wilson, who now lives in Queensland, has made a credible case that the shroud may be the often copied first-century holy icon of Edessa (now Urfu, Turkey) once venerated as the image “not made by man.” According to

Wilson, the shroud was moved to Constantinople during Christian persecutions before mysteriously making its way to de Charnay via an executed crusader relative of the same name, Scientists had no interest in the 4.3-by-1-metre linen until 1898. During an exhibition of the shroud, it was photographed by Secondo Pia. While making a negative, Pia was reportedly filled with “excitement and happiness” when a positive image took form on the plate. Unlike the faint images previously

Crucifixion delivered by experts in torture and death

“His back, torn open by the Romans, then had to bear the rough wood of the crossbeam, which probably weighed 24 to 55 kilograms.”

Continued from Vista 1 Crucifixion was humiliating, too, so it was usually reserved for slaves, lower-class criminals or those whose crimes were especially heinous. The stripped man was exposed, naked, to a boorish crowd that delighted in such spectacles. They cast stones at him, spat at him, jeered at him.

great effort to breathe in and even greater effort to exhale - which is normally a fairly passive process.”

“After the exposure, the emotional duress, the severe beating and then the scourging, He was probably in Class 3 shock, out of a possible 4.”

The end began when executioners extended the condemned man’s arms and bound them to a wooden beam. Sometimes, they would also drive nails through the man’s wrists at the highly sensitive median nerve. The executioner relied on the element of surprise for the first hammer blow. The victim was unlikely to have experienced such pain before. It was “the most unbearable pain that a man can experience,” Barbet concluded.

Nailing the second arm, however, could pose a problem, because the nervous system would instinctively recoil from any repetition of that pain. The executioner would need to struggle against an arm rigidly resistant to his efforts. All of this wrangling, involuntary on the part of the victim, would intensify the pain in the arm already nailed. The beam then was attached to a pole. Every shift of the beam renewed the pain in the median nerve. But all of that was just a prelude to the real torture of crucifixion.

“Our bodies normally have five litres of blood.

McKeating said that “in a typical Roman scourging, a man would have lost a litre and a half.”

The victim found himself suspended above the ground, his body slumped forward, his knees bent and his feet positioned as if he were standing on tiptoe. That position made it almost impossible for him to draw a breath.

“Crucifixion stretches the chest cavity open,” McKeating explained, “and the weight of the body pulls down on the diaphragm so the lungs are kept open. It requires

The victim could not breathe inward or outward without lifting his body up by the nails in his wrists and pushing up on the nail in his feet. With every breath then, he felt the coarse metal tearing at his nerves.

Gradually, his limbs cramped and weakened. As he was less able to lifthim self up, he began, slowly, to suffocate, A victim of crucifixion alternated between the panicked sense of asphyxiation and the searing pain of the nails in his flesh. Relief from one inevitably brought about the other.

In a strong man, this could go on for many hours, even days. If the Romans wanted to accelerate the process, they would break the victim’s legs so he could no longer push himself upward to take a breath.

Even before the cross “Jesus was probably a strong man,” McKeating said. “He was relatively young, He worked hard, and He tended to travel by foot. But by the time He reached Calvary, He had undergone many hours of prelirninary tortures that alone might have killed him.”

In the Garden of Gethsemane, “His sweat became like drops of blood falling to the ground” (Lk 22:44). The JAMA article, following Barbet, attributes this to a phenomenon called hematidrosis or hemohidrosis - hemorrhaging into the sweat glands. This is a rare condition that occurs in people at the extremes of human emotion.

It leaves the skin very tender and highly sensitive to pain.

Jesus would have keenly felt every

blow as His captors “mocked him and beat him” (Lk 22:63). The beatings continued through long hours in which He was also forced to walk from one interrogation to another - before the Sanhedrin, before Pilate, before Herod and again before Pilate. The JAMA research concludes that He walked approximately 4.5 kilometres during that sleepless night.

Pilate ordered Jesus to be flogged, and Roman flogging alone could kill a man. A typical whip of cords was studded with metal, sharp animal bones or shards of pottery. It was designed to bruise and tear the skin. Often, a man was whipped by two torturers, one on each side, while he was bound to a post or pillar. It was here that Jesus probably suffered His greatest blood loss. His back, torn open by the Romans, then had to bear the rough wood of the crossbeam, which probably weighed 24 to 55 kilograms. He had to carry the burden along an uneven roadway from Pilate’s praetorium to the hill of Calvary, a third of a mile. Surely, He fell often.

“Some people say that Jesus’ suffering was somehow easier because he was God,” McKeating said. “But that’s not so. Many theologians believe He suffered in a greater way because He had perfect knowledge of what was happening. Also, His senses would have been more acute and more sensitive to pain because they were not at all dulled, as ours are, by sin and self indulgence,”

Cause of death

What killed Jesus? “I think it’s multi factorial,” McKeating said. “I think the proximate cause of death was probably suffocation‘asphyxia’. But I think the end came relatively swiftly - just three long hours - because our Lord was prob-

ably in shock before He was actually crucified.

“After the exposure, the emotional duress, the severe beating and then the scourging, He was probably in Class 3 shock, out of a possible 4.”

A great physiologist once described shock as the rude unhinging of the cellular machinery of our bodies. “The technical definition,” said McKeating, “is that it’s inadequate perfusion of blood to the tissues of our body.”

Our bodies normally have five litres of blood. McKeating said that “in a typical Roman scourging, a man would have lost a litre and a half.”

Shock would have weakened him and left Him anxious and confused, hastening the end.

The Gospels suggest other factors, McKeating said. “After Jesus died, the soldier’s lance thrust brought forth blood and water (Jn 19:34). Where did the water come from? Probably pericardial effusion. Fluid would have built up from internal injuries, pulmonary contusions, bruises, beatings, and it would have filled His chest cavity or the sac around His heart. Every time the heart would beat, then, it couldn’t expand the way it needed to, and it couldn’t fill up. Eventually, it would stop.”

Forensic scientists say that the better we know what killed someone, the more likely we are to find out who killed him.

Who killed Jesus? After a decade-and-a-half of study, McKeating doesn’t hesitate to respond.

“I did,” he said. “My sins did.”

- Our Sunday Visitor

Aquilina is author of many books and is vice president of the St Paul Centre for Biblical Theology (www.salvationhistory.com).

visible at only one or two yards, the negative, with its left-right reversal of details, provided a striking look at a crucified man. Was he looking at the body of Jesus of Nazareth?

Physical evidence fits

Today, visitors to any of about 10 Shroud Centres in the US and nine other countries can study enhanced life-size photographs and judge for themselves.

They will see straw-coloured front and back images of a crucified male with Semitic characteristics. The man has a beard, and his shoulder-length hair includes the side locks and unplaited pony-tail typical of a first century orthodox Jew. The body is nude with the hands folded over the groin, the typical posture in Jewish burials. Blood stains are visible from wounds in the wrists, feet, head and brow. The images appear head to head, as if a body had been laid on a winding sheet that had then been drawn over to cover the front. Scorch marks run down both sides of the fabric, the result of a 1532 fire that melted the silver lining inside its reliquary.

Supporting Gibson’s screen account are approximately 120 scourge marks front and back, including the distinctive dumbbell markings of a Roman flagrum. A cap of puncture wounds covers the top and sides of the head. There is swelling around the face, a black eye, a broken nose and swelling on both shoulders. Abrasions cover the knees, and there is evidence of a spike through both feet.

Most telling is a long narrow stab wound that pierced the diaphragm in an upward direction between the fifth and sixth rib. All are details consistent with Gospel accounts of the Passion. Although the Romans used cruciflxion as punishment from 150 BC to AD 350, together the scourging, crowning with thorns and pierced side are unique to Jesus. Even tornout segments of beard bear out the description of the suffering Messiah (Is 50:6).

Scientists perplexed

No other burial cloths have ever been found bearing a human image, so what accounted for this one? Scientists wanted to know. How could a negative image be produced on cloth centuries before the invention of photography?

With the shroud locked away in St John the Baptist Cathedral in Turin, Italy, scientists were left with photos.

Fortunately, Giuseppe Enrie’s colour enlargements in 1931 were so detailed that French surgeon Dr Pierre Barbet, author of A Doctor at Calvary, could explain the wounds.

The landmark study of the shroud, however, took place in 1978, when 30 of the world’s most prestigious scientists were allowed 120 hours with the linen.

Recruited by John Jackson after he and fellow physicist Eric Jumper found that the Enrie print possessed three-dimensional qualities uncharacteristic of paintings or photos, the Shroud of Turin Research Project found no natural explanation for the image.

“I expected to walk in, walk up

to the shroud, see brush strokes and walk out in 20 minutes,” STURP photographer Schwortz said. Instead, using physical, chemical and biological tests, the STURP team ruled out paint, dust, photography and other possible causes of the image. The dark stains were real blood and serum, including a high bilirubin content consistent with a victim of a severe beating.

Most important, STURP concluded that the blood penetrates deeper into the linen’s fibrils than the subtle dehydrated and discoloured cellulose that forms the body image. In short, the blood was transferred to the cloth by contact with a body before the image was formed, making forgery inconceivable.

Lavoie explained, “The image is one fibre deep, with white beneath. Therefore, no dye, stain or liquid could have caused this without penetrating further into the fibres beneath. In order for a forger to paint the shroud, he would have had to use a paintbrush half the thickness of a human hair.”

While skeptics have reproduced rough duplicates of the image, none satisfy the shroud’s superficiality, subtlety, pixelation or distance-related dimensionality” Leo Vala, a photographic expert who pioneered the development of 3-D, said in Amateur Photographic magazine. “No one could have faked that image. No one could do it today, even with all the technology we have.”

Authorities have no plans for further scientific study, and the next public exhibition isn’t scheduled until 2025, but the samples and photographs taken by the STURP

team continue to produce information.

Biological, anatomical and historical evidence indicate the man in the shroud was Jesus of Nazareth. Pollen, mite and textile evidence position the shroud as an ancient cloth once present in Turkey and Palestine.

Only a handful of people have ever had access to all the unbiased facts, Schwortz says, but that is rapidly changing. After a friend told him the shroud was painted by Leonardo da Vinci even though da Vinci was born at least a century after the known existence of the shroud, Schwortz decided to start a website.

“Hard science is tedious and boring, but it’s where the real truth lies,” he said. “You can’t explain why the shroud is real in one minute.”

His site, www.shroud.com, is a virtual library and clearing house for shroud information, providing its 1,000 daily visitors full-colour photos of the shroud, articles from scientific journals and reports from international meetings of sindonologists.

Other reliable information can be found at the Shroud Centres or from any of a dozen reputable organisations.

The case for the shroud’s authenticity “would hold up in any court...,” writes Kenneth Stevenson, co-author with Gary Habermas of The Shroud and the Controversy That means Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ was probably more history than Hollywood.

- Our Sunday Visitor

The Shroud’s path through history

50-943: Cloth image of Jesus’ face is revered and copied at Edessa, Asia Minor.

943: The Edessa cloth, which most scholars now believe is the shroud, is moved to Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine Empire.

1157: A list of Constantinople relics includes the “burial cloth of Jesus.”

1204: The cloth disappears after Crusaders pillage Constantinople.

1355: Knight Geoffrey de Charnay takes shroud to a church in Lirey, France.

1452: Charnay family transfers shroud to Savoy family, who place it in the cathedral at Chambery, France.

1532: Franciscans rescue damaged shroud from fire at Chambery.

1535: Savoys move to Turin, Italy, where shroud is unrolled and exhibited May 4. Its exhibition is repeated about twice each century thereafter.

1898: Secondo Pia takes first photograph of shroud. The negative image looks like a photographic positive, a discovery that arouses scientific interest.

1931: Giuseppe Enrie again photographs shroud. Professional photographers find no ev idence of fraud.

Resurrection details

No one has ever been able to discover how the image was formed on the Shroud of Turin. That doesn’t stop researchers from reaching beyond the grave for an answer.

Dr Gilbert Lavoie, author of Resurrected, believes the image was created by an unknown energy source during the Resurrection.

A visitor to one of his presentations told Lavoie the image looked as if it were “floating in air.” “That man saw immediately what didn’t see” until years later, Lavoie said.

A shroud researcher for almost a quarter of a century, Lavoie said that the blood flow on the shroud is vertical and that the hair on the man in the shroud hangs straight down to the shoulders, not spread out as one would find on a prone body.

“Light around the eyes, rather than shadows, indicates the man was upright, with light coming from above,” said Lavoie. “I’ve taken courses in photography and shown the image to professors of anatomy. They see this man is upright.”

A medical doctor who has been present at many autopsies, Lavoie also noted that bodies lying in death are “all flattened out.” The muscles protrude, and the body loses form when lying down, he said. The man in the Shroud of Turin, however, does not lose form.

Lavoie stressed that the man is not standing, because the soles of the feet can be seen in the shroud image.

Shroud researcher Ken Stevenson also believes the shroud offers evidence of Christ’s resurrection. The man buried in the shroud was in a state of rigor mortis, he writes. That the shroud contains no hint of bodily decomposition indicates “a hasty bodily departure” during rigor mortis, 24 to 48 hours after death.

The bloodstains on the shroud were not smeared as they would have been had the body been removed by humans, Stevenson also writes.

STURP pathologist Robert Bucklin notes that there are no signs the body was unwrapped.

Can the Resurrection be proved? Science deals with the natural and can only get you to the door. It takes faith to walk through it, Stevenson says.

1973: First scientific studies show bloodstains and surface particles.

1978: Members of Shroud of Turin Research Project conduct extensive scientific studies.

1983: The Savoy family wills the shroud to the pope.

1988: Carbon-14 radiation tests date shroud to between 1260 and 1390.

1996: Bacteria growth found on shroud threads made shroud seem to be younger than actual age. Carbon-14 test discredited.

1997: During renovations on Turin cathedral, firemen rescue shroud from fire by arsonist.

2000: Pope John Paul II joins 2 million spectators during the last public exposition of shroud during Great Jubilee.

2002: Restoration of shroud, replacing backcloth and removing 30 patches used by Poor Clare nuns in 1534 to repair fire damage.

2025: Next Public Exposition.

Travertine aragonite dust from around Jerusalem is found on the nose, knees and feet of the shroud image.

i say, i say

Goodness comes from striving for Christ

■ With Mark Reidy

Many of our problems today exist not because people aren’t good, but because they are striving to be good without God. When people choose to ignore, or are ignorant of Divine guidance, they are left with no other option than to create their own moral parameters.

Behaviours and attitudes become by-products of one’s environment and are then moulded by instincts and feelings. The consequence of this is that an increasing number of people are equating personal liberty with moral independence and are turning further away from anything that restricts their “freedom”. This is why we find ourselves increasingly surrounded with attitudes, and even laws, which contravene the teachings of the Church.

But it is imperative that we, as believing Christians, understand that this cycle of spiritual destruction that non-believers find themselves in, is not, in most cases, consciously driven by evil intent. Their rationalisation, I believe, has been born from a sincere, but misguided, heart of love. When operating outside of God’s grace, individuals become locked into the here and now and are unable to perceive the eternal ramifications of their choices. They resort to the logic of human reason and emotion and honestly believe

that their responses are indeed the most loving. The usual intention of those who support abortion, for example, is not to destroy an unborn life, but to relieve a struggling mother of the responsibilities of child rearing. Similarly, euthanasia is advocated to release the pain-ridden from their suffering. Homosexuality is supported so that those inclined are able to fully express themselves as they choose. Foetus experimentation is demanded so that cures can be found for debilitating diseases. Contraception is promoted so that individuals can enjoy uninhibited sexual pleasure in a “responsible” manner. Campaigners for the legalisation of prostitution do so for the safety of women working in the industry. And the list goes on.

Admittedly, there will always be those with sinister intent promoting these causes, but I believe that the general motivation of the proponents of each comes from a caring heart. In the minds of supporters, the primary concern in each of these situations is for the welfare of the individual involved or/and a respect for their right to choose. Within the confines of their own self-created moral and behavioural boundaries, they are, to the best of their ability, responding in love.

I believe that it is on this common ground of love for others, that we must begin to share the truth of God. Because He is the source of all that love is, the door has been left ajar for us to introduce Him. This should always be the starting point when interacting with those who do not share our beliefs.

But in order to bring the fullness of love into these lives, it is imperative that we are able to firstly separate the sin from the sinner. In this way we begin to recognise that all people, including those who misunderstand God, are His creations and are equally loved by Him.

Then, through prayer for guidance from the Holy Spirit and the example of our own lives, we can begin the journey of leading others from the limited love of the human heart to the infinite love of God. responses: reidyrec@iinet.net.au

Sadly, the outcome of the RU486 debate in parliament was predictable. The question now is, what are we as Catholics doing about it? The only way to stop RU486 being available is to make it commercially unviable for the maker; and that means bringing up a generation of adults who won’t want it. That is our job; are we doing it?

The whole reason that there is even a desire for such a drug to be available is our instantly selfgratifying, selfish, materialistic, society. Are we a part of that? Are we maniacally keeping up with the neighbours and teaching our kids that that is what is most important in life - you don’t love your neighbour, you compete with him? Is having the right thing or doing the right thing more important to us? Do we even know what the right thing is anymore? Are we teaching our children by our own example of life and married love to respect and understand themselves and others along the lines of Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body - or to worship a particular body image at the expense of health and sanity? As a sign of how far we have

Catherine Parish

strayed and how much Catholic teaching has in fact not been taught, I mentioned the wonderful Theology of the Body to my mother. “That’s nothing new,” she laughed. “Any practising Catholic should know all that. It’s just traditional Catholic teaching.” What has changed is the widespread ignorance of or disregard for Catholic teachings even among Catholics. We have been so deeply affected by the lack of good and thorough catechesis in Catholic schools since the 1960’s. Among other things this ignorance has led to the widespread acceptance of contraceptive practices even within the Church as the only way to handle human fertility

- though it has never ever been permitted in God’s law as taught and upheld consistently by the Catholic Church. Instead of fighting against this descent into a mindless pursuit of the material and witnessing to the fact that there are other ways of living that might be more in keeping with the dignity of the person, many Catholics have given in to the attractions of two kids, two jobs, two cars, two houses.

But it’s no use bemoaning the failure of catechesis in Catholic schools and carrying on as if it is hopeless.

If we find we don’t know what Catholics are supposed to believe, our first task is to learn - or relearn - the authentic Catholic answers to life’s tough questions, so that we can give our kids something to chew on when they ask us things. And most of all we have to grow in our own faith and love for God, we have to develop our own relationship with Our Lord - we have to pray.

My son said to me the other day, “Jesus was a bit of a rebel, wasn’t he, Mum?” Without thinking I agreed. But then when I thought about it, he wasn’t the rebel; we are the rebels, always looking for the easy way out, to avoid the suffering and

difficulties that are inseparable from the joys of the Christian journey. Being Catholic means embracing those difficulties and carrying them along the way as Jesus did when he carried his cross to Calvary. We are meant to be different. We are meant

to witness to a different set of beliefs from those the world holds dear. Christ was a sign of contradiction, and these days Catholics are too, by the very nature of our beliefs, especially our beliefs about sexuality and the value of human life.

Confused

Is abortion destroying an unborn life or relieving a struggling mother of the responsibilities of child rearing?

Recalling John Paul II the Great one year on...

The biblical pilgrim

No writer knew John Paul II more than George Weigel. Here the US theologian and writer, author of JPII’s biography Witness to Hope, honours the life of a man who showed the world what it was to live - and to live life to the full.

By George Weigel

Some 12 years ago the distinguished Lutheran theologian, Dr Robert Jenson, wrote a brilliant essay for First Things with the provocative title, “How the World Lost Its Story”. Dr Jenson’s purpose was to sketch a strategy for the Christian Church in the distinctive cultural circumstances of the postmodern world, but his central image - the idea of a world bereft of a “story” - may help us understand one important facet of the life and ministry of Pope John Paul II.

While it was primarily an essay in ecclesiology, Jenson’s article was also an acute analysis of the contemporary situation of both Jews and Christians under the conditions of postmodernity. We live, he writes, in a culture of incoherence. The more generous postmodern theorists may concede that there are truths around us that can be grasped, although the postmodernist is most likely to describe such discoveries as a matter of “your truth” or “my truth”. What cannot be admitted is that whatever fragments of truth may be found can be fitted into a coherent narrative or story. And a world without a storyline, Dr Jenson goes on to observe, is a world bereft of dramatic texture, no story, no drama; no drama, no dramatic resolution. A world without a story, a world without drama, is a world without a sense of promise, a world that, as Jenson puts it, “cannot entertain promises”. Little wonder that this is a cultural circumstance in which people of biblical faith often feet acutely uncomfortable.

The western world once had a story, Jenson observes. It was a story learned from many sources. But its essential narrative line was pre-eminently the by-product of biblical faith. Rodney Stark has made a parallel point in his recent study, The Victory of Reason: it was biblical faith - or, more explicitly, the Christian development of the faith of the people of Israel – that gave western civilisation its linear concept of history, its future orientation, its belief in both spiritual and moral progress. Thus it was biblical faith that gave the

“Wojtyla brought to the papacy a settled conviction that the world’s story and the biblical story were not stories running on parallel tracks. Rather; the biblical story - the story, whose chapter headings are Creation, Fall, Promise, and Prophecy; Incarnation, Redemption, Sanctification, and the Kingdom of God - is the world’s story.”

west its sense of what we might call the world’s “narratability”.

Forty years ago, prior to the social and cultural upheavals responsible for what we now style “postmodernity,” I was taught one way to tell the world’s story; it was a story that many of you were taught as well, and in its most intellectually sophisticated form, you can still find it in weighty books like William H McNeill’s The Rise of the West. According to this rendering of the world’s story, the key chapter headings read something like this: Ancient Civilisations; Greece and Rome; the Dark Ages; the Middle Ages; Renaissance and

Reformation; the Age of Reason’, the Age of Revolution; the Age of Science; the Space Age. Now this was, to be sure, a largely secular telling of the world’s story; still, it was a rendering of the story that was not hostile to, but was in fact dependent on, the concept of a linear story, a human story oriented toward the future. And that, I suggest was because this way of telling the world’s story - which even in its secular form acknowledged the accomplishments of both Judaism and Christianity in forming that unique civilisational enterprise known as “the west’- remained tethered, if by a

rather long and perhaps frayed umbilical cord, to a deeper storyline: a storyline whose chapter headings read Creation, Fall, Promise, Prophecy; Incarnation, Redemption, Sanctification, the Kingdom of God. The story of the west that I was taught in school was a story that skated perhaps too comfortably across what Christopher Dawson would have called “the surface of history”. But, in Jenson’s terms, it was in fact a coherent story because its narratability rested on the foundations of that deeper biblical storyline to which it was tethered.

Over the past several genera-

tions, though, that tether has been broken. History texts may still tell the world’s story in more-or-less linear fashion, beginning with ancient civilisations and finishing up with the space age. But that, one suspects, is because the textbook publishers, influenced by the market (which means school boards), have not yet become completely enthralled to the gospel of incoherence proclaimed by the prophets of postmodernism. In large sectors of western high culture, however, a sense of the narratability of the world has been completely lost, because the tether between the world’s story and the deep narrative of that story as proclaimed by the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament has been cut. And the result is the world that we dub “postmodern”: the world of the non-story, the un-narrative, the world of fragmented knowledge and incoherence, the world cut off from a true knowledge of the past and sceptical about any notion of the future that speaks of promise.

When he was elected the 264th Bishop of Rome in 1978, Karol Wojtyla brought to the Office of Peter a sharp intuition about this problem, which he had honed in his work in the late 1960s and early 1970s with doctoral candidates in philosophy at the University of Lublin. Before the first decade of his pontificate was completed, he seems to have come to the judgment that the problems of postmodernity - the problem of a world that had lost its story - would (and sooner rather than later) replace the Marxist misconstrual of reality as the principal challenge to a biblical understanding of human nature, human community, human origins, and human destiny. History would not end with the Communist crack- up; but the very idea of something called “history” might well be lost, were postmodernism to triumph.

Wojtyla also brought to the papacy a settled conviction that the world’s story and the biblical story were not stories running on parallel tracks. Rather; the biblical story - the story, to repeat, whose chapter headings are Creation, Fall, Promise,

Never stopped: In some ways the late pope was at his most inspiring as he failed in health. His indomitable spirit - and his desire to serve and follow Christ through his own passion - inspired millions.

Photo: CNS

George Weigel

John Paul II: a pilgrim to the world

Continued from page 11 and Prophecy; Incarnation, Redemption, Sanctification, and the Kingdom of God - is the world’s story: the story whose surface features are conventionally labelled Ancient Civilisations, Greece and Rome, the Dark Ages, the Middle ages, Renaissance and Reformation, and so forth and so on. The biblical story is the world’s story read in its deepest dimension and against its most ample horizon. The biblical story is, if you will, the story inside the conventional story of history, the depth story that gives the surface story its narratability and, ultimately, its coherence.

Let me put this in another, if related, way: John Paul II believed, with Hans Urs von Balthasar, that the human story is not the story of man’s search for God, but rather the story of God’s search for us, and our learning to take the same path through history that God takes. That is what the biblical story teaches and that, John Paul II was convinced, was the story the world must learn anew (or, in some instances, for the first time), if the world were to recover a sense of its nobility and possibility - which is to say, if the world were to recover its story and its destiny. And it was in that conviction that John Paul II became a pilgrim to the world: a biblical pilgrim, telling the world its true story - the story of Abraham, the story of Moses, the story of Jesus - so that, as he put it at the United Nations in 1995, “a century of tears might give birth to a new springtime of the human spirit”. It was neither an accident nor a curiosity of the Vatican’s sometimes arcane terminology that John Paul II always referred to his travels - as did the Vatican’s press releases and other official documents - as “pilgrimages”. This was not tourism. This was not “travel”. On 250 occasions over 26 years, John Paul left Rome and went on pilgrimage to a foreign country or a particular local Church in Italy, to remind the people of those unique places that their story was part of the deep narrative of the world’s story, the story of creation and redemption. Thus John Paul II’s biblical pilgrimage throughout the world and through contemporary history was a pilgrimage intended to restore a sense of his-

tory as History: the story, to repeat, of God’s search for man and our learning to take the same path through history that God is taking.’

That 26-year long pilgrimage had certain moments of the highest drama.There was John Paul II’s first Polish pilgrimage in June 1979. There, by speaking truth to and about power, and by giving back to his people the truth about

their identity and their culture, John Paul ignited a revolution of conscience in Poland and throughout east central Europe. That revolution of conscience, in turn, was a critical factor, and perhaps the critical factor, in shaping the non-violent political resistance that eventually produced what we now know as the Revolution of 1989 and the collapse of European Communism.

“John Paul II always referred to his travels as “pilgrimages”. This was not tourism. This was not “travel”. On 250 occasions over 26 years, John Paul left Rome and went on pilgrimage to a foreign country or a particular local Church in Italy, to remind the people of those unique places that their story was part of the deep narrative of the world’s story, the story of creation and redemption.”

As Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis has noted in his recently published history of the Cold War, the low retreat of the Communist plague from the lands behind the iron curtain began in earnest when John Paul II, biblical pilgrim, came home and reminded his people that to exclude the God of the Bible from the history of man was an offence against humanity and against true humanism.

There was John Paul’s March 1993 pilgrimage to Nicaragua, a long-suffering land then being led by a gang of adolescent Marxists known as Sandinistas, who were given to careering around the nation’s capital in sports cars, brandishing AK-47s, when they weren’t locking up their political opponents and harassing the heroic Archbishop of Managua, Miguel Obando y Bravo, a true man of the people. The Sandinistas tried to interrupt the papal Mass with shouts of “Power to the People”; John Paul demanded “Silence!” and the Sandinistas more or less obeyed. The ruling party loaded the area in front of the papal Mass platform with their stooges; John Paul, seeing the faithful Catholic people of Nicaragua penned into enclosures more than a hundred yards away, stood at the front of the Mass platform, grasped his silver crosier-crucifix by its base, and waved it back and forth across the sky in salute to those who had come to Mass to pray. That remarkable scene was

televised all over El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama - and slowly, over the ensuing months and years, the Sandinista plague also began to recede, and with it the dream of a Communist Central America.

There was John Paul’s historic visit in April 1986 to the Synagogue of Rome, which was a pilgrimage of another sort, the continuation of a personal pilgrimage that had begun more than 60 years before in Wadowice, the small Polish town where Karol Wojtyla had grown up. As he drove across the Tiber and up the Lungotevere to the great synagogue in which no previous Bishop of Rome had ever set foot, he carried with him memories of friendships with his Jewish classmates, of his father’s teachings about tolerance, of the town pastor’s Gospel-based condemnations of anti-Semitism, of his loss of friends in the Shoah and his own experiences of life under Nazi occupation. He had, among senior churchmen, a unique sense of the drama of modern Jewish life and a unique appreciation of Jewish pain. But he had come to the Synagogue of Rome, he said, not only to remember and to repent of whatever needed repentance, but to mark a new beginning: a moment in which Jews and Catholics, mindful of their “common heritage drawn from the Law and the Prophets” undertook “a collaboration in favour of man, in defence of life

Light in the gathering darkness: John Paul II, biblical pilgrim, reminded his people that to exclude the God of the Bible from the history of man was an offence against humanity and against true humanism. Photo: CNS

A special place: Karol Wojtyla loved the young, and seemed to draw energy from their presence.

Photo: CNS

and in defence of the dignity of the human person. Jews and Catholics, collaboratively, had to remind the world of its true story, from which men and women learned the truth about their dignity.

Then there was John Paul II’s pilgrimage to Denver and World Youth Day 2003. Most of the bishops of the United States, like most bishops throughout the West, had given up on young people: they funded youth ministry offices in their dioceses, but without any real hope that they would produce much of anything. John Paul II had a very different view, based on his own extensive experience as a young priest, when he was one of the most dynamic and effective university chaplains in the world. His magnetic presence had brought to Denver more than three times the number of young people the US bishops’ conference had expected; and at his last meeting with them, at a great Mass in Cherry Creek Park, he laid down a challenge - a challenge to tell the world the truth of its story. The world could not wait for these committed young souls to become its leaders in some vague future; it needed their witness now. And so he challenged them: “Do not be afraid to go out on the streets and into public places, like the first apostles who preached Christ and the good news of salvation in the squares of cities, towns, and villages. This is no time to be ashamed of the Gospel,

“And there was John Paul in his last nine weeks, teaching a last priestly lesson in the truth that he had taught for decades from the most visible pulpit in the world - that self-giving, not self-assertion, is at the heart of the world’s story.”

it is the time to preach it from the rooftops.” John Paul made a different kind of pilgrimage to the United States two years later, when he came to the symbolic centre of worldly power, the great marble rostrum of the General Assembly of the United Nations, to defend the universality of human rights against postmodern sceptics, eastAsian autocrats, Islamists, and the world’s remaining Communists, all of whom regarded the idea of “universal human rights” as (to borrow from the mummy at the University of London, Dr Jeremy Bentham) “nonsense on stilts”. A world without a story of human tragedy and aspiration, John Paul suggested, was a world in which genuine human conversation was impossible. A world that had forgotten the moral truths inscribed in the human heart - truths that could be known by reason - was a world condemned, not simply to incoherence, but to dangerous incoherence, of the sort Nietzsche had foretold in his speculations

about the triumph of the will to power. Perhaps that was why, the Pope proposed, there was something strange afoot at the end of the second millennium; “It is one of the great paradoxes of our time that man, who began the period we call ‘modernity’ with a selfconfident assertion of his ‘coming of age’ and ‘autonomy,’ approaches the end of the 20th century fearful of himself, fearful of what he might be capable of, fearful of the future. In order to ensure that the new millennium now approaching will witness the flourishing of the human spirit, mediated through an authentic culture of freedom, men and women must team to conquer fear: We must learn not to be afraid, we must recover a spirit of hope and a spirit of trust … Hope and trust are ... nurtured in that inner sanctuary of conscience where ‘man is alone with God’ [Gaudium et Spes 16] and thus perceives that he is not alone amid the enigmas of existence, for he is surrounded by the love of the

Creator.” The politics of nations could never ignore the deep narrative of the world’s story; to do so meant “harming the cause of man and the cause of human freedom”. That was why he had come to the summit of the Mars Hill of the postmodern world; he had come “as a witness: a witness to human dignity, a witness to hope, a witness to the conviction that the destiny of all nations lies in the hands of a merciful Providence”.

On the night of December 24-25, 1999, Pope John Paul II opened the Holy Door of St Peter’s Basilica, symbolically opening the Great Jubilee of 2000. The door had been knocked open on previous jubilees, as the pope rapped on a loosened brick with a white and gold hammer and set loose a cascade of masonry that, when settled, revealed an open door. John Paul chose a different method on Christmas Eve, 1999: the masonry that sealed the door between jubilees was already removed, and the Pope inaugurated the Great

Jubilee by gently pushing on the door with both hands - a symbol of the gently welcoming embrace of divine mercy, which John Paul wanted the Church and the world to experience anew, so that the Church might be reminded of the story it must proclaim to the world and the world might be reminded of the truth about itself.

Then there were the dramas at the end: John Paul II on pilgrimage to Lourdes in August 2004, a “sick man among the sick”, teaching with his example that suffering embraced and transformed by grace is part of the true story of the world. And there was John Paul in his last nine weeks, teaching a last priestly lesson in the truth that he had taught for decades from the most visible pulpit in the world - that self-giving, not self-assertion, is at the heart of the world’s story.

John Paul II’s Holy Land pilgrimage of March 2000 has a privileged place among the dramatic highlights of his pilgrim’s progress through the last quarter of the 20th century and the first half-decade of the 21st. He had first broached the idea of a pilgrimage to the Holy Land shortly after his election: where else should a pope spend his first Christmas but in Bethlehem? When the traditional managers of popes had been revived, they adduced all sorts of reasons why it was impossible: the Holy See had no diplomatic relations with

Be not afraid: men and women, the Pope said, must learn to conquer fear: “We must learn not to be afraid, we must recover a spirit of hope and a spirit of trust … Hope and trust are ... nurtured in that inner sanctuary of conscience where ‘man is alone with God.’

Photo: CNS

Modern pilgrim was cast in a biblical mould

Continued from page 13

the contending states in the area, the politics were a minefield, there was no time to prepare, the security situation would be impossible, etc etc. For once, John Paul agreed not to follow his own instincts, and for the next 21 years, whenever the question of the Holy Land came up in the Pope’s conversations with his diplomats, he would ask, “Quando mi permetterete di andare?” (When will you let me go?). In Tertio Millennio Adveniente, his 1994 apostolic letter outlining plans for the Great Jubilee of 2000, he floated the idea of a great biblical pilgrimage through the principal sites of salvation history; Ur, Sinai, the Holy Land itself; Damascus, site of the conversion of St Paul and the symbolic starting-point of the Christian mission ad gentes.

Five years later, in early 1999, the traditional managers of popes were privately suggesting that it was a lovely dream, but one that would remain just that - a dream. They did not reckon with John Paul II, who on June 29, 1999, simply announced that he was going, adding Athens and the Areopagus - for John Paul, a powerful metaphor of the Church’s encounter with the postmodern world - to the itinerary. Plans to begin in Ur of the Chaldees were scotched by the manipulations and intransigence of the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein, so on February 23, 2000, John Paul conducted a “virtual pilgrimage” to the land of Abraham, whom the Roman Canon names “our father in faith”, in the Paul VI Audience Hall of the Vatican, which had been transformed by oak trees (reminiscent of the terebinths of Mamre), a primitive uncarved stone (evoking the sacrifice of Isaac and the many altars Abraham had built in his wanderings), and a reproduction of Andrei Rublev’s great icon of the three angels visiting Abraham. Abraham, he said, was the archetype of the person who grasps the meaning of the story of God’s search for man in history, “someone [who] is heading toward a promised land that is not of this world”, a destination reached, as Abraham had reached the land of the promise, “through the obedience of faith”. The next day, John Paul flew to Egypt, and on February 26 he came to Mount Sinai, where he spoke of the liberating power of a divine law “written on the human heart as the universal moral law” before it was written on tablets of stone. A wind still blew from Sinai, the Pope proposed, and that wind reminds us that the Ten Commandments are the “law of freedom: not the freedom to follow our blind passions, but the freedom to love, to choose what is good in every situation, even when to do so is a burden”. That law of freedom is bound up with human fulfilment, for, as John Paul said, “in revealing himself on the Mountain and giving his Law, God revealed man to man himself. Sinai stands at the very heart of the truth about man and his destiny.” Sinai is a privileged place in the depth narrative that is the world’s story, rightly understood.

John Paul II finally arrived in the Holy Land of his imagination and his desire on March 21, 2000. Over the next five days, he went to Bethlehem and to Galilee, where he visited Nazareth, stood in Capernaum outside the house

of Peter, his predecessor, and preached to tens of thousands of young people on the Mount of Beatitudes. Fittingly enough however it was in Jerusalem that John Paul’s jubilee pilgrimage saw its most dramatic moments: the Pope at Yad Vashem on March 23, calling the world to reflect on the lethal consequences that result from following a false story; the Pope praying at the Western Wall on March 26, in an embodiment of the divinely mandated entanglement of Christians and Jews that spoke far more powerfully than any interreligious manifesto; and later that day, the Pope at Calvary and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. He had been there, formally, in the morning, where he had celebrated Mass at the traditional site of Christ’s tomb before going to pray at the Western Wall. Then, later in the afternoon, during the luncheon at the apostolic nuncio’s residence that was the last event on the schedule, John Paul Il quietly asked whether he might be permitted to return to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, in private. The traditional managers of popes couldn’t believe it, but the Israeli authorities agreed to honour the wish of the man their security services had code-named “Old Friend”. So the Pope went back. And there, this old man, crippled by disease, climbed the steep stone steps to the Eleventh and Twelfth Stations of the Cross - because the man who had called the world to fearlessness on October 22, 1978, had to spend more time in prayer at the place where, he believed, the eternal Son had taken all the world’s fear upon himself and, by offering himself to the Father in an act of perfect obedience, made it possible for the sons and daughters of God to live beyond fear.

John Paul’s June 1999 Letter on Pilgrimage to the Places Linked to the History of Salvation, one of the most lyrical documents of his papacy, was also perhaps his clearest statement of his intentions in

undertaking a pilgrimage to the Holy Land - which was nothing less than to remind the world of its lost story. “To go in a spirit of prayer from one place to another’ he wrote, “in the area marked especially by God’s intervention helps us not only to live our life as a journey, but also gives us a vivid sense of a God who has gone before us and leads us, who Himself set out on man’s path, a God who does not look down on us from on high, but who became our travelling companion.” That was why he had to go on pilgrimage to “the places where God had pitched his ‘tent’ among us” - because. in doing so, he was bearing witness in an unmistakable way to the world’s true story, the story whose chapter headings are Creation, Fall, Promise, and Prophecy; Incarnation, Redemption, Sanctification, and the Kingdom of God.

John Paul’s biblical pilgrimage throughout the world contained a challenge for all of the people of the Bible, Jews as well as Christians. What was that challenge? John Paul hinted at it during his historic 1986 visit to the Synagogue of Rome, when he spoke of a Jewish-Catholic “collaboration in favour of man.” By which I take it he meant that the people who take Abraham as their “father in faith”, the people who worship the God who revealed his Name to Moses on Mount Sinai, the people who share the same Ten Commandments as their basic moral code, the people who live in a covenant relationship with God, must be, collaboratively, lights to the nations, defenders of the dignity of human beings created in the image and likeness of God, and promoters of authentic freedom.

John Paul was acutely aware of the urgency of a renewed collaboration between the people of the Bible in building a new humanism because he was acutely aware of the dangers of the present moment in history. The American

ship with him, is to be witnesses to and messengers of the truth about who we are as human beings - and in doing so, to build a culture of life that takes its orientation from the Lord of life, the ultimate source of our dignity and our rights.

On March 20, 2000, shortly after his arrival in Jordan, Pope John Paul II went to the Memorial of Moses on Mount Nebo and looked across the Jordan Valley at the land he had first visited during the Second Vatican Council - the land to which he had wished to return for so long, the land he had frequently visited in his imagination and his prayer. Some, pondering that dramatic scene, thought of the elderly Pope as a different kind of Moses: a prophet and lawgiver rich in years who would, in fact, manage to make it over Jordan into the Promised Land.

But perhaps another image was more apt. John Paul II, biblical pilgrim in the postmodern world, was, rather, Joshua, constantly pressing Joshua’s challenge at Shechem: “Choose whom you will serve” (Joshua 24:15). The Lord of life, he, who summons his human creatures to an even nobler life of covenant fidelity, indeed of covenant communion with him? Or Moloch, who always demands the blood of innocents?

Jewish editor and essayist, Milton Himmelfarb, who died recently, once suggested that the essence of Jewish witness in the world could be captured in one sentence; “Judaism is against paganism.” John Paul would have agreed, and would have said that, as for Judaism, so for its child, Christianity. Our “collaboration against paganism.”

Princeton’s Robert George proposed some years ago that the one, infallible way to recognise paganism in its protean array of disguises is to find where innocents are being slaughtered. Paganism, in whatever form, requires the death of innocents; that is what false gods do, and that is what their false stories require. That was true of Moloch, and it has been true of Moloch’s successors down to our own time, including the National Socialist Moloch and the MarxistLeninist Moloch. But a world without a story can be just as lethal as a world built on a false story.

The false story of the imperial autonomous self has, in a sense, filled the narrative gap in a postmodern world-without-a-story; and that false story has, predictably, had exceptionally lethal consequences, with the death of innocents from abortions over the past 30 years now tolling in the hundreds of millions around the world.

The first decade of John Paul’s papacy witnessed his successful campaign against the false god of Communism and its distinctive form of paganism; the entire pontificate, however, saw the late Pope challenging the false gods of the postmodern culture of death by constantly preaching the God of Abraham, Moses, and Jesus as the Lord of life. As creatures of the Lord of life, human beings are endowed with an inalienable dignity; and it is in the book of that dignity that we read the strongest account of what we call “human rights”. Thus the task of the people who have been claimed by the Lord of life as his own, and who have entered into a covenant relation-

That was the challenge, and those were the questions that John Paul II put before all the people of the Bible. The response to that challenge and the answer to those questions will determine whether John Paul’s proposal at the Synagogue of Rome in 1986 - that Jews and Catholics be “collaborators in favour of man” - will remain merely a pious vision, or will begin to transform the world-without-a-story into a world that has rediscovered its story, and thus its true dignity and its eternal destiny.

John Paul’s worthy successor, Pope Benedict XVI, will do everything in his power to intensify that collaboration, because he, too, knows that the stakes are very high. As he put it at the Synagogue of Cologne during World Youth Day, it was “neo-paganism” that gave birth to the “insane racist ideology” that planned and carried out the Shoah; when “the holiness of God was no longer recognised ... contempt was shown for the sacredness of human life.” In the face of new threats to human dignity, the Pope concluded, a “sincere” Jewish-Catholic dialogue which aims “above all to make progress toward a theological evaluation of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity” is an imperative. To remind the world of its true story; to build a “collaboration in favour of man” among the people of the Bible; to see that that collaboration sows the seeds of a genuine humanism with the capacity to renew free societies in the virtues necessary for their flourishing and defence: on this first anniversary of the death of John Paul the Great, those are the tasks, this biblical pilgrim in the postmodern world left for the rest of us. We honour his memory to the degree that we continue his work.

George Weigel is the author of the bestseller, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II, and, most recently, of God’s Choice: Pope Benedict XVI and the Future of the Catholic Church, both published by HarperCollins. This essay has been adapted for the Catholic Herald from a recent address at Ave Maria University in Florida.

Scenes from a life: we honour the late Pope’s memory, writes author George Weigel, to the extent that continue his work. Photo: CNS

Catholic doctors reach out

■ By Sylvia Defendi

Perth Charity organisation, Wheelchairs for Kids was presented with a $750 donation by the Catholic Doctors Association, on April 7, in recognition of the organisation’s continual efforts to assist disabled children in disadvantaged countries. The CDA have been involved with Wheelchair for Kids since 2000, through donations of funds and equipment. “It is just such a worthy cause,“ said Dr Michael Shanahan of the CDA, who presented the cheque.

Queenslander Dez Larance began constructing wheelchairs out of recycled bicycle parts in 1997, after witnessing the disturbing number of immobile disabled children off the tourist routes in Fiji.

Subsequently, the Rotary Club of Scarborough initiated Wheelchairs for Kids in 1998, originally making wheelchairs from recycled materials and distributing them to needy children in developing countries.

The Christian Brothers joined the project and the partnership has expanded to 80 local retiree volunteers producing and distributing over 200 new wheelchairs per month to poverty-stricken children affected by land mines, disease or

birth defects. One of only two such organisations, and the largest of its kind, Wheelchairs for Kids has provided 8116 children, from over 52 countries, with wheelchairs since its inception. Previous manual arts teacher and Christian Brother, Olly Pickett, who runs the workshop, said the donation was much appreciated, especially seeing as the organisation is able to make a wheelchair for merely $100. Since its establishment, Wheelchair for Kids has initiated two workshops in China and one in Cambodia, Kenya and India. “Eventually it would be great to set up sustainable workshops in every one of the countries we service,” said Br Pickett. Over 126 local schools are involved with Wheelchairs for Kids, ensuring, through constant fundraising, that each needy child receives the wheelchair, knitted rug, cushion and toy, distributed by the organisation.

“I’ve been to Cambodia, Kenya, East Timor and India, and I’ve seen the joy of a crippled child who knows he or she will have a better life from now on. The smile on their faces is unmatched. They are just ecstatic to have the opportunity to play with their friends and get to school,” said Br Pickett. To make a donation, call Br Pickett on: 9409 3633

Bishop Bianchini, Geraldton

Know the Cross, share in life

During Lent in the Geraldton Diocese, many people have been using a great aid to prayer – The Little Black Book Each day, from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday there is a helpful and practical reflection. This Lent, the Black Book took the Passion of Luke, reflecting on a few verses each day.

For years we have been getting this little but power-packed black book. We get it as others do in Perth and Australia from the Diocese of Saginaw, in the United States.

The author and inspirer of it is a very down-to-earth Bishop, Ken Untener. Even though he died in 2004 his inspiration continues. There is also a Little White Book for the Easter Season from Easter Monday until Pentecost and a Little Purple Book for the period of Advent. It helps so many people to pray and meditate for at least six minutes a day in these very important seasons of the Church’s year.

This Lent we were led to both accompany Jesus on his journey of suffering and death and to link

it to our own lives. Jesus’ passion and death is closely connected to our sufferings, burdens, responsibilities, rejections etc. In brief, his cross is intimately bound up with our own crosses.

The more we appreciate Jesus’ sufferings and death, the more we will understand what his Life, Resurrection, Peace and Joy mean. One cannot be without the other. In Jesus’ life one actually leads to the other.

It is the same in our lives. When burdens, responsibilities, sufferings, worries and crosses are there in our lives, it is important to see them as only part of the bigger picture. This bigger picture is the full life in Christ both now and after death when we will share the fullness of his resurrection.

When we read Luke 9:23 and 14:27 in connection with Jesus’ passion we see that all this is more than part of the bigger picture. It is an essential part of being a disciple or follower of Christ.

The words of Jesus are strong and clear. “If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let him renounce himself and take up his cross eve-

ryday and follow me.” “Anyone who does not carry his cross and come after me cannot be my disciple”.

The cross is essential to knowing and loving Jesus. It is essential to truly appreciate his risen life and the great feast of Easter.

This Easter may we all come to know more fully the power of Jesus’s cross, and to share more fully his risen life.

The Easter meaning of suffering

hy is there suffering?’

Bishop Holohan, Bunbury ‘W

This is one of the great human heart questions. God reveals several answers in the scriptures. Easter reminds us of the greatest answer of all.

Christ-like suffering wins

redemption

Prior to his sufferings, Jesus revealed a basic evangelisation spirituality principle [John 12:24]:

In all truth I tell you, unless a wheat grain falls into the earth and dies, it remains only a single grain; but if it dies, it yields a rich harvest.

Jesus did not find it easy to accept the sufferings that were ahead of him. He pleaded to God the Father to be saved from them. In his great anguish, he sweated drops of blood [Luke 22:44].

When, like the grain of wheat, he died, his life and ministry seemed a failure. Though he had preached to great crowds, working many miracles and wonders, only his mother, John, and two other women supported him.

The Apostles, whom he had spent three years forming to lead his Church, had run away [Mark 14:43-52]. Peter, the appointed leader of the Apostles, even pretended not to know Jesus [Mark 14:66-72].

Yet, after he died, Jesus rose again on the Third Day. At Pentecost, the first signs of the ‘rich harvest’ became apparent. The Apostles were filled with heroic faith. Thousands who had seen and heard him converted [Acts 2:22].

The Easter meaning of suffering

The ‘rich harvest’, which came after an apparently failed minis-

try, testified to the truth of Jesus’ prophecy. The harvest is the conversion which results from the action of God. Those who, like Jesus, offer their lives to God in self sacrifice, especially for those who have given up religious practice, also win a rich harvest, the conversion of others.

This basic evangelisation spirituality principle is particularly important for our Diocese. So many have drifted from the practice of the faith. This principle highlights the value of the sufferings of us all for the renewed conversion of others, including family members, friends, and fellow parishioners.

Part of our suffering can be the apparent failure of our efforts to bring others back to God. We may seem to have been no more successful than the dying Jesus. We need, therefore, to pray for Easter faith. This will preserve us from discouragement. It helps answer, too, questions such as: ‘Are my efforts to bring others to faith achieving anything at all?’

What sufferings can we offer God for others?

Everyone has sufferings they can offer God for the conversion of others. First, there are the sick and frail.

Jesus seemed to be at his most powerless when dying on the cross, unable to move or to speak much. Yet this was the climax of his ministry, his most powerful moment of all from the point of view of winning others to God.

I am reminded of this image, and the evangelisation spirituality lesson it teaches, every time I meet stroke victims, people crippled with arthritis, those undergoing serious hospital surgery and other treatments, paraplegics in wheel

chairs and the frail who need others to care for them. These people, often also unable to move or speak much, can be at the climax of their lives as evangelisers if, like Jesus on the cross, they offer their lives to God for others.

Second, there are those who learn they have a serious illness, and those who are dying. There are the grieving and the lonely.

Third, there are the sufferings of those whose efforts to bring others to God seem to have failed. I think of the dying Jesus when I hear parents and religious education teachers wondering: ‘Did my efforts to bring children to faith have any value, for they seem to have no interest in faith?’: ‘Where did I go wrong?’ Then there are the priests and religious who have given their lives to spreading the Gospel, like Jesus, and who may suffer the temptation of wondering what they have to show for their lives.

Fourth, there are the sufferings of daily life – teenagers experiencing self doubt and peer pressures, married couples struggling through the trials of relationships, parents providing for the varying demands of children. Single parents and those whose marriages have not worked out can suffer greatly. Then there are the trials of work and other responsibilities.

Times of insecurity too bring anxiety and other trials: retirement, unemployment, poverty, mental illness, financial insecurity and concerns related to being accepted as a migrant to Australia. A related suffering is the loneliness experienced by those living alone or who are losing their hearing or sight. Those in prison have their own kind of suffering to offer God for others.

Daily life also can bring burdens

that involve long term sufferings. These include those of the married person caring for a spouse suffering dementia, parents caring for a child with a disability, and adult children who are the carers of aged and sick parents.

Finally, there are the sufferings of temptations – particularly against chastity, in a society that does not value human sexuality; against Christian witness, to people who do not value God; and against life, in a society that allows abortion. There are the challenges against chastity faced by the spiritually heroic with a homosexual orientation living chastely in a society that ridicules this.

The calling to rural priesthood Priestly ministry in country parishes brings its own trials. There is the isolation required to minister to people in distant towns, and the potential for loneliness and some loss of morale caused by declining town and Church numbers.

Then there are other trials, which all priests share, but which can be more acute in country towns: lack of responsiveness by some, even rejection by others; travelling

long distances only to find a few at Mass; the criticism of country town gossip; the loss of a family involved in the life of a parish.

Priests from other countries, called to our Diocese by the Lord, experience distance from families and family events. There is the pain of leaving behind parents, family members and friends to return from annual holidays.

Finally, there are the temptations against commitment in a world which imagines there can be happiness without commitment. These can include the struggles to remain faithful to priestly ministry, and to keep faith in the promise of Jesus:’ anyone who loses his life for my sake will save it’ [Luke 9:24].

Let us proclaim the Easter meaning of suffering!

By instituting the Eucharist during the Last Supper, Jesus revealed that the meaning of his Easter sufferings was his self-sacrifice to God. This was a ritual sacrificial meal. Jesus replaced the lamb, sacrificed in the Temple, with himself. He calls us to unite ourselves, especially our sufferings, with him in self-sacrifice during each Mass.

Anyone who offers their sufferings to God for others who have given up religious practice can be an enormous spiritual resource for our Diocese. Suffering is a pure offering to God, whereas prayer and efforts to preach the Gospel can have mixed motives.

Let us all – priests and people – help anyone who is suffering to appreciate its Easter meaning. Let us urge them to offer their sufferings, like Jesus, to God for others –particularly in the Eucharist. Let us ask ourselves: ‘What are the sufferings in my life now that I can offer to God for others, sufferings which can yield a rich harvest?’

Bishop Justin Bianchini

Bishop Gerard Holohan

How well do you know the Easter story? See if you can put the numbered stories in the correct order.

Easter holiday fun

1. The Capture

After the meal was finished, some of them wandered out into the garden of Gethsemane where Jesus knelt down to pray. He had asked his friends to stand guard, but when he checked, they had fallen asleep. He woke them up and went back to pray. Three times this happened but on the last time, the Temple guards and Chief Priests caught Jesus. His friends ran off and left him.

3. The Argument in the Temple

Jesus arrived at the Temple where he saw men selling pigeons for sacrifice and money-changers handing out the special Temple coins. He was very angry and turned over the tables, driving them out of the temple. Two days before the actual feast of the Passover, Judas Iscariot, one of Jesus’ 12 friends, went to the chief priests. He had been disappointed that Jesus had not led a revolt against the Romans, now he wanted to betray him, and was given 30 pieces of silver for doing so.

2. The Resurrection

Two days later, a friend of Jesus, Mary Magdalene, went to the tomb and realised that the stone had been removed. Looking in, she saw that Jesus body had been taken. She caught sight of a man that she thought was the gardener, and yelled at him for taking Jesus’ body. Suddenly he turned and spoke to her and she recognised that it was Jesus himself that she was talking to. He had risen from the dead.

4. The Journey to Jerusalem

Jesus wanted to get to Jerusalem for the Feast of the Passover. He asked two of his friends to fetch a donkey from the next village. Jesus then mounted the donkey and rode into the crowded streets of Jerusalem. When the people of Jerusalem heard that Jesus was coming they came out to meet him, spreading their coats and fronds of palm leaves on the road for him to ride over.

5. The Trial

The Priests wanted to kill Jesus, but they wanted it to look like a fair trial. The priests needed the consent of the Roman Governor, Pontius Pilate consent to carry out the execution and realised that they needed to charge Jesus with treason. Pilate didn’t think that Jesus had done anything treasonable, but the priests stirred the crowd that had gathered into a riot, and the Roman Governor agreed to sentence him to death.

EXPERIMENT @ HOME: Potato Battery

How Potato Batteries Work

What You Need:

■ Two Potatoes

How the Potato Clock works

3 Number the potatoes as one and two

3. Number the potatoes as one and two.

4 Insert one nail in each potato

4. Insert one nail in each potato.

5 Insert one short piece of the copper wire

Potatoes are great mashed, roasted, baked

Potatoes are great mashed, roasted, baked or in clocks or in clocks.

That’s right, potatoes are nature’s tastiest

That’s potatoes are nature’s tastiest batter y battery.

How to Make a Potato Battery

Making a clock run on potato power is a clock run on potato power is easier that you might think easier that you might think.

This project is easy, bizarre and makes

This project is easy, bizarre and makes a sweet science fair project or chemistr y a sweet science fair project or chemistry experiment Who knew potatoes could be so experiment. Who knew potatoes could be so empowering?

■ Two short pieces of heavy copper wire

Two short pieces of copper wire

■ Two common galvanised nails

Two common nails

■ Three alligator clip/wire units (alliga- Three units tor clips connected to each other with tor connected to each other with wire)

■ One simple low-voltage LED clock that One LED clock that functions from a 1- to 2-volt button- a 1- to 2-volt type batter y type battery.

Steps:

1 Remove the batter y from the batter y 1. Remove the battery from the battery compartment of the clock compartment of the clock.

2 Make a note of which way around the 2. Make a note of which way around the positive (+) and negative (-) points of the (+) and (-) of the batter y went battery went.

5. Insert one short of the copper wire into each potato as far away from the nail as into each potato as far away from the nail as possible possible.

6 Use one alligator clip to connect the

6. Use one to connect the copper wire in potato number one to the copper wire in potato number one to the positive (+) terminal in the clock’s batter y positive (+) terminal in the clock’s battery compartment compartment.

7 Use one alligator clip to connect the nail

7. Use one to connect the nail in potato number two to the negative (-) ter- in potato number two to the negative (-) terminal in the clock’s batter y compartment minal in the clock’s battery compartment.

8 Use the third alligator clip to connect

8 Use the third to connect the nail in potato one to the copper wire in the nail in potato one to the copper wire in potato two and set the clock! potato two and set the clock!

Answer: 4,3,7,1,5,6,2.

A potato batter y is an electrochemi-

A potato battery is an electrochemical batter y, other wise known as an electro- cal battery, otherwise known as an electrochemical cell An electrochemical cell is a cell. An is a cell in which chemical energ y is converted cell in which chemical energy is converted to electric energ y by a spontaneous electron to electric energy a spontaneous electron transfer In the case of the potato, the zinc transfer. In the case of the potato, the zinc in the nail reacts with the copper wire The in the nail reacts with the copper wire. The potato acts as a sort of buffer between the potato acts as a sort of buffer between the zinc ions and the copper ions The zinc and zinc ions and the copper ions. The zinc and copper ions would still react if they touched copper ions would still react if touched within the potato but they would only gener- within the potato but would generate heat Since the potato keeps them apart, ate heat. Since the potato them apart, the electron transfer has to take place over the electron transfer has to take over the copper wires of the circuit, which chan- the copper wires of the circuit, which channels the energ y into the clock Presto! You nels the energy into the clock. Presto! You have potato power have potato power.

EASTER COOKING: Rising biscuits

Make these miraculous cookies and learn about the story of Easter:

• wax paper covered cookie sheet

• electric mixer

• mixing bowl

• 1 cup whole pecans

• 1 tsp vinegar

• 3 egg whites

• pinch of salt

• 1 cup sugar

• ziplock baggie

• wooden spoon

• Scotch tape

• Bible

Pre-heat oven to 300 degrees. This is important.

Place pecans in Ziplock bag and let children beat them with the wooden spoon to break into small pieces.

Explain that after Jesus was arrested, he was beaten by the Roman soldiers. Read John 19:1-3

Let children smell the vinegar. Put 1 tsp vinegar into a mixing bowl. Explain that when Jesus was thirsty on the cross he was given vinegar to drink.

Read John 19:28-30.

Add egg whites to the vinegar. Eggs represent life. Explain that Jesus gave his life to give us life. Read John 10:10-11.

Sprinkle a little salt into the children’s hands. Let them taste it and brush the rest into the bowl. Explain that this represents the salty tears shed by Jesus’ followers, and the bitterness of our own sin. Read Luke 23:27

So far the ingredients are not very appetising. Add 1 cup sugar. Explain that the sweetest part of the story is that Jesus died because he loves us. He wants us to belong to him. Read Ps. 34:8 and John 3:16.

Beat with a mixer on high speed for 12-15 min-

6. The Crucifixion

utes until stiff peaks are formed. Explain that the colour white represents the purity in God’s eyes of those whose sins have been cleansed by Jesus. Read Isa. 1:18 and John 3:1-3.

Fold in the broken nuts. Drop by teaspoons onto wax paper covered cookie sheet.

Explain that each mound represents the rocky tomb where Jesus’ body was laid. Read Matthew 27:57-60.

Put the cookie sheet in the oven, close the door and turn the oven OFF.

Give the children pieces of tape and seal the oven door. Explain that Jesus’ tomb was sealed. Read Matt. 27:65-66.

GO TO BED. Explain that they may feel sad to leave the cookies in the oven overnight. Jesus’ followers were in despair when the tomb was sealed. Read John 16:20 and 22.

On Easter morning, open the oven door and give everyone a cookie. Notice the cracked surface and take a bite.

The cookies are hollow!! On the first Easter, Jesus’ followers were amazed to find the tomb open and empty. Read Matt. 28:1-9.

The soldiers took Jesus away, flogged him and gave him a crown of thorns and generally mocked him. He had to carry his own heavy cross onto the hill where he was to be crucified. Then they nailed his hands and feet to the cross and left him hanging there to die. After he was dead, he was taken down from the cross and left in a burial cave where a stone had been rolled across the entrance to stop wild animals from getting in.

an easter funny ...

7. The Last Supper

On the evening of the festival, Jesus and his friends sat down to their meal, but before they ate, Jesus started to wash his friends feet. His friends were surprised because that was servants work, but he was demonstrating that he wanted them to serve each other just as he was serving them.

Jesus told his friends that one of them was going to betray him. They were all shocked and surprised. He blessed and broke bread and told them ‘This is my body’ and poured wine, blessed it and told them ‘This is my blood’.

TOP HOLIDAY movies

“The Shaggy Dog” (Disney)

Lame reworking of the 1959 Disney comedy, incorporating elements of its 1976 follow-up, about a workaholic Los Angeles deputy district attorney (Tim Allen) who, while trying a case involving a sinister scientist (Robert Downey Jr.), is bitten by a mutt and soon finds himself turning into one, leading to nutty canine complications with his neglected wife (Kristin Davis) and two teenage children. Directed by Brian Robbins; even Allen’s comic dexterity can’t make this dog of a film hunt, resulting in slapstick silliness that is strictly for the pups. Some mildly crude humour and comic violence. The USCCB Office for Film & Broadcasting classification is A-I - general patronage.

Zathura: A Space Adventure” (Columbia)

Fancifully entertaining adaptation of Chris Van Allsburg’s children’s book about two bickering brothers (Jonah Bobo and Josh Hutcherson) who play a magical board game that transports their house into outer space with the only way back being to finish out their turns, with each round bringing new dangers in the form of rampaging robots, meteor storms and ravenous reptilian aliens. Director Jon Favreau combines dazzling visuals and disarming emotion to evoke childlike wonder, while imparting a sentimental message about the importance of family and forgiveness. Recurring fantasy action violence, child peril, some scary images and minimal crude language. The USCCB Office for Film & Broadcasting classification is A-II - adults and adolescents.

“Ice Age: The Meltdown” (20th Century Fox)

Inferior, but still highly entertaining, sequel to the 2002 computer-animated hit which finds the prehistoric trio -- cranky mammoth Manny (voiced by Ray Romano), sarcastic saber-toothed tiger Diego (voiced by Denis Leary) and wise-cracking sloth Sid (voiced by John Leguizamo) -- joined by a confused she-mammoth (voiced by Queen Latifah) and a tag team of prankster possums (voiced by Seann William Scott and Josh Peck) as they race to escape an impending cataclysmic flood triggered by the warming climate. Directed by Carlos Saldanha, the story and characters have thinned along with the ice, but in the thawing process the laughs and zany charm remain intact along with a gentle message about family and friendship. Some scenes of menace that may be too intense for very young children, a few crass expressions, some innuendo and a mildly crude sight-gag. The USCCB Office for Film & Broadcasting classification is A-I - general patronage.. Some material may not be suitable for children.

Morse offers big card in a vital game

Smart Sex

Finding life-long love In a hook-up world

By Jennifer Roback Morse

Foreword by Chuck Colson.

Published by Spence Publishing

Available from Record Books

$29.95 plus postage

■ Reviewed by Brian A. Peachey

Jennifer Roback Morse has written a remarkable, easily read book with a valuable message for the young: Don’t do dumb sex.

She says: “I don’t think you’d be surprised to learn that many forms of recreational sex often turn out to be quite foolish, and incidentally, not much fun. Every mature person realizes the potential dangers and disappointments of hooking up, shacking up and just plain messing around. The real surprise is to learn how systematic these disappointments are, and to learn the underlying problem that makes these disappointments so common.”

This is a valuable book. It will be of value to all married people and to those contemplating marriage. Marriage counsellors and teachers, especially those in upper secondary education should read it. Smart Sex should also be in school libraries and recommended to students.

Although it does not presuppose a particular religious commitment it would be of value to the clergy.

Parents (and also grandparents) of young adults who have chosen to cohabitate instead of choosing to marry would gain important information about the dangers and pitfalls of cohabitation, which would help them to give advice and guidance to those they love.

Jennifer Roback Morse, Ph.D. was a committed career woman and before having children she taught

economics for fifteen years at Yale and George Mason University. She and her husband adopted a twoyear-old Romanian boy in 1991, the same year she gave birth to her daughter.

Dr Morse left full-time university teaching in 1996 to move with her family to California. She is now associated with the Hoover Institution as a research fellow. In addition to caring for their own two children, Dr Morse and her husband fostered two boys.

The book is divided into three major parts:

1) “Why Your Marriage Matters to the Rest of the World,”

2) “The Problem with Consumer Sex,” and 3) “Self-Giving, Rightly Understood.” It has some wonderful sub-titles: “Why Recreational Sex Is Not Fun” or “Why Morally Neutral Sex Isn’t.”

The foreword by Chuck Colson commences with: “This book is just what Christians and right-thinking citizens need to read now… extraordinary insights by a brilliant economist as to why the family is endangered and why it matters.”

Dr Morse’s invitation to Chuck Colson to write the foreword is interesting and significant. Those of us, who have political memories going back to 1972-4 and the “Watergate scandal” that resulted in President Nixon being forced to resign, will recall that Charles W (Chuck) Colson was the Special Counsel to the President. In March 1974 the Grand Jury charged Colson and six others of the President’s aides with conspiracy to obstruct justice. Colson pleaded nolo contendere (no contest) and served seven months jail in Alabama.

Colson became a born again Evangelical Christian and founded the not-for-profit Prison Fellowship. For the past 30 years he has worked to promote prisoner rehabilitation and reform of the prison system in the United States. The royalties from his large body of published writing has gone to the Prison Fellowship.

The emminent scholar, James Schall SJ writes that “Dr Morse has managed to give us a graphic look at why the supposed alternatives to the family in recent times have not worked and cannot work. But also, not to be purely negative, she explains just what it takes to re-establish, even amidst personal moral chaos, a real family based on principles and, yes, disciplines that will work. This is a blunt, straightforward, indeed, amusing book, at the same time personal and scholarly. Morse tells us that she has herself lived through most of the aberrations. She is a trained economist and brilliant logician. This is also a book about the culture, what is wrong with it and how to repair it.”

Father Schall pays her a remarkable compliment when he compares her work with that of G K Chesterton: “Like Chesterton, Morse understands the need to save the family from the government. She also sees that the government gets into the act of interfering with the family because individual men and women choose personal problems and relationships that leave many children and women (men too) in a state of dependency or despondency.”

Unlike some modern career women and the feminist movement – which Dr Morse criticises – she supports the role of men and says: “Possessiveness is the dark side of male attachment. The bright side of the very same tendency to attach is loyalty. Men are capable of heroic loyalty, to their wives and children, to their teams, companies and countries. Our culture indulges in so much male-bashing that we sometimes overlook this salutary fact about the male half of our species.”

Part II, The Problem with Consumer sex is important reading. She says that: We have created a world in which we treat sex as a private recreational activity, with no moral or social significance. But

when sex is a recreational activity, my partner becomes a consumer good. And we all know what we do with consumer goods that cease to satisfy: We get rid of them.”

“In this world of consumer sex, it is socially acceptable to use other people. But no one really wants to be used. I think that is the ultimate source of our disappointments with the modern consumer-sex approach.” The substitutes for marriage are not very successful.

Although it seems improbable to

the modern mind, the truth is that married couples have more and better sex, and have a far better track record at dodging the dumb sex that has caused so much misery. Married sex is smart sex.

Smart Sex is a book by a thinking woman. Morse is in a class by herself, bemused, sincere, blunt, intelligent, and mystical. It is a book on the metaphysics of gift and how it is essential to our lives.

There is no book quite like this. Do not miss it.

Friday April 14

GOOD FRIDAY CEREMONIES  CATHOLIC AGRICULTURAL

COLLEGE, BINDOON

11.00 am - Stations of the Cross, 2.30 pm Solemn ceremony - The Lord’s Passion. Confessions from 10.30 am & after Stations of the Cross. All are welcome! Those who require transport please contact Francis Williams Tel: 9459 3873 / mob 0404 893 877. For more details contact Fr Paul 9571 1839.

Sunday April 16

ETERNAL WORD TELEVISION NETWORK ON ACCESS 31

1-2pm. Easter Week Scripture / Mother Angelica, introduced by Deacon Steltemeier [Mother Angelica Classics] This program is sponsored by Fr Geoff Beyer, and parishioners of St Joseph Pignatelli, Attadale. The Rosary Christian Tutorial Association wish all viewers a blessed and joyous Easter Season. Postal address: PO Box 1270, Booragoon 6954.

Enquiries 9330-1170

Monday April 17

BUSH WALK FOR VOCATIONS

Being held at the Schoenstatt Shrine, 9 Talus Drive, Armadale, 6112. Holy Mass 11am, lunch 12noon, Keynote address by Father John O’Reiley 1pm, Bushwalk reflections 2pm followed by afternoon tea and an Easter egg hunt with a twist. Adoration 5.30pm benediction. All welcome to bring your friends.

Thursday April 20

HEALING MASS

A Healing Mass in honour of St Peregrine, patron of Cancer sufferers and helper of all in need, will

be held at the Church of SS John and Paul, Pinetree Gully Rd off South St, Willetton at 7pm. There will be Veneration of the Relic and Anointing of the Sick. For further information please contact Noreen Monaghan on 9498 7727.

Sunday April 23

Holy Hour for Vocations. Infant Jesus Parish, Wellington Road, Morley have a regular Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament on the 4th Sunday of the month from 2-3pm. This Holy Hour is to pray for Vocations to the Priesthood and Religious Life. The next Holy Hour will be held on 23rd April 2006, 23pm. All are welcome - please spread the word.

Sunday April 23

DIVINE MERCY

The Divine Mercy Apostolate invites us all to celebrate the Feast of Divine Mercy at St Mary’s Cathedral, Victoria Square, Perth.

1.45pm – Reconciliation and Holy Rosary, 2.30pm - Holy Mass – main Celebrant, Bishop Sproxton and other priests are welcome to concelebrate. 3.30pm – Benediction, followed by Veneration of the First Class Relic of Saint Faustina Kowalska. Enq: John 9457 7771, or Linda 9275 6608.

April 23/25/27

EMMAUS WALK

10am Bardon Park Carpark. Commence a 15 minute walk to Friendship townhouse situated along the riverside walkway, gospel reading/sharing. Luncheon (donation). Proceeds to Cross Roads Community Fremantle, Friendship 2000 Overseas Projects. Like the apostles in the Emmaus story we

will discover the reality of “Jesus Walking With Us”. Come and explore life’s journey in this picturesque setting and the company of likeminded people, non-walkers are welcome. Booking essential: 9272 8263/0438 946 621 Maggie.

Thursday April 27

EASTERTIDE FAITH FORUM

Come and enjoy this interesting evening of thought and discussion with your family and friends. Presentation by the renowned Catholic Apologist Raymond de Souza, director of St Gabriel Communications: Understanding Europe in the World’s Changing Times and Enemy #1; A person or a Force – The Devil? St Joseph’s Parish Hall, 30 Hamilton St, Bassendean. Refreshments. Questions and Answers. Truly an opportunity of Catholic perspective for their timeliness not to be missed.

Friday April 28

HEALING FIRE  BURNING LOVE

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me – Jesus is setting the broken hearts free Our Lady of the Missions Catholic Church, 270 Camberwarra Drive, Craigie 7.30pm – 9.00pm. Come and experience the freedom Jesus gives to those who love him. Be empowered during prayer and praise to break through the everyday ups and downs of life. Noted speaker Gerry Smith, from Grief Management Services, will be giving a talk on healing the broken hearted and revealing how we can be set free to rise above and conquer in Jesus name.

Saturday April 29

800 YEARS OF DOMINICAN LIFE

The Dominican sisters of Western Australia have organised several celebrations to mark the 800th Anniversary of their foundation. The first of these will be a gathering for afternoon tea at 2pm, followed Sung Evening Prayer at 4.30pm at Holy Rosary parish, Woodlands. This will mark the Feast of St Catherine of Siena. Further information can be found at www/.domsiswa.org.au or by email to domsiswa@globaldial.com.au. Please bring photos or memorabilia to share and pass this invitation to your friends and family who may have been associated with Dominican schools or parishes here or in other countries.

Friday April 28

CATHOLIC FAITH RENEWAL  PRAISE AND WORSHIP

On Friday at 7.30pm at St John and Paul’s Church, Pinetree Gully Rd, Willetton there will be a Praise and Worship evening followed by a talk given by Fr Corran Pike titled “Discipleship” and Thanksgiving Mass. There will be light refreshments after Mass. You are all welcome to attend and we encourage you to bring your family and friends to this evening of fellowship. We look forward to seeing you there. Enq: Rita 9272 1765, Rose 0403 300 720, Gertrude 0433 231 305.

Tuesday May 9

CAFE AT JOHN PAUL

Module Three of the successful CaFE - Catholic Faith Exploration - series, entitled Knowing God Even Better will begin at the John Paul Church hall,

BUILDING TRADES

■ BRICK REPOINTING

Phone Nigel 9242 2952.

BUILDING TRADES

■ PERROTT PAINTING PTY LTD

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

■ PICASSO PAINTING

Top service. Phone 9345 0557, fax 9345 0505.

CATHOLICS CORNER

■ RETAILER OF CATHOLIC PRODUCTS

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

CHANGE YOUR LIFE FOREVER

■ WORK FROM HOME

Around your children & family commitments. My business is expanding and I need people to open new areas all over Australia. Training given. Highly lucrative. www.cyber-success-4u.org

14

19

20

Willetton. The five-talk video series, presented by the inspirational David Payne, Director of Catholic Evangelisation Services, UK will be held every Tuesday up to June 6 from 7.30pm - 9.00pm. Sessions are conducted in a warm and friendly cafe setting, enabling you to deepen and share your faith with others over a cuppa or glass of wine, and nibbles. For further details or to register, please call the parish office at 9332 5992.

Friday May 5

50TH ANNIVERSARY OF MARIA GORETTI

St Maria Goretti School and Parish are celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the opening of the School and church. All past priests, parishioners, students, teachers and friends are invited to gather in the school forecourt on Friday May 5 at 6pm for Holy Mass followed by a light supper and fellowship. If you have any memorabilia please bring and share or send into the school. Enquiries can be made through the school on 9277 5563 or email to admin@smg.wa.edu.au RSVP by phone on 9277 5563 or email by May 1 for catering purposes.

Saturday May 6

DAY WITH MARY

St Thomas the Apostle Church, Cnr College Road and Melville St, Claremont from 9am – 5pm. A video on Fatima will be shown at 9am. A day of prayer and instruction based upon the messages of Fatima. Includes Sacrament of Penance, Holy Mass, Eucharistic Adoration, Sermons, Rosaries, Procession of the Blessed Sacrament and Stations of the Cross. Please BYO lunch. Enq – Franciscan Sisters of the Immaculate 9250 8286. Next Day with Mary – June 3 – Yanchep/Lancelin. Bus services contact Nita on 9367 1366.

May 6 - 26

RETREAT IN DAILY LIFE

CLC WA (Christian Life Community) is conducting a Retreat in Daily Life program in conjunction with the Australian Jesuit community. This year the retreat will commence on Saturday May 6. The retreat will be led by a visiting Jesuit, James Blaettler SJ together with a team of local spiritual Directors. This is a non-residential retreat experience ideally suited for those who need to continue their daily routine and obligations while still seeking to deepen their relationship with God. The retreat is conducted over 3 weeks, meetings with a Director occur twice weekly. For a brochure or more information contact Veronica Reutens (9310 1147) or Anne Zevis (9335 8142 email; zevises@bigpond.com).

■ BABYSITTER

EMPLOYMENT

Babysitter required Landsdale, 2 preschool aged girls, required 2 days per week, variable hours and days. Phone Liz 0402 138 548

■ PARTTIME WORK

Ladies wanted to sell popular all zip bags, all sizes and colours, good money to be made. Work in own time around family. Ph: Sue 0413 871 361.

■ PARTTIME MEDICAL RECEPTIONIST

Required for expanding medical practice in Yokine. Appreciation of Catholic values on Life issues essential. Please send CV to 8/10 McCourt St, West Leederville 6007 by 1 May.’

FURNITURE REMOVAL

■ ALL AREAS

Mike Murphy 0416 226 434.

HOLIDAY ACCOMMODATION

■ BED AND BREAKFAST

B & B low rates, lovely riverside walks close to Perth. Ph: 9272 8263 or 0438 946 621.

■ DENMARK

Holiday House 3bdr x 2bath, sleeps up to 8. BOOK

NOW. Ph: Maria 0412 083 377.

■ SHOALWATER

Holiday units, self-contained, sleep up to 6, walk to the beach, near Penguin Island, very affordable rates. Bookings Ph: 0414 204 638 or bluewaterholidayunits@dodo.com.au.

RELIGIOUS PRODUCTS

■ REPAIR YOUR LITURGICAL BOOKS

Tydewi Bindery offer handcrafted fine bindings, journals, leather recovering. Repairs fo all your books, liturgical, bibles, missals and statues. Ph. 9293 3092.

Classifieds Phone Carole 9227 7080 or a/h: 9227 7778 (Deadline 12pm Tuesdays)

OFFICIAL DIARY

May 6 – June 24

The Holy Spirit of Freedom Community presents, “Empowered by the Holy Spirit for Living Today”. This is an 8 week Seminar which invites participants to see a new outpouring of the Holy Spirit in their lives. The course will run each Saturday from May 6th to June 24th from 10.30am to 12.30 pm at St Anne’s Parish Hall, 11 Hehir St, Belmont. All Welcome. For further details contact 9475 0155.

Sunday May 7

THE BOVE FARM MAY ROSARY RALLY

Celebration in Honour of Our Lady to be held at the Queen of the Holy Rosary Grotto, Bove’s Farm, Roy Road, Jindong. Hymn singing commences at 12.30pm. Holy concelebrated Mass led by Bishop Gerard Holohan commences 1pm, followed by Rosary Procession and Benediction. Afternoon tea provided. All welcome! Bus bookings from Perth to Bove Farm can be made with Francis Williams on ph 9459 3873 or mob 0404 893 977. (Note: Roy Road runs off the Bussell Highway, halfway between Busselton and Margaret River).

Monday May 8

ALPHA DINNER

Glendalough at 6pm, Invite a non-Christian friend to learn about life and God by attending a 10 week program. Sponsored by St. Bernadette’s Parish. Call for more information - Pam 9245 4959.

Tuesday May 9/16/17

Catholic Mission will be conducting an evening workshop for the parents, relatives and sponsors of confirmandi entitled ‘Confirmation and the Call to Christian Witness’ at Our Lady of Mercy Parish, Girrawheen Tuesday May 9, Our Lady Help of Christians Parish, East Victoria Park on Tuesday May 16 and St Emilie’s Parish, Canning Vale on Wednesday May 17. For further information about these workshops contact the Catholic Mission Office on 9422 7933 or email us at catholicmissionp erth@bigpond.com.

Saturdays PERPETUAL HELP NOVENA DEVOTIONS

Saturdays 4.30-5pm. Redemptorist Church, 190 Vincent Street, North Perth. No Novena Saturday April 15 (Easter Vigil).

ART EXHIBITION

Art exhibition every Saturday and Sunday at the Parish Hall, Star of the Sea church, Cottesloe, cnr of Stirling Highway and McNeil Sts 11am – 4pm. All proceeds from the sale towards the extension of St Mary’s Cathedral, Perth.

TENNIS ANYONE?

■ WA CATHOLIC TENNIS ASSOCIATION

Invites you to join in the forthcoming season on Saturday afternoons from May to September at the Manning Tennis Club. Anyone aged 17-70 is welcome to fill our A, B and C grades. Just form a group of 5 people (three men, two women) for our doubles competition. Come along, improve your tennis while having great fun and meeting new people. Ph: Warren 9271 4670, Rod: 0409 839 768.

THANKS

■ ST JUDE

Thanks to St Jude for prayer answered AM

USFOROZ

■ MEMORIAM CARDS AND BOOKLETS

Urgent jobs in 24hrs. W/E and A/H 0410 651 900.

Opening Mass for Catholic Prayer Festival, Eagles Nest - Archbishop Hickey

23 Mass, Feast of Divine Mercy, St Mary’s Cathedral - Bishop Sproxton

25 Anzac Day Parade and Service, Perth City - Fr Brian O’Loughlin VG

26 AGM Churches’ Commission on Education - Bishop Sproxton

27-29 Media Conference, Rome - Archbishop Hickey

28 Ministries Mass, St Charles’ Seminary - Bishop Sproxton

MAY

1-11 May Australian Catholic Bishops’ Conference, Sydney - Archbishop Hickey, Bishop Sproxton

ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS

Is alcohol costing you more than just money? Alcoholics Anonymous can help. Ring 9325 3566.

BLESSED SACRAMENT ADORATION

Holy Family Church, Alcock Street, Maddington. Every Friday 8.30 am Holy Mass followed by Blessed Sacrament Adoration till 12 noon. Every first Friday of the month, anointing of the sick during Mass. Enq. 9398 6350.

PERPETUAL ADORATION AT ST BERNADETTE’S

Adoration: Chapel open all day and all night. All welcome, 49 Jugan St, Glendalough, just north of the city. Masses every night at 5.45pm Monday to Friday, 6.30pm, Saturday and the last Sunday Mass in Perth is at 7pm.

ST CLARE’S SCHOOL, SISTERS OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD

A short history of St Clare’s School is being prepared to celebrate 50 years of its work in WA. Any past students, staff, families or others associated with the school - from its time at Leederville, at North Perth, at East Perth or at Wembley - are invited to contact us with photographs, or memories. Privacy will be protected, in accordance with your wishes. Please contact Nancy Paterson on 0417 927 126, (email npaters@yahoo.com.au) or St Clare’s School, PO Box 21 & 23 Carlisle North 6161. Tel: 9470 5711.

Wednesdays SIGN LANGUAGE COURSE

Australian Sign Language (Auslan) Classes are offered free of charge at Emmanuel Centre on Wednesdays at 1pm. If this does not suit you, other arrangements can be made. Please contact Fr Paul or Barbara at Emmanuel Centre, 25 Windsor St Perth 9328 8113.

QUEEN OF APOSTLES SCHOOL

If anyone has information on Queen of Apostles School, Riverton, used to go there or knows anyone who did please do one of the following to tell the extension group – Call 9354 1360 and ask to speak to Veronique or email your information to veronequeregnard@gmail.com.au or janellekoh@yahoo.com.au or you can put your information into the box in the office at Queen of Apostles School. Thanking you in anticipation.

GOD’S FARM EASTER

Every Easter God’s Farm enjoys a blessed time of total silence, solitude and stillness from Holy Thursday evening to Easter Sunday midday. Our Lady’s Grotto plus 200 acres to walk with Jesus and

share His Passion welcomes you warmly. All of the Easter Ceremonies are available at Dunsborough and Margaret River. To maintain this silent pilgrimage the gates of God’s Farm will be closed to visitors from Holy Thursday to Easter Sunday as above. All are most welcome as usual after this period. Full details please contact Betty Peaker sfo. PO Box 24, Cowramup, 6284. Tel/Fax 97 556 212.

Sunday September 17

KOORDA CHURCH 50TH ANNIVERSARY

Our Lady of the Assumption Church at Koorda will celebrate its Golden Anniversary this year on September 17. Past Parish Priests and past parishioners are invited to come and join us for the celebrations. Anyone who has any photos they would like to include in a display is welcome to send them to Kath Gosper at PO Box 68, Koorda 6475. You could send copies or we will copy and return them to you. The day will commence with Mass at 10.30am to be followed by lunch at the Recreation hall.

LINDA’S HOUSE OF HOPE APPEAL

To enable us to continue to provide and offer support for girls wishing to leave the sex trade we need your help. We have achieved already with your assistance new offfices which are now complete at the rear of the shelter and are fully functional. Further donations are also required to enable us to complete the internal layout of the shelter itself. Please send donations to Linda’s House of Hope PO Box Z5640, Perth, St George’s Tce 6831. Ph: 0439 401 009. All donations over $2 are tax deductible.

Please Note

The Last Word Perspective on ‘the Gospel of Judas’

When the National Geographic Society announced its intentions to publish an English translation of an ancient text called “The Gospel of Judas” a ripple passed through the world’s media. The 31-page manuscript, written in Coptic, purportedly surfaced in Geneva in 1983 and has only been translated now. The Rome-based ZENIT news agency asked Legionary Father Thomas Williams, dean of theology at the Regina Apostolorum university in Rome, to comment on the relevance of the discovery.

What is the “Gospel of Judas”?

Father Williams:

Though the manuscript still must be authenticated, it is likely to be a fourth- or fifth-century text, and is a copy of an earlier document produced by a Gnostic sect called the Cainites.

The document paints Judas Iscariot in a positive light, and describes him as obeying a divine ordinance in handing over Jesus to the authorities for the salvation of the world.

It may well be a copy of the Gospel of Judas referred to by St Irenaeus of Lyons in his work Against the Heresies, written around AD 180.

If authentic, what challenge would this document pose to traditional Christian belief? Will it “shake Christianity to its foundations” as some press releases have suggested?

Father Williams: Certainly not. The Gnostic gospels, of which there are many besides this one, are not Christian documents per se, since they proceed from a syncretistic sect that incorporated elements from different religions, including Christianity.

From the moment of their appearance, the Christian community rejected these documents because of their incompatibility with the Christian faith.

The “Gospel of Judas” would be a document of this sort, which could have great historical value, since it contributes to our knowledge of the Gnostic movement, but it poses no direct challenge to Christianity.

Is it true that the Church has tried to cover up this text and other apocryphal texts?

Father Williams: These are myths circulated by Dan Brown and other conspiracy theorists.

You can go to any Catholic bookstore and pick up a copy of the Gnostic gospels. Christians may not believe them to be true, but there is no attempt to hide them.

But doesn’t an early document of this sort rival orthodox Christian sources, such as the four canonical Gospels?

Father Williams: Remember that Gnosticism arose in the middle of the second century, and the “Gospel of Judas,” if authentic, probably dates back to the mid- to late second century.

To put a historical perspective on things, that would be like you or me writing a text now on the American Civil War and having that text later used as a primary historical source on the war. The text could not have been written by eyewitnesses, the way at least two of the canonical Gospels were.

Why would the leaders of the Gnostic movement have been interested in Judas?

Father Williams: One of the major differences between Gnostic belief and that of Christianity concerns the origins of evil in the universe.

Christians believe that a good God created a good world, and that through the abuse of free will, sin and corruption entered the world and produced disorder and suffering.

The Gnostics blamed God for the evil in the world and claimed that he created the world in a disordered and flawed way. Thus they champion the rehabilitation of Old Testament figures such as Cain, who killed his brother Abel, and Esau, the elder brother of Jacob, who sold his birthright for a plate of pottage.

Judas fits perfectly into the Gnostic agenda of showing that God intends evil for the world.

But wasn’t Judas’ betrayal a necessary part of God’s plan, as this text suggests?

Father Williams: Being omniscient, God knows full well what choices we will make and weaves even our bad decisions into his providential plan for the world.

In his last published book, Pope

John Paul II eloquently reflected on how God continues to bring good out of even the worst evil that man can produce.

That doesn’t mean, however, that God intends for us to do evil, or that he intended for Judas to betray Jesus. If it wasn’t Judas, it would have been someone else. The authorities had already decided to

put Jesus to death, and it was just a matter of time.

What is the Church’s position regarding Judas? Is it possible to “rehabilitate” him?

Father Williams: Though the Catholic Church has a canonisation process by which it declares certain

persons to be in heaven, as saints, it has no such process for declaring people to be condemned.

Historically, many have thought that Judas is probably in hell, because of Jesus’ severe indictment of Judas: “It would be better for that man if he had never been born,” as he says in Matthew 26:24. But even these words do not offer conclusive evidence regarding his fate.

In his 1994 book, “Crossing the Threshold of Hope,” Pope John Paul II wrote that Jesus’ words “do not allude for certain to eternal damnation.”

“The main difference between [Peter and Judas] is not the nature or gravity of their sin, but rather their willingness to accept God’s mercy.”

- Fr Thomas Williams LC

But if anyone deserves hell, wouldn’t it be Judas?

Father Williams: Surely many people deserve hell, but we must remember that the mercy of God is infinitely greater than our wickedness.

Peter and Judas committed very similar faults: Peter denied Jesus three times, and Judas handed him over. And yet now Peter is remembered as a saint and Judas simply as the traitor.

The main difference between the two is not the nature or gravity of their sin, but rather their willingness to accept God’s mercy. Peter wept for his sins, came back to Jesus, and was pardoned. The Gospel describes Judas as hanging himself in despair.

Why is the “Gospel of Judas” arousing so much interest?

Father Williams: Such theories regarding Judas are certainly not new.

It’s enough to remember the 1973 play Jesus Christ Superstar, where Judas sings, “I have no thought at all about my own reward. I really didn’t come here of my own accord,” or Taylor Caldwell’s 1977 novel I, Judas

The enormous economic success of The Da Vinci Code has undoubtedly stirred up the pot, and provided financial incentive for theories of this sort.

Michael Baigent, author of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, now has a book out called The Jesus Papers, which recycles the old story that Jesus survived the crucifixion.

And a newly released “scientific” study asserts that meteorological conditions could have been such that Jesus really walked on ice, when the Gospels say he walked on water.

Basically, for those who reject outright the possibility of miracles, any theory, outlandish as it may be, trumps Christian claims.

History or fiction:The final words on the last page of this Coptic manuscript read: “Gospel of Judas.” The National Geographic Society released the first modern translation of the ancient Judas text April 6. It is among dozens of manuscripts known as the gnostic gospels. Photo: CNS/National Geographic

Jigsaw puzzle: Florence Darbre, conservator of the Gospel of Judas manuscript, works with Coptologist Gregor Wurst to reassemble multitudes of fragments onto proper pages. The National Geographic Society released the first modern translation of the ancient gnostic text that describes conversations between Jesus and Judas Iscariot.

Photo: CNS