The Record Newspaper 21 September 2006

Skatin’ Sisters coming soon page 2

Anna Krohn

Controversial Italian writer laid to rest in Church where her mother prayed

A s Muslims take offence around the world, it ’s wor th revisiting...

As Muslims take offence around the world, it’s worth

What Benedic t Benedict really said said

Br Andrew to be focus of Farm retreat

■ By Sylvia Defendi

The Australian man who was co-founder of Mother Teresa’s Missionary Brothers of Charity, will be honoured on the sixth anniversary of his passing with a unique retreat held at God’s Farm in Gracewood from October 6 to 8.

Br Andrew, who enlisted 500 Brothers of Charity across the globe, regularly visited God’s Farm and gave annual retreats for 12 years before his death on the feast of St Francis of Assisi in 2000.

In remembrance of Br Andrew’s extraordinary character the October retreat will feature the words of Sr Eliezer, a Missionary Sister of Charity, who knew Br Andrew well and assisted him in his last days.

Special permission has been granted for Sr Eliezer to visit God’s Farm, where she will share Br Andrew’s last words and the joy he had for Mother Teresa’s work.

■ By Paul Gray

Pope Benedict XVI’s speech at the University of Regensburg in Germany, which this week provoked controversy in the Islamic

world, was a logical continuation of the theme reported on the front page of last weekend’s edition of The Record

“Benedict urges religious revival in world ‘rapidly going deaf’,” said the front-page

headline, which reported on the first leg of the pontiff’s six-day visit to his homeland in German Bavaria.

That report, based on the Pope’s address to a quarter of a million people at a fairground in Munich,

highlighted the Pope’s emphasis on the importance of combating secular values in the West today

Continued - VISTA 3 Pages 12-13: The full text of Benedict’s speech

Former Perth broadcaster wins Christian Book of Year

■ By Sherilee Kingston

The Australian Christian book awards were announced in Melbourne on September 13, with Sheridan Voysey’s book Unseen Footprints ; encountering the divine along the journey of life

taking first place. “I am very encouraged to have Unseen Footprints receive this award. When I was invited to attend the Melbourne awards lunch and address the gathering, I suspected I might’ve received third place,” said Mr Voysey, a former broadcaster and announcer with Perth’s

Christian radio station Sonshine 98.5 FM, said.

“What a surprise when Unseen Footprints took the trophy!”

“There was strong competition this year all the short-listed books are worthy titles from good authors with excellent messages addressing

Continued - Page 4

Winning style: Sheridan Voysey receives his award from the Australian Christian Literature Society’s Len Woodley, left, Scripture Union’s Commissioning Editor Sally Smith and Peter Adam.

Photo: Australian Christian

Continued - Page 4

VINNIES REACH OUT

■ By Sylvia Defendi

School students, employees and volunteers of the St Vincent De Paul Society took to the streets on Friday September 15 for the annual street appeal.

Continued - Page 4

The face of anger: Kashmiri activists belonging to the Muslim League shout slogans during a protest against Pope Benedict XVI in Srinagar, capital of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir on September 15.

Photo: CNS /Fayaz Kabli/ Reuters

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Sisters of Life headed for Australia

New order for women is young, vibrant and growing - and devoted to nurturing life

■ By

Paul Gray

Anew order of nuns dedicated specially to promoting the antiabortion cause will visit Australia at the end of the month.

The Sisters of Life, an order founded in 1991 by Cardinal John J. O’Connor in New York, will fly several representatives to New Zealand, Sydney and Melbourne for a series of public talks and conversations with women.

The Respect Life Offices of the Catholic archdioceses of Sydney and Melbourne, staffed by lay women Brigid

Vout and Marcia Riordan, respectively, are heavily involved in sponsoring the visits by the Sisters. Unlike other nuns, members of the Sisters of Life take a special fourth vow to protect human life, in addition to the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.

Now in their 15th year, the nuns provide shelter and support for vulnerable pregnant women in New York.

They also conduct “post-abortion healing retreats,” to offer spiritual help to women who have had abortions.

The Sisters have now established five separate convents around the New York area.

Melbourne Respect Life Officer

Marcia Riordan told The Record she was amazingly impressed by the “young, vibrant women” who have joined the order, when she visited New York herself. The order has 47 nuns, who come

from across the US, Canada and the United Kingdom. The late Cardinal O’Connor founded the order after a visit to Dachau Concentration Camp, where he touched a crematorium oven built by the Nazis in their extermination of Jews and others.

This experience moved the Cardinal to take a vow to protect and enhance the sacredness of all human life.

Eight women came forward to found a community in 1991 after the Cardinal “advertised” his idea in a weekly newspaper column with the headline: “Help Wanted: Sisters of Life.”

The daily lifestyle of the nuns, who live in community, involves periods of prayer, meditation and silence as well as work at their particular apostolate.

The Sisters of Life are also active in promoting John Paul II’s Theology of the Body.

Released priest prayed for his captors

“I Felt God Was With Me,” says Father Sirop

BAGHDAD, Iraq, SEPT. 13, 2006 (Zenit.org) - The Chaldean priest who spent almost a month in captivity said that he had an acute awareness of God’s protection during his ordeal.

Just hours after his release, Father Hanna Saad Sirop told the charity Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) about his hard experience in captivity and expressed his forgiveness of his abductors.

The 34-year-old Iraqi also expressed his gratitude for those who worked and prayed for his safe return.

Father Sirop, who serves at St Jacob’s Church in the Dora district of Baghdad, heads the theological section of Babel College, run by the Catholic Church in Baghdad. He had planned to go to Rome in early September to study, with the support of ACN. An ACN communiqué today confirmed that the Chaldean priest telephoned his relatives and friends the minute he was released. The reunion with his loved ones was a “very big moment,” he said.

Father Sirop stressed how prayer for his release has “united” large sectors of Iraq at a time of near civil war.

“I want to thank all those people who helped me with their prayers. That really was a miracle for me,” he told ACN. “From the moment I was kidnapped, I felt God was with me. I began to say: ‘God, you are my protector. You will be with me in my pain.’”

The Chaldean priest expressed to the international charity his willingness to forgive his captors. “I do not hate them,” he said. “I pray for them - I continue to pray for them.”

Father Sirop said that when he was going to be released, he urged his abductors to delay releasing him, realizing that to be abandoned on

the streets of Baghdad after dusk put him at risk from murderous criminals.

His brother eventually picked him up and took him to meet his mother and other family members.

The priest said he has been advised against revealing his experience during his captivity for fear of reprisals.

According to ACN, the priest’s release means that he is able to begin studies in philosophy in Rome.

The Chaldean priest’s disappearance spread growing alarm in the Christian community, as kidnappings in the country involving priests had until now been of short duration.

Murdered nun died forgiving her killers

The last words of an Italian woman religious slain on Sunday in Somalia were: “I forgive, I forgive.”

Around midday, Consolata missionary Sister Leonella Sgorbati, 65, was crossing the road between SOS Hospital where she worked

Two gunmen emerged from behind nearby taxis and kiosks and shot her.

Sister Leonella was rushed to the SOS Hospital and died shortly after.

“She realized that she was

dying, because she kept saying ‘I can’t breathe,’” according to a statement today from Consolata religious to the Catholic Information Service of Africa (CISA) in Nairobi. “Her last words were: ‘I forgive, I forgive.’”

Sister Leonella’s body had seven bullet wounds, said the women religious, who are nurses at SOS Hospital. Two suspects were arrested and investigations have been launched by the Union of Islamic Courts, reported

CISA. The body of the missionary was flown to Nairobi on Sunday night in the company of three Consolata religious.

A requiem Mass will take place at the Consolata Shrine Parish Westlands, Nairobi.

“I am sure she wanted to be buried in Kenya because she loved Kenya so much,” Sister Josephine Barbero, the Consolata regional superior in Kenya. said.

Bishop Giorgio Bertin of Djibouti, also apostolic

administrator of Somalia, will be present at the funeral.

Leonella Sgorbati was born in Gazzola, Piacenza, Italy, on December 9, 1940. She joined the Consolata Missionary Sisters in San Fre, Cuneo, in May 1963 and took her perpetual vows in November 1972.

After nursing school in England (1966-1968), she was appointed to Kenya, where she arrived in September 1970.

Go, sister: Three members of the Sisters of Life enjoy in-line skating near their convent in the Bronx neighbourhood of New York on May 6. The religious community was established in the Archdiocese of New York in 1991 to protect and enhance the sacredness of all human life. The nuns pictured asked that they be identified only by their order. Photo: CNS/Chris Sheridan

Ex-madam slams proposal to decriminalise prostitution

■ By Sherrilee Kingston

A former Perth prostitute and madam who now rescues girls trapped in the sex trade says it is a big mistake to decriminalise prostitution as it would not resolve any of the problems.

Linda Watson was responding to the news that Western Australian Attorney General Jim McGinty is proposing to decriminalise prostitution next year. Ms Watson founded the Perth based House of Hope, which offers encouragement and help to women trying to break free from the sex industry and heal the terrible damage it has done to women and girls.

Linda’s House of Hope also seeks to tell the Australian communi-

Government funded body criticised for referring clients to prostitutes

■ By Sylvia Defendi

State funded South Australian sexual health education provider, Shine SA, has been bombarded with criticism for referring clients to prostitutes.

Family First MLC Dennis Hood said he was shocked to discover the news that SHINE SA considered this practice standard procedure and had no intention of withdrawing the ‘service.’

“This is a gross misuse of taxpayers money and may be illegal activity. Funding must be suspended and a full independent investigation held immediately”, Mr Hood said.

Disbelief came as Mr Hood was forwarded a list of Shine SA’s recommended prostitutes.

“There is no mistaking the intention of the list as it includes

ty the truth about the industry. It encourages the community to honour women and not to take advantage of them, with families and society benefiting at large.

Ms Watson said “I’ve seen what goes on from the inside and the outside - prostitution is bad news. It hurts everyone who gets involved, and decriminalising prostitution will only proliferate the problems.”

A recent report by police intelligence indicated the significant increase in sex workers who have probably grown by about 3000 in the past 18 months, with most of the influx coming from private operators from South-East Asia, as reported by the West Australian on September 12.

Ms Watson said the report was only a tiny taste of things to come if “the WA government legalises brothels. You ain’t seen nothing yet!” she said, “When it is legal to run a brothel, legal to procure girls, legal to be their pimps, how on earth are you going to stop the bikies taking over completely?”

Since 2003 there had been 112 investigations into people trafficking and 22 charges had been laid. Ms Watson said that recent relaxation of policing has meant that more and more children are being trapped in prostitution.

“Little pre-teens have been coming into my House of Hope, it is breaking my heart.” Ms Watson said “decriminalising prostitution sends a message to the whole community that selling your body is an ok thing to do. Even kids will get that message, it’s tragic.”

Support is desperately needed to help fight this battle. Ring Linda’s House of Hope, 043 9401 009.

the headings ‘Female Sex Workers’ and ‘Male Sex Workers’ and is followed by a series of names, mobile phone numbers and a brief description of the ‘service’ they provide,” he said.

The South Australian State Government provided over 2 million dollars in funding to SHINE SA last year and has offered the non-government organisation a $5.75 million land and building package.

“Family First is calling upon the Government to freeze any funding for SHINE SA in the forthcoming State budget until these questions have been answered,” added Mr Hood.

President of Western Australia’s Family Association, John Barich, said that prostitution was never in the best interest of anyone.

“This is quite an irresponsible act.

“What will come of those who have to deal with unwanted pregnancy, abortions, STD’s and marriage breakdowns due to infidelity, because of SHINE SA’s recommendations?” he said.

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?

Linda Watson

Winning author didn’t expect success of book

Continued from Page 1

Australian life, faith and society”.

Using examples from contemporary culture Unseen Footprints provides a fresh and creative look at the intersections of the divine in daily life, and presents the faith in a way that connects with today’s Australians.

After the success of Unseen Footprints Mr Voysey is in the process of writing another book, he said.

“I am in the process of research-

ing the follow up [book]. This title will focus on God’s personality, what he likes, is passionate about, what he dislikes and what grieves him. I sense that many know some of the basic teachings of Christianity but aren’t really sure what God himself is like and how he fulfils the deepest yearnings of the human soul.”

John Dickson, last years winning author came in second place this year with his book A spectators guide to Jesus: an introduction to the man from Nazareth. Third place went to Leigh Hatcher for

I’m not crazy I’m just a little unwell; my journey through chronic fatigue syndrome.

Unseen Footprints was widely praised by the judges of the award. With one judge commenting that it is “ideal for non-Christians and good to give to people who are searching, while being equally relevant to those who have already found God.”

Another judge said “Unseen Footprints provides an excitingly fresh and creative look at the intersections of the divine in daily life,

and presents the faith in a way which connects with today’s generation.

“It explores our responses to situations of pain, fame, yearning and delight without descending to sentimentality or religiosity.”

Inspiration for the title came from Psalm 77:19 “You walked through the water of the mighty sea, but your footprints were not seen.”

This unique book is available from Scripture Union Stores, or through direct mail order by phoning 1800 808 639.

Vinnies reach out Co-founder honoured at God’s Farm

Continued from Page 1

Buckets were handed out across the CBD and metro areas as donations were collected, stickers were distributed and balloons given to children, all in aid of the society’s good works.

Students from a number of Catholic Colleges, who attended the event, were to be congratulated, said society president Genevieve De Souza, adding that many them were able to help collect funds for the entire day.

With more than 100 volunteers collecting throughout the day, the society is expected to receive $30,000.

“The success of the St Vincent de Paul’s annual street appeal is attributed to the generous contributions of Western Australians,” said Mrs De Souza.

The street appeal is an annual event in the society’s calendar and has been running for more than 20 years, with the help of numerous volunteers.

Mrs De Souza said that the funds raised would go towards providing emergency relief to individuals and families who were struggling or in crisis.

“It is coming close to Christmas and many people are already beginning to feel the pinch with the cost of living continually increasing,” she said.

To make a donation call: 13 18 12 or visit: www.vinnies.org.au/wa.

Continued from Page 1

Sr Eliezer will be joined during the retreat by Fr Douglas Rowe, who will offer daily Mass in the stone chapel and will be hosting a four-hour seminar on the wonders of contemplative prayer.

Coordinator of retreats at God’s Farm, Betty Peaker is thrilled to be hosting the retreat in honour of her dear friend, whom she visited in Victoria in 1988, asking him to come to God’s Farm.

In 1989 Br Andrew visited God’s farm and held his first of many retreats.

“He had nothing, no driver’s license, no watch; he belonged to the Lord, and everyone who met him realized this through the wonderful way he spoke,” remembered Ms Peaker.

As a practical and lasting tribute to Br Andrew a permanent centre has been established at God’s Farm, which houses the largest collection of memorabilia recounting his life story.

Ms Peaker, who recalls the popular retreats given by Br Andrew, dutifully recorded each of his speeches, which are now available from God’s Farm.

In rememberance: Missionary Sisters of Charity pray during an anniversary Mass in 2004, for Mother Teresa. Br Andrew, co-founder with Mother Teresa of the Missionary Brothers of Charity, will be honoured on the sixth anniversary of his death, with a retreat at God’s Farm from October 6 to October 8.

Many audiocassettes, over 50 letters, photos and home videos are kept at God’s farm, including published copies of two books

written by Br Andrew (also available through The Record). For further information and to make reservations contact Betty Peaker on 9755 6212.

PATHWAYS

ST PAUL

WALKING THE PILGRIMS ROAD

In brief

Back to school

Kids who insist that they can study better while plugged into their iPods or watching TV can now be blinded with science that argues the opposite. To test the relationship between multi-tasking and learning, researchers at UCLA assigned 14 20-somethings to an exercise that involved learning how to sort various shapes into different piles based on trial and error. Each participant performed the task under two conditions: first, without any distractions; then while listening to high and low beeps and counting only the high ones. Participants were tested on what they learned under each condition.

Psychology professor Russell Poldrack and colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) - a technique that tracks increases in blood oxygen content as an indicator of activity in different parts of the brain. “Our results told us that people can learn under either condition, but the way they learned [material] and the brain systems involved were different,” said Poldrack. “For the task performed while multi-tasking, the subjects’ knowledge was less flexible, meaning they could not extrapolate their knowledge to different contexts.” Another psychologist comments: “When learning with distractions, students’ brains are trying to wing it by using a region that is not the best suited for long-term memory and understanding.”

- FamilyEdge

Virtually no textbooks in ‘Schools of the future’

A $63 million “School of the Future” built under the guidance of Microsoft and hailed as the first of its kind has opened in Philadelphia with 170 students. Its technology left them awestruck: a laptop for every child; lockers that open with the swipe of a smart card; a fully wireless building. There are virtually no textbooks -- not even an encyclopaedia in the library - but plasma screens, ceiling projectors and interactive white boards abound.

The school is Microsoft’s biggest venture in a school to date. The company donated $100,000 to name an area in the building, but did not provide equipment or software or otherwise fund it. Instead, it gave personnel time, best practices, and access to its network of “international thought leaders”. Bill Gates greeted students in a video clip and said he would visit. Naming rights for the whole school are still up for grabs at a cost of $5 million.

Students are admitted by lottery. Seventy-five per cent are from the neighbourhood (in West Philadelphia) and the rest from the city at large; 85 per cent come from low-income families. Every student has to apply for college, and demonstrate 11 “adult competencies, including “managing relationships”, “creativity”, “valuing diversity”, “dealing with ambiguity”, and “taking courageous action”. - FamilyEdge

Chinese au pairs

Affluent American couples are hiring au pairs from China for their children because they assume that China’s expanding influence will make Mandarin the sophisticates’ language of the future. Some parents also have adopted children from China. One agency, Au Pair in America, has had 1400 requests for Mandarin-speaking nannies since 2004 - none before that. They are not easy to find, as there is prejudice in today’s China against domestic work. - FamilyEdge

Good works: St Vincent De Paul employees, Darran Rigney and Linda Iskra, supported their teams as they collected funds for the Society.

Photo: CNS

Cardinal Pell responds on Benedict Islam furore

Cardinal George Pell of Sydney Pope defended Benedict after the controversy following the Holy Father’s speech at Regensburg in Germany during his visit there last week. He said: “It is a sign of hope that no organised violence has flared here in Australia, following Pope Benedict’s recent comments.

“No one compared the Pope to Hitler or Mussolini (as in Turkey) or called for his murder as Sheik Malin did in Somalia. No group like the League of Jihadists in Iraq promised “that the soldiers of Mohammed will come sooner or later to shake your throne and the foundations of your state”.

“However the violent reactions in many parts of the Islamic world justified one of Pope Benedict’s main fears. They showed the link

for many Islamists between religion and violence, their refusal to respond to criticism with rational arguments, but only with demonstrations, threats and actual violence.

“Our major priority must be to maintain peace and harmony within the Australian community, but no lasting achievements can be grounded in fantasies and evasions.

“The responses of Sheik al-Hilali, Australia’s mufti, in particular, and even Dr Ameer Ali of the Prime Minister’s Muslim Reference Group were unfortunately typical and unhelpful. It is always someone else’s fault and issues touching on the nature of Islam are ignored.

“Sheik al-Hilali often responds to criticism by questioning the intelligence and competence of the ques-

tioner or critic. So too with the Pope, whose speech he claimed was not what was expected of a holy person and indeed “the Church needs to re-examine its thoughts about someone who doesn’t have the qualities or good grasp of Christian character or knowledge”.

“Dr Ameer Ali’s published reply was more surprising as it called on Pope Benedict to be more like Pope John Paul II than Pope Urban II, who called the First Crusade.

In fact the Pope’s long speech was more about the weaknesses of the Western world, its irreligion and disdain for religion and he explicitly rejected linking religion and violence. He won’t be calling any crusade.

“Today Westerners often link genuine religious expression with

peace and tolerance. Today most Muslims identify genuine religion with submission (Islam) to the commands of the Quran. They are proud of the spectacular military expansion across continents especially in the decades after the Prophet’s death. This is seen as a sign of God’s blessing.

“Friends of Islam in Australia have genuine questions, which need to be addressed, not regularly avoided. We are grateful for those moderate Moslems who have spoken publicly. But as Andrew Robb, Parliamentary Secretary on Multicultural Affairs, told Muslim clerics last weekend evil acts done falsely in the name of Islam around the world “need to be addressed, not swept under the carpet.”

Full Benedict speech - Pages 12,13

First Jesuit in 150-plus years to be made bishop

Scenes from an ordination: Bishop Gregory O’Kelly, in left of top photo, became the first Jesuit in Australia in more than 150 years to be consecrated as a bishop at a ceremony in Adelaide’s St Francis Xavier Cathedral on September 14. The Society of Jesus, to which Bishop O’Kelly belongs, arrived in Australia in December 1848. Appointment of a Jesuit as a bishop is a rarity in the life of the Church as Jesuits take a special vow “not to ambition” as part of their vocation of service to the Church. Bishop O’Kelly is shown, at left of top photo, concelebrating Mass with Archbishop Philip Wilson of Adelaide and Bishop Eugene Hurley of Port Pirie; and, later, addresses the congregation. Cardinal George Pell of Sydney, left, prays over Bishop Kelly during the evening, while Adelaide schoolchildren sing at the event which attracted enormous crowds of people. The Auxiliary Bishop’s coat of arms is shown below.

Photos: Ben Searcy

Amare et Servire

“To love and to serve”

Response: An Anglican church after it was hit by a firebomb in the West Bank city of Nablus on September16.

Photo: CNS/Abed Omar Qusini/Reuters

Western values founder without faith

We hear a lot about fanatical faith these days, but the West may have more to fear from irrational reason.

■ By Carolyn Moynihan

According to President George Bush, the war against terrorism that America launched after September 11, 2001 is not the much-touted “clash of civilisations” but “a struggle for civilisation”. This implies a civilisation that people of all cultural persuasions could affirm, but in what does it consist? Bush says it consists in “liberty”, or “the way of life enjoyed by free nations”, meaning democracies as found in the West.

One line of commentary in recent days, while remaining critical of the war on terror, has endorsed Bush’s confidence in the Western way of life and added some detail.

A British writer says the “Western model of secular liberal democracy, Enlightenment values and capitalist economics” is so successful and attractive it will inevitably win out over the resistance of Islamic militants. A German broadcaster believes attempts to “pulverise the values of the civilised world” are doomed “because history has shown that in the end, progress prevails, modernity wins”.

Both writers try to give some moral content to their sketch of the secular Western state, the latter referring to a “core of humanness” (which totalitarian states deny) and the former to “basic and universal human values such as “dignity, protection of life and justice”.

These are certainly core values that the West has defended very well in modern times - notably in the wake of the second World War when the leaders of the victorious nations set out to build a lasting peace rather than simply punish the defeated aggressors. Yet if these values were as evident in the West today as we like to think, it is difficult to see why the campaign of Al Qaeda would have gained the following it has, even within Western countries.

In practice, Western values accommodate behaviour ranging from generous humanitarian efforts to preserve life, to the treatment of human life as mere material for experiments; from high sensitivity to what will offend some cultural groups, to open contempt for what is sacred to others; from intense political efforts to protect children from poverty and abuse, to legislation that can rob them of their right to a mother and father. Don’t these extremes indicate a deep confusion about the meaning of basic values, if not their eclipse?

Even thinkers of a secular stamp have seen in the aftermath of 9/11 a vacuum of meaning and moral authority in the West that governments have tried in vain to fill with values-building exercises such as “diversity training”, “the citizenship curriculum”, “sensitivity courses”. None of this seems to have won resident Muslim communities over to secular and liberal values.

Returning to Christian roots

To many of us the cause and the remedy for this situation are clear.

Procedural values such as diversity, dialogue, multiculturalism - even core values such as human dignity, justice and peace - are vague in meaning and unconvincing because they have come adrift from the Christian moral tradition that gave birth to them.

What we need to do is get back to the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount. But isn’t this exactly what secularists, and even fellow Christians, fear: a takeover of the state by religious fundamentalists who would have more in common with the Taliban than with the Enlightenment?

“Few people have taken this fear more seriously and given it more thought than the theologian Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, and even fewer have answered it with his clarity, serenity and persuasiveness.”

Few people have taken this fear more seriously and given it more thought than the theologian Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, and even fewer have answered it with his clarity, serenity and persuasiveness.

These are the qualities that stand out in a collection of his papers and speeches, the majority delivered in 2004 before he became Pope, and published under the title, Values in a Time of Upheaval. Central to his thought is the relationship between reason and faith.

One thing he makes very clear: there is no justification for Christians staging some kind of theocratic coup.

In fact, it is Christian faith itself that has “dethroned the idea of political theocracy”, as one can see in Christ’s statement, “My kingdom is not of this world” - even though it took a long time for all the consequences of this to be understood. In

the modern secular state Christians live together freely with people of other persuasions, their task being “to transform the world from within by means of faith, hope and love.” [1] (As a matter of equality and justice, not to mention reason, this does not exclude them from

Beyond value: “ Human life is precious, but not an end in itself to the exclusion of other moral goods,’” said Pope John Paul II in “Evangelium Vitae.”

The Church does not believe that just because things are scientifically possible that this makes them ethically right.

Photo:CNS/Cleo

holding public office and expressing their values at the same time.)

On the other hand, the state cannot be constructed out of pure reason, “cut loose from all historical roots and refusing to recognise any moral foundations except those that would win the assent of every person’s reason.”

Such a state, says Ratzinger, is left with only the majority principle, and this means “the ruin of law, which is thereby controlled by statistics.”

Don’t we see this in the way in which social policy is handled in the West today, where simple majorities can change laws affecting the basic concept of family? Pope John Paul

II offered a trenchant analysis of this tendency in his 1995 encyclical, The Gospel of Life. Through the majority principle democracy can contradict even its most basic values, he warned.

“The State is no longer the ‘common home’ where all can live together on the basis of principles of fundamental equality, but is transformed into a tyrant State, which arrogates to itself the right to dispose of the life of the weakest and most defenceless members, from the unborn child to the elderly, in the name of a public interest which is really nothing but the interest of one part.” The moral value of democracy is not automatic: it “stands or falls with the values which it embodies and promotes.”[2]

Reason and faith need each other

The truth is that secular rationality and Christian faith - or other faiths, for that matter - need each other. Religion is not by its nature irrational, and this is plainly seen in the Christian faith in which, as Ratzinger points out, “God himself is Logos … the creative reason that gave birth to the world and that is reflected in the world.” [3] But religion can become irrational, and dangerously so, as, for example, in the terrorism recently carried out by Muslim groups. These pathologies of religion need to be purified by reason.

But there are also pathologies of reason and these may be even more dangerous in our time, says Ratzinger. Consider the atomic bomb or the way scientists manipulating embryos now “turn man into a product”; or the countless victims sacrificed to communism in the Soviet Union or Vietnam. “A sick reason and a misused religion thus lead in the end to the same outcome.”[4] In other words, there isn’t much to choose between suicide bombers and Dutch euthanasia fanatics.

“This is why reason too must be admonished to keep its own boundaries and to learn to listen to what the great religious traditions of mankind have to say,” counsels Ratzinger. It is “right reason” we must pursue, not just any reason.

If we want peace in the world, reason and faith must talk to each other. The principal partners in this conversation are Christian faith and Western secular rationality “since these two determine the situation of the world in a way unparalleled by any other cultural forces.”

But these two in turn must “be willing to listen and accept a genuine correlation” with other cultures also.

It is important to include them in the attempt at a polyphonic correlation in which these cultures themselves will be open to learn from the Western complementarity of faith and reason.

This would permit the growth of a universal process of purification in which those essential values and norms that are known or at least guessed at by all men could acquire a new radiance. In this way, that which keeps the world together would once again become an effective force in mankind. [5]

If Western rationalists think this is a tall order, they should realise that it is also very demanding on Christians - not because Christians are unused to reasoning, but because it is easier to rationalise than to live the Christian faith.

As Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict points out, their God is not only reason but love - a love that went all the way to the Cross - and they are supposed to love everyone like that.

Carolyn Moynihan is Deputy Editor of MercatorNet.

Sister brings Dominic’s legacy to life in word and song

■ By Sylvia Defendi

As part of ongoing global celebrations for the 800th anniversary of the Dominican order, Western Australian Sr Margaret Scharf OP will be hosting a series of discussions on her involvement with music, liturgy and the legacy of founder St Dominic.

These days Sr Scharf is a resident of California, and is most commonly known for her contribution to liturgical music, with over 150 songs composed and many of those published in hymnbooks used across the state.

“We are nearing the end of our anniversary celebrations and were wondering who we could bring to WA that could give a unique insight into the Dominican fullness of life,” said zonal coordinator and lay Dominican, June Ross.

A supervisor for a spiritual directors’ program, resident composer and previous principle, Sr Scharf hopes that her audience will gain a sense of passion for the Church through a connection with its origins.

“It is so easy to be in the ‘now,’ to be always focused on the present with no connection with the past and how we got to this point in time,” Sr Scharf said.

Three intriguing lectures will be offered at Our Lady of the Rosary parish hall, on Angelico St in Doubleview.

On October 3, between 7 and 9pm, Sr Scharf will explore the concept of vocation, how it is perceived in society, within the Church and how this notion has changed over time.

The Gospel of St Luke will be the primary focus of Sr Scharf’s second lecture, which will run on October 4 from 9am to 12.30pm.

The last lecture will take place on October 7 at 2pm and will showcase Sr Scharf’s musical talents as she reflects on music and its place within the liturgy.

These lectures will mark the second last anniversary celebration for Western Australian Dominicans and friends, who have joined 32,000 apostolic sisters, 5,000 contemplative nuns and tens of thousands of lay Dominicans in 101 countries in celebration of the order.

Justice centre to conduct information evenings

■ By Sylvia Defendi

A great number of inquiries has prompted the Edmund Rice Centre for Social Justice to introduce the third in a set of quarterly free information nights to be held on September 25.

Hosted at the Fremantle centre, located at 24 High St, the information session “will give people the chance to experience the vision, activities and public enthusiasm the centre thrives on,” said Director of the Edmund Rice Centre for Social Justice, David Freeman.

Issues concerning social justice are being brought to the forefront of society, Mr Freeman said; and “it is for this reason that we are seeing

In brief

a real thirst for a Centre that can garner and focus this interest.”

People attending can expect to enjoy light refreshments, at 5.30pm, as they are greeted by staff of the centre, after which the session will commence with a presentation.

The session will conclude, at 7.30pm, with a questions and answers forum.

“It is a great opportunity to hear about our Immersion Program; to find out what the Centre is all about, especially its aims and direction and to gain an overview of our many and diverse activities,” Mr Freeman commented.

For further information, or to make reservations, email: erc@powerdsl.com.au.

Elderly sisters want same rights as gays in Europe

Two elderly sisters who live together are taking the government of the United Kingdom to the European Court of Human Rights in an attempt to get the same inheritance tax rights as homosexual couples. Joyce and Sybil Burden have lived together since birth. But if one of them dies the other will face a large inheritance tax bill, and have to sell their house to meet the cost. The sisters want the law changed so that cohabiting siblings have the same rights as married couples, which exempt the survivor from inheritance duty.

The sisters, aged 88 and 80, have written to the Chancellor before the Budget every year since 1976 asking for inheritance tax law for siblings to be overhauled. After Britain’s Civil Partnership Act 2004 gave inheritance rights to homosexual couples, they wrote to the European courts without any legal advice and were stunned when it accepted their case - due to be heard September 12.

-

FamilyEdge

Sunday shopping linked with behaviour decline in youth

It’s obvious that opening shops on Sunday has led to more people shopping on Sunday - more than go to church. But the effects on religion of increased competition from the shopping mall are wider still, according to two American economists. Daniel Hungerman, of Notre Dame University, and Jonathan Gruber, of MIT, have taken what may be the first look at the negative impact on churches and young people of the erosion of Sunday retail-closing laws.

In “The Church vs the Mall…” they find that after “blue laws” are repealed by a state: religious attendance drops about 5 per cent; about 15 per cent of weekly churchgoers no longer attend so regularly; drinking rates among religious youths go up, and drug use among that group rises to the same level as among non-religious youths. Key data for these findings come from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, started in 1979.

- FamilyEdge

The feast of St Catherine of Siena, the foundation of the Dominican order in WA, St Domenic’s Feast Day and a visit from Sr Nancy Murray, who is actor Bill Murray’s sister, were among the many celebrations hosted in WA throughout this year.

Dominican celebrations will end on October 8 with a celebration for the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, at the Doubleview parish.

Mass will be celebrated at 10am and will feature music arranged and presented by Sr Scharf. All are invited to attend the event, which will also feature music from Newman College students during morning tea.

For further information please contact the Dominican Sisters on: (08) 9446 7689 or email: domsiswa@globaldial.com.

Praise and worship: Dominican Sister, Margaret Scharf said she was glad to be back in Western Australia, and is eager to begin discussions on the past, present and future of the Church.

mothers who gave birth during 2000-2001 -- known as the Millennium Cohort. It found that cohabiting couples were twice as likely to experience a family breakdown during the early years of parenthood than married couples of a similar income. When the sample was expanded to include all unmarried couples -- including those cohabiting and “closely involved” -- family breakdown is five times more common than among married couples.

The study was commissioned by the Conservative party social justice policy review group, headed by former leader Iain Duncan Smith. He said it showed the government’s “assumption that children’s outcomes are solely dictated by socio-economic factors is wrong. The structure within which they grow up and are nurtured is vital to their wellbeing.” The findings will put pressure on the current Conservative leader, David Cameron, to put marriage at the heart of Tory policies on the family, although some of his advisers fear this would alienate support from unmarried families. - FamilyEdge

HOLY ROSARY SCHOOL,DOUBLEVIEW

Holy Rosary School is a double stream co-educational school with an enrolment of 517 students from Kindergarten to Year 7. The school was founded by the Dominican Sisters in 1959 and has had a Dominican Sister as Principal since then.

Holy Rosary is staffed with energetic and enthusiastic staff and in 2005 the school commenced the RAISe (Raising Achievement in Schools) program. Specialist teachers are employed in Music, Physical Education, Computing and Italian (LOTE). Extension programs are offered in Maths and Language. The school also has a Special Education Centre that supports a significant number of students with disabilities. There is a strong commitment to the Catholic Schools Performing Arts Festival and Tournament of Minds program.

The parish and school enjoy a close, harmonious and effective relationship. There is strong community participation in the activities of the School Board and Parents and Friends’ Association.

A school profile is available on the school website www.holyrosarydblv.wa.edu.au

The successful applicant will be expected to take up the position at the commencement of Term 2, 2007. Applications should be submitted no later than 12 October 2006.

ST CLARE’S SCHOOL,LATHLAIN

St Clare’s is a secondary girls’ school catering for 30 students and was established by the Good Shepherd Sisters in 1956. Today the school is under the joint auspices of the Sisters and the Archdiocese of Perth.

The prime purpose of St Clare’s is to enable girls and young women who have been excluded from, or unable to succeed in mainstream schooling, to advance their literacy and numeracy skills as they progress towards completion of their education.

The school has an active commitment to Reconciliation as reflected in its student enrolment. Each member of the school staff is responsible for creating a structured and supportive environment for the students to work towards their individual educational goals.

Strong emphasis is placed on:

❚ individualised education programs, Curriculum Frameworks and developing literacy and numeracy skills

❚ developing school as a workplace and providing work experience

❚ developing self esteem, assertiveness, social skills, communication skills, personal responsibility and Gospel values

❚ a religious education program that integrates faith, life and culture.

A school profile is available on the school website www.stclares.wa.edu.au

The successful applicant will be expected to take up the position on 1 January 2007. Applications should be submitted no later than 9 October 2006.

Applicants need to be practising Catholics and experienced educators committed to the objectives and ethos of Catholic education. They will have the requisite theological, educational, pastoral and administrative competencies, together with an appropriate four-year minimum tertiary qualification, and will have completed Accreditation to Teach Religious Education or its equivalent.

A current Federal Police Clearance/100 Point Identification Check and a WACOT membership number must also be included.

The official application forms, referee assessment forms and instructions can be accessed on the Catholic Education Office website www.ceo.wa.edu.au

Photo: Sylvia Defendi

letters to the editor

Control is the problem

Behind all the hullabaloo going on in sections of the worldwide Muslim community over their misunderstanding of a few of Pope Benedict’s recent words, there is a psychological and spiritual problem called control. The problem is not confined to Muslims or to people who like to brandish AK47s in preference to rational arguments. It is found all too frequently in our families, where it seriously harms marriages and children, and in our schools, where it causes further harm to children.

It is so serious a problem in the human psyche that Jesus gave us one of the Beatitudes as the pathway to freedom from it. Unfortunately, neither the problem nor the beatitude is widely understood.

Control is a particularly serious problem in that section of the Muslim world that runs from North Africa to Afghanistan because great emphasis is given to the control features of the religion and because the tribal structures emphasise control, revenge and a distorted sense of honour.

In all societies, however, the problem begins in the way children are raised, especially in the years before they reach the age of reason (7) and up to the age when their personality is established internally and they begin the journey outwards (about 11).

In that pre-rational period there are four main energy centres or senses which always arise and which, if dealt with properly by parents and others, can be integrated into the subconscious in a balanced way that leads towards a healthy personality. If they are dealt with badly, they disappear in distorted forms into the subconscious and prevent the natural development of a balanced person. Four of the beatitudes are directly related to these four states.

Logic versus the grenade

Ihave read Pope Benedict’s address in Germany and find nothing to cause uproar among our brother Muslims.

Pope Benedict went further, saying: “God is not pleased by blood – and not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature… Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats.”

Youth alcohol program a shocking eye-opener

Iam writing to you to inform you of a recent program that we Mercedes College Year 10 students were involved in. It was the P.A.R.T.Y Program, (Preventing Alcohol Related Trauma in Youth) and was a big eye-opener for everyone.

Based at the Royal Perth Hospital, the program discussed important issues such as the consequences of alcohol abuse for our youth. Here, we were able to talk to patients, see how patients are treated, find out about rehabilitation and learn a little bit about what put the patients into hospital.

It was a rewarding experience for all involved. Although a bit gruesome and scary at times, it has taught us that abusing alcohol is not a cool thing to do but rather a risky and life-threatening action.

I believe that if more educational programs like this were created, alcohol-related trauma in youth would decline dramatically.

People would learn that alcohol can actually cause death and that it is against God’s will to harm one’s body. Youth would be more responsible for their actions when going out to a party or drinking at home.

Ashleigh Arrowsmith Mercedes College, Victoria Square, Perth

Afew weeks ago I went on the P.A.R.T.Y program at Royal Perth Hospital. It was probably one of the best excursions I have ever been to. The main way they bring across their message in this program is, basically, by shocking us.

PO Box 75, Leederville, WA 6902

Tel: (08) 9227 7080, Fax: (08) 9227 7087 cathrec@iinet.net.au

One of them is the sense of personal power, which children begin to realise they have from about age two onwards. They begin to be aware that they can ‘do’ things, they want to learn how to do what father and mother are doing, they want to try things out on their own, and they want to explore the world, often (particularly boys) roaming far from home in the process. Obviously, many of these attempts to develop their personal power will result in mishaps, accidents, and various forms of consternation for adults.

The development of personal power is crucial to the development of a functioning human being because it is the energy sense that enables people to accept effective responsibility for their working life, their community contributions, and perhaps most importantly for the responsible expression of the procreative power that is inherent in human sexuality. If it is distorted, all those areas of life will be adversely affected.

If adults accept, encourage, praise and do their best to educate this energy and exploration - in whatever forms it expresses itself – the child is likely to develop to his or her potential. If there is consistency and love in the parents’ response to the child’s attempts to develop their personal power, that power is likely to be expressed by the resultant teenager and adult in effective ways.

However, if children suffer excessive control, they will not develop confidence in their ability to be the person they ought to be, and they will grow up to be controllers. Spontaneity repressed in early childhood leads to fear of spontaneity in others. This fear results in an impulse to suppress the spontaneity of others – which in children is called bullying and in adults is called control.

Control is not discipline. Discipline guides the child towards awareness and control of impulses, leading to the ability to exercise true self control. Control is the attempt to suppress a child’s impulses, with the result that he never learns to understand and master them.

The greater the problems buried in the subconscious in the pre-rational stage, the harder the task to disentangle from them. Many problems don’t really surface until marriage and parenthood. Control can be expressed in physical aggression, but also in psychological and social ways.

The best sign for an individual willing to look for it is whether their first impulse towards a small child is to want to suppress or silence them even before becoming aware of what the child is going to say or do. Another is the unspoken belief that we know how to live someone else’s life better than they do. Control shows up in critical expressions that imply that the child is not acceptable in his present state and needs to be changed into something or someone else.

Children must resist control because they are confused by it and, more deeply, because they are created by God in human freedom and must develop themselves, not some other person’s idea of who they should be. The good news is that when controlling adults mend their ways, children recover.

The beatitude Jesus gave us as the way out of the control problem is: “Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth.” Meekness has nothing to do with fear or weakness. It is the strength to accept people as they are.

Jesus told us “I am meek and humble of heart” and demonstrated it over and over with children and adults.

However, the greatest demonstrations came at the beginning of his public life when he refused the temptation to have control of all the kingdoms of the world ….and at the end of his earthly life when he was raised up on the cross so that all men would be drawn to him (not forced to come to him).

We need to grow in this be-attitude to improve individual, family and community life, as well as international relations.

These are general comments that had nothing to do with setting on fire two churches in the West Bank, attacking a church in Tubas with firebombs and, more disgustingly, destroying the interior of a 170-year-old church in the town of Tulkarem - in other words destroying our history. I invite those involved to reread Pope Benedict’s speech, to understand it, then come forward for a dialogue which could lead to reconciliation.

We cannot have dialogue if we lack understanding of the contents of this particular speech delivered by the Pope during his visit to Germany.

Not all terrorists are Muslims and not all Muslims are terrorists. I consider Islam as a good religion because it is a message of peace. Jihad does not mean war and I believe the Islamic word for war is ‘Harb.’ Jihad means to struggle, strive or to work for something with determination.

Our Missionary work is Jihad and this is summarised in Luke 4:18 – 19 when at the beginning of Jesus’ work he says, “The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has appointed me to bring good news to the poor…”

Hence working in a difficult environment with the poor, giving donations for those in need for the sake of God and many more acts of good are the struggles in our day to day life.

Terrorists are hijacking the word Jihad for their own purposes and not those of Allah. Pope Benedict has already expressed deep sorrow about the angry reaction sparked by his speech about Islam and holy war. He has gone further to clarify that these did not express his personal thoughts but were a quotation from a medieval text.

What else does the Muslim community want from him? The protests around the world simply justify this quotation on violence and the refusal to respond to criticism with rational arguments. I won’t support and encourage dialogue with a society where people use threats and violence to intimidate others.

Edward Khaemba, CSSp., Beagle Bay Mission, Broome

First, we watched a slide show full of some very graphic pictures, and then we were taken on a tour through the hospital, including to the Intensive Care Ward, where we saw some people with spinal injuries in deep comas, some of them nearly the same age as us.

During the first half of the day, many people started crying; two or three even fainted. None of us had ever imagined that such a bad consequence could ever come out of ‘just getting in a car when you are drunk.’

I can assure you that after going on the P.A.R.T.Y program nobody who goes on this course will ever drink and drive, or get in a car with someone who was drunk, without having seriously considered the consequences of their actions. But this program was not only shocking. We had a lot of fun, especially when trying to eat our lunch with neck braces on!

Unfortunately, due to lack of government funding, the program will now only be run for one class per school. I think this is such a shame, as the program was so beneficial to us, and will probably reduce the number of young people losing their lives in roads.

Roisin

Mollatt Mercedes College, Victoria Square, Perth

The P.A.R.T.Y program is a voluntarily-run program at Royal Perth Hospital by Ms Kim Oliver a research nurse in the trauma services of the hospital.

It was brought to my attention after attending the program that a large list of schools have been turned down attendance due to lack of government funding. From my personal experience I feel the program was very beneficial to all those young and old who attended to see first hand the consequences of irresponsible behaviour.

Jennifer Mohen Mercedes College, Victoria Square, Perth

The question still stands

OK, I was wrong about dates (Dates confused, The Record September 14 2006) - But there will be other elections. The next one will be in two months’ time, November 2006.

In these elections Senator Kerry, Senator Kennedy and their colleagues in the pro-abortion Democratic Party are likely to get more Catholic votes as a result of the photo opportunity in Washington cathedral three months ago, being singled out to have their hands shaken by the new archbishop of Washington, and to receive Holy Communion from the hands of the Apostolic Nuncio. Who is politicising the Eucharist?

My criticism of the nuncio and the archbishop is not, as Fr Brennan asserts, ‘unfounded’. By publicly extending VIP status to the two Senators, the nuncio and the archbishop did indeed

‘convey to hundreds of politicians and millions of voters the message: Killing unborn people, and legalising that killing, is no big deal’.

Once again I ask Fr Brennan: If the Senators had worked and voted to legalise the killing of some other category of Americans - let’s say, Black Americans, or Native Americans, or Hispanic Americans - would the nuncio and the archbishop have done as they did? And if they had done, would Fr Brennan now be writing letters to The Record in their defence?

Or is Fr Brennan suggesting that legalising the killing of human beings before they are born is somehow not morally equivalent to legalising their killing at a later stage in their lives?

Ted Watt Claremont

Editor: this correspondence is now ended. kaput. finito.

One concert, 75 years of song

■ By Sylvia Defendi

Celebrating 75 years of song, the UWA Choral Society will be performing works by renowned West Australian composers, Ian Grandage, David Tunley and New Norcia’s Benedictine Monk Dom Stephan Moreno on Sunday October 1.

The concert, which will be held at 2.30pm in Winthrop Hall on the UWA campus, will include famous pieces by Mr Gandage as well as sacred liturgical music, such as Cantus Sacri and Missa Septima, composed by Dom Moreno.

A current composer-in-residence with the Youth Orchestra of Australia, internationally renowned Mr Gandage will be present during the concert to accompany the choir through his works.

Also accompanying the choir will be organist Domenic Perissinotto, widely known for his performances at St Patrick’s Basilica.

“Members of the choir have thoroughly enjoyed rehearsing for this concert which will celebrate the oldest choir in Perth by performing works written by WA composers across the choir’s life time,” said Sabbia Tilli, a member of the UWA Choral Society.

Tickets are available through BOCS at the Octagon Theatre, UWA, 6488 2440, or at the door.

Seminary became a mosque, and perhaps more

Mark Cross - no longer the Cross of Christ

■ By Tony Evans

Evidence of the decline of Christianity in Europe, once the cradle of the Faith, can be witnessed almost daily from reports and opinion in the press, on television, and in the many authoritative books recently published. One notes an article in a British paper by a journalist which opens with the statement that the Catholic Church in Britain is facing its greatest challenge since the Reformation.

Over the last thirty years attendances at Mass have slumped by 40 per cent, Baptisms by 50 per cent and Catholic marriages by 50 per cent and so on. The editor of the UK Catholic Herald, writing in the national press, lays much of the blame with the ‘intellectually lazy’ English hierarchy. Influential British journalist, Melanie Phillips, in her recent book Londonistan, argues that the country has turned into a global hub of radical Islamic jihad and that the Church of England specifically (though certainly not exclusively), has “..an instinct for self-immolation ..it abases itself particularly towards those ideologies that are out to destroy it.”

To avoid deep depression it is tempting to listen to the counter argument that all this is unnecessarily alarmist, racially divisive, and

exaggerated for political reasons. This fleeting temptation for me at least, is quickly banished by recent television aerial shots of a police swoop on a Muslim college in the heart of East Sussex which was suspected of harbouring jihadist training courses. Here, in one television image was encapsulated the stark reality of the decline of the Catholic Church in Britain in the face of the rise of Islam.

What was not mentioned in the news reports was that the college at Mark Cross had been, when I knew it, the junior seminary

of the vast and highly populous diocese of Southwark. My school, Mayfield College, was a neighbour of the seminary three or four miles distant. A couple of my school friends transferred to Mark Cross and went on to become priests – one of whom, now retired - I keep in contact with.

The annual cricket and rugby matches between the two colleges were special events; I well remember playing cricket against the novices in those grounds where, in these times, the ‘novice’ terrorists were suspected of

training. The two colleges were designed by the same architect and financed by the same benefactor. The two chapels were especially beautiful, built in the mid-nineteenth century gothic revivalist style.

We proudly thought our chapel was the finest, and later when I re-visited the school in the 1970s it seemed even more of the jewel that it always was, tastefully decorated with wall paintings and statuary, a ‘privileged’ altar, a fine pipe organ and much more which remain forever in my memory.

It was there that I learned to serve Mass and where the Mark Cross priest-professors would sometimes come to join our chaplain on special occasions.

Now, neither college exists as a Catholic institution. Mark Cross is a Muslim school under suspicion, and Mayfield has been sold to a development consortium which plans to convert the main buildings into superior flats. Our chapel, once grade A listed, has been gutted, the furnishings removed and the organ dismantled, and lying in neglected pieces according to an eye-witness.

Only the Muslims know what the Mark Cross chapel has been used for.

This decline of Catholic life in England in the face of the advance of Islam is not some imaginary episode, or an alarmist thesis invented by pessimistic writers like Melanie Phillips or Damian Thompson of the Catholic Herald

It is unarguable and never better illustrated by the tragedy of Mayfield College and Mark Cross in East Sussex. And it has lessons for Australia too.

Old boys reminisce: The author, at right, and his elder brother in front of Mayfield College Chapel before it was gutted and sold to a developer.

Photo: courtesy, Tony Evans

Back in black: The UWA Choral society with Musical Director John Beaverstock will be warming their vocal cords in preparation for the up-coming concert.

it comes to provide a sense of meaning or purpose in one’s life and makes one feel alive and powerful.

In cases where intense hatred persists over a long period of time, it may also come to serve as a means of self-identification. A person may come to define himself in a negative way, by contrasting himself with the one he hates. Those who find themselves in this situation may experience an existential crisis and psychological pain manifested in the form of profound feelings of emptiness, upon letting go of the hatred.

Q: What is it about our postmodern culture that leads people to latch onto hatred for a sense of identity, and how can a person move toward an accurate sense of self devoid of negative attitudes?

Soup

of self-efficacy and competence, and enhanced meaningfulness.

Filling the psychological VOID

The cultivation of Christian charity in the wake of forgiveness can go a long way to improving mental health, says JESSLYN MCMANUS, of the Institute for the Psychological Sciences, who presented her research on forgiveness therapy for the US Society of Catholic Social Scientists at its last national meeting. In this interview with ZENIT, McManus shares her views on working through hatred and resentment in order to build a sense of self rooted in love.

QMany would agree that it is good to forgive one’s enemies, and that forgiveness contributes to mental health. So why is it sometimes difficult to let go of anger or hatred toward those who have hurt us?

McManus: In recent years, forgiveness has come to be seen by many as an effective means to bring about psychological healing to those who are suffering from the effects of an injustice. Anger, whether outwardly expressed or defensively denied, is a reccurring theme in psychotherapy.

Forgiveness therapy models offer an alternative to common methods for dealing with anger and resentment, which rely primarily upon expression and/or the use of medication.

Forgiveness therapy is used in order to help people gradually let go of resentment and hatred, which causes stress and psychological pain.

After working through each of the phases in the “forgiveness model,” the client is able to make a moral response of goodness toward the offender.

However, when anger and hatred come to take on a central role in one’s life, problems may arise even when one has

successfully worked through the forgiveness stages and the dispositions are abandoned. These difficulties, which may become apparent in “post-forgiveness therapy,” need to be addressed with empathy, genuine care and skillful guidance.

Hatred has a powerful attraction which is difficult to resist.

Although forgiveness contributes to mental health, it is sometimes difficult to let go of anger or hatred toward those who have hurt us because of the psychological “benefits” these emotional states provide.

Pain or hurt is usually underlying anger or hatred. Therefore, hatred can be seen as a way

to protect oneself from damage to one’s self-image or concept. However, these “rewards,” which are associated with egocentric gratification, only perpetuate hatred and impede psychological and spiritual health. Hatred can also be used to defend against painful memories and emotions.

As long as one hates, he or she does not have to confront or experience the underlying pain and suffering caused by the offender. It also keeps one from recognizing that one’s self is flawed and that others have positive attributes.

In addition, hatred may become so pronounced that

The Pope, the emperor and the scholar

Continued from Page 1

The Regensburg speech (which was also reported in last week’s Record) was, by contrast, aimed at a far more academic audience, in particular the teaching staff of the University of Regensburg.

In a way, this speech was an even more complete and hard-hitting argument for combating the secular values of today’s West.

The speech, veiled in the Pope’s own gentle language, targeted two groups in particular for getting it wrong about the nature of the Christian religion: non-believing scientists, and liberal Christian theologians.

McManus: In its forms of deconstruction as well as its rejection of universal truths, postmodern culture produces a society in which “knowing oneself” proves to be a difficult task.

The absence of tradition and shared meaning and values characteristic of postmodern society has resulted in a fragile, empty sense of self. This condition leads people to turn to such things as consumerism to fill the vacant self.

This lack of rootedness, combined with a fragmented sense of reality, makes it difficult for one to establish a firm sense of where one came from and who one is today.

This sets up a context in which self-identification through hatred will flourish.

A person can move toward an accurate sense of self devoid of negative attitudes by fulfilling their vocation as relational beings, who are made for love.

Q: What is the next step, after letting go of anger and hatred? What is the significance of “filling the void”?

McManus: As was previously stated, successful removal of the hatred may produce an existential void and the loss of sense of self.

The hatred must be replaced with something engendering self-worth, namely, altruism - that is, living a life of true Christian charity.

The next step after letting go of anger and hatred, therefore, is to redefine oneself as a person who loves rather than one who hates, through acts of self-giving. The significance of “filling the void” is to provide the person with newfound meaning in their lives and a source of identity through love.

Both altruism and Christian love involve self-giving, moving away from the self and toward others. This love was perfectly exemplified in Christ Jesus.

Many studies have shown that altruistic emotions and behaviors are associated with psychological health and well-being.

Some of the factors which have been found to help bring about these psychological benefits are enhanced social integration, distraction from the agent’s own problems, increased perception

Q: On what level could secular psychology adopt this theory, and how does our Catholic faith imbue it with a deeper dimension?

McManus: This theory may be formalised in a clinical program in which self-giving love is actualised in overt altruistic acts. This therapeutic program may be implemented once the forgiveness process is under way.

The program would resemble the following:

The client would be encouraged to choose a person whom the client feels is having a difficult time and is in need of care, and to do specific acts of kindness for him or her. This may consist of running an errand, cooking a meal or simply calling the individual often to see how they are doing.

In addition, the client will be asked to choose a secondary group or organisation to which he can offer his time. For example, the person may choose to volunteer at a soup kitchen, visit the elderly in a nursing home, or work with disabled children.

They will keep a journal in order to track their progress in their altruistic activities. They will record what each act was and for whom each was done.

They should also include the feelings they experience and any feedback they receive.

While these acts may not be altruistic in the true sense of the word in the beginning - since they are done as part of a therapeutic program - they will lead the client to understand the merit of living selflessly. This will, in turn, lead the person to do truly altruistic acts on his or her own initiative as time goes on.

Theologically, the idea that people are fulfilled in and through community with others is based on the idea that we are created in the image and likeness of a triune God whose very being is self-giving love.

Therefore, this type of program would not only be effective in that it would bring about psychological benefits for the client. It also would enable people to fulfill their vocation as persons made for self-giving and relationships with others.

Furthermore, in helping others to cultivate the virtue of charity, the therapist plays a role in bringing about the Kingdom of God on earth.

-

Zenit

It also encouraged the faithful in general, and theologians in particular, to get on to the front foot more and argue the case for the relevance of the whole Christian message: not just as a cultural reality but as a living system of philosophy and love which can transform the world in positive ways.

Entirely at home with an academic audience - the Pope was himself formerly a professor at the same university, which boasts not one but two faculties of theology - Benedict began with the kind of joke that would be appreciated by academic theologians and academic atheists alike.

He reported that a colleague had once said there was something odd about Regensburg university: “it had two faculties devoted to something that did not exist: God.”

The Pope said that even in the face of radical scepticism such as this, it is still necessary to raise the question of God through the use of reason, and to do so “in the context of the tradition of the Christian faith.”

This, then - the relationship between reason and faith - was to be his theme for the duration of the speech.

It was a remarkable speech in itself, but it was soon to become even more remarkable, for entirely different reasons. It was remarkable to begin with because of what it had to say about the relationship between religious belief and reason. It became even more remarkable

Outrage: Pakistani Muslims chant slogans to condemn Pope Benedict XVI for making what they regard as derogatory comments about Islam during a rally in Multan, Pakistan, on September 15. Photo: CNS/Mian Khursheed/Reuters

strations, such as burning effigies of the Pope, and called for violent attacks against Christians, and even for the Pope’s assassination. The violent, or rather pseudo-violent reaction to the speech (for this form of violence is entirely artificial, being both media-generated and mediafocused) has entirely overshadowed the Pope’s actual words. And they were remarkable words, words which may yet provoke a new direction for discussion about religion within Western culture.

For make no mistake, this speech by the Pope was aimed squarely at Western culture, not at the Muslim world. If the Islamic reaction draws more attention to the speech within the West, so much the better. The central issue in the speech is the relationship between faith and reason. This is a theme which is increasingly being addressed by a wide range of writers including Professor Rodney Stark in the

the application of reason to practical problem-solving. Christian theology far surpassed both classical learning and Islamic scholarship in its practical effects, leading to a new culture of innovation which has effectively transformed the lifeprospects of humanity, for the better, and has given rise to modernity as we know and experience it. Faith, then, or at least Christian faith, has not only been essential to the organisation of the Church, but to the entire success of Western civilisation. Central to this success has been the role of reason encouraged, and nurtured by Christianity.

Benedict’s speech does not address Rodney Stark’s line of argument, but deals with the question of the precise relationship between Christian faith and reason. Christian faith is different from Muslim teaching, which regards God as “absolutely transcendant,” the Pope suggests. The Pope argues that according to

Muslim commentator attacks Benedict’s critics

■ By Paul Gray

An influential Australian Muslim writer has defended the right of Pope Benedict to express his theological opinions, and criticised fellow-Muslims for responding violently to the Pope’s words during the controversial Regensburg address, in which the Pope quoted 14th century Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus.

Waleed Aly, a regular newspaper commentator and director of the Islamic Council of Victoria, said the Pope’s address was an academic address and “had nothing to do with affronting Muslims.”

In a column in Melbourne’s The Age newspaper, Aly reacted caustically to the threats of violence against the Pope made by some of his fellow Muslims.

“Some Muslims clearly interpret Benedict to be quoting

when a single paragraph from it, containing a quotation from a 13th century emperor, was picked up by international news services and misreported as being an insult to Muslims.

From there a rather typical mediagenerated controversy developed: violence-minded Islamic leaders in several countries utilised the opportunity to encourage people to engage in media-friendly demon-

Manuel with approval, and take offence at the suggestion that Islam is inherently violent,” Aly wrote.

“The response is to bomb five churches in the West Bank, and attack the door of another in Basra. In India, angry mobs burn effigies of Pope Benedict.

“In Somalia, Sheikh Abu Bakr Hassan Malin urges Muslims to ‘hunt down’ the Pope and kill him, while an armed Iraqi group threatens to carry out attacks against Rome and the Vatican.”

“There,” Aly commented sarcastically. “That’ll show them for calling us violent.”

Mr Aly said some elements in the Muslim world are looking avidly for something to offend them. “At some point, the Muslim world has to gain control of itself. Presently, its most vocal elements are so disastrously eactionary, and therefore so easily manipulable.”

United States. His book Victory of Reason published late last year, is a scholarly reinterpretation of the history of reason and its effects on the rise of the West. Stark, in a line of argument of which the Pope would no doubt approve, suggests that Christian theology bequeathed to the West a habit of mind which had never been successfully created by any other culture or faith in world history, that habit being

Islam, God’s will is “not bound up with any of our categories, even rationality.” God “is not bound even by his own word,” the Pope quotes a Muslim as saying. “Were it God’s will, we would even have to practise idolatry.”

The central point in the (subsequently) controversial quotation which the Pope made in this speech is that violence and reason are opposed to each other.

of dehellenisation, some Christians are arguing that the Greek influence on the early Church was merely “a preliminary inculturation which ought not to be binding on other cultures,” the Pope says.

Other cultures can therefore return to the simple message of the New Testament, rejecting the Greek influence and “inculturating” it anew in their own particular milieux and circumstances.

On this last idea, the Pope comments: “This thesis is not only false: it is coarse and lacking in precision.

The New Testament was written in Greek and bears the imprint of the Greek spirit, which had already come to maturity as the Old Testament developed.” Benedict then says that “the fundamental decisions made about the relationship between faith and the use of human reason are part of the faith itself; they are developments consonant with the nature of faith itself.”

“To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death:” this is the final line of the quotation from Emperor Manuel II Paleologus which has caused all the trouble.

Benedict sums up the importance of this line by claiming: “The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature.” From here, the Pope goes on to explore the relationship between Greek philosophy and Revelation from God in the Bible, arguing that reason itself, embodied in the Second person of the Blessed Trinity (logos, the Word) is inherent to Christian faith.

The most important section in the Pope’s speech - and in its own way, more substantially controversial even than the quotations from the Byzantine emperor, though this point was missed entirely by the media - is the section dealing with attempts that have been made through history to divorce this “Greek” element from Christian faith itself: what the Pope calls “the program of dehellenization.”

Though the Pope expresses himself politely in this section, as he evidently always does, there is nevertheless a very hard edge to what he is saying here. The point can be summed up thus: Christian thinking itself has gone completely off the rails, many times throughout history, by failing to recognise the essential role of reason within its own tradition.

The Pope lists three stages in Christianity’s own attempt at dehellenising (de-Greeking) itself. The first stage is the Reformation of the 16th century. The second stage is the liberal theology of the 19th and 20th centuries.

The third stage, which is currently in progress, is that of “cultural pluralism.” Briefly, during each of these stages, Christian thinkers and theologians have attempted to dismiss the influence of Greek philosophy on Christianity, mistakenly believing that influence to be a distortion of the essential message of Jesus. In relation to the last and current stage

If the Pope’s quotation about Islam were really a swipe at Muslims, the section on dehellenisation of Christianity is an even stronger swipe at both Protestantism, with its emphasis on “Scripture alone,” and at modern liberal theology with its many slogans about the need for “inculturation,” and “cultural relevance.”

Of course, the Pope was not attempting to swipe at, or insult anybody during his Regensburg speech. Its clear purpose is to construct an argument about the essential relationship between faith and reason, and to point to the fact that theology has a vital role to play in today’s world.

Science has not killed theology, the Pope emphasises. Rather, modern scientific reason accepts the rational structure of matter, and it also accepts the correspondence between the human spirit and that rational structure, as given facts. Yet the question “why this has to be so” is a real question that can only be answered by philosophy and theology.

Continuing his Greek theme, the Pope ends his speech with another quote from the famous philosopher Socrates. Socrates had said that after hearing many people expressing false philosophical opinions, it is tempting to give up philosophy altogether. But in doing this, said Socrates, “he would be deprived of the truth of existence and would suffer a great loss.”

Pope Benedict comments: “The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby.”

The Pope says the courage to engage the whole breadth of reason is “the program with which a theology grounded in Biblical faith enters into the debates of our times.”

Reflecting on the Pope’s speech - as distinct from the controversy which the media and some opportunistic Muslim leaders have generated, in relation to the speech - it is tempting to say that Benedict has put forward a revolutionary new argument for the world to consider.

This is the argument that we cannot properly understand the Christian faith unless we understand that it is more than just a faith.

In fact, it is nothing less than a marriage, or a fusion perhaps, between faith and reason, or between Revelation and reason. These are not the Pope’s actual words, but this is the direction he is leading us.

- Stories by Paul Gray

Give a little: Christian charity ought to be cultivated writes Jesslyn McManus.

Helping hand: Youth should be encouraged to volunteer their time.

anyone?: A little charity goes a long way. Volunteers often speak of the personal benifits of aiding those who are less fortunate.

Opinion

life, the universe and everything

A mother’s prayers can be darn strong

■ With Anna Krohn

You may never have heard of her, since her orbit was typically Trans-Atlantic and urban Italian. But on September 25, one of the most ascerbic, articulate and belligerent journalists of recent times was overtaken, all too humanly by breast cancer.

Even at 77, Oriana Falluci was a seething, Vogue-Paris elegant and literate mass of contradictions. She called herself “a Christian atheist”, a “freedom fighter” and a feminist. Others called her, sometimes justifiably, racist, intolerant and simply offensive. In many ways her life embodied all the angry sadness and poignancy of those who have fought for a cause and have seen all causes swallowed up in the complacency of post-modernism. She was an antifascist resistance fighter during the war and fearless war correspondent in the most dangerous war zones of the 60s and 70s. She defended

i say, i say

freedom of speech only to be shot by Mexican student activists.

Falluci was a secular feminist who turned her gimlet gaze onto the problems of abortion. At a time when it was unmentionable, she penned a narrative dialogue from troubled mother and her unborn and endangered child – called “Letter To a Child Never Born”. It is not clear if her thoughts are autobiographical- but later in life she was clearly opposed to the burgeoning reproductive technology industries and abortion itself.

She railed against violence but often verbally disemboweled her subjects and whole races of people.

Fallucci notoriously called Henry

Kissinger “Nixon’s mental wet nurse” during the Vietnam war. She succeeded in 1979 to both outrage and bring to laughter the Ayatollah Khomeni. She refused to be called a daughter of the political “right” or “left”, but was called the “Agitator” by both sides. She called growing populations of Moslem immigrants to Europe “invaders” who used “boats and children” instead of weapons. But her books are translated and passed around among women living in strict Moslem countries.

A strictly private woman with an almost brutal detachment to her work, she had an affair with one of her high profile subjects who later

died in a tragic accident. She had only one sister and no children or family to survive her.

She was an icon of secular humanism, who openly praised Pope Benedict XVI for his intellect and for his provocative charge that Europe “hated itself.” Before she died she gained a controversial private audience with him.

After she died, she was buried in the great city of her birth, Florence, in a multi-religious cemetery- while the bells of the Church where her anarchist mother prayed and went to Mass could be heard in the background.

Mother’s prayers are very powerful.

On loan from our Heavenly Father

■ With Mark Reidy

Ukrainian girl, Oxana Malaya was three years old when her alcoholic parents forgot about her and she was forced to

Ihave been hinting at new possibilities for the Church to be presented throughout these articles, and it is during the course of writing that I have become increasingly aware that there are two unavoidable challenges.

The first is the risk of paying attention and worrying endlessly about a continual slide towards less – less people participating in

find refuge in a hovel that housed the family dogs. When she was discovered five years later, in 1991, she was running around on all fours, barking.

I thought of Oxana as I held my daughter, Ana, several weeks ago, moments after she entered the world. Because Ana was delivered by caesarean section, Elena had to wait in the Recovery room and I was blessed with the opportunity to hold her for her first hour and marvel at the miracle of new life. It was a moment that none can surpass.

However the initial feelings of joy and wonderment were soon accompanied by instincts of protection and responsibility.

As I heard her feeble cries and watched her open her eyes for the

first time, I became overwhelmed with her sense of helplessness. Here, cocooned in my arms, was the most vulnerable of God’s creations. No other species is as dependent on their caregivers for such a long period of time, as humans. It made me think of Oxana.

When God breathes His life at the moment of every conception, He wraps His beloved gift in a mother’s womb. His plan is that we, as parents, spiritually and physically nurture our children to the point of independence, where they are capable of freely choosing their own relationship with Him and hopefully seeking to fulfil His purpose for their lives.

As I held this tiny gift in my hands I began to comprehend the

will be pushed over the edge into oblivion.

parish activities and those participating showing signs of aging, less income and less support for charitable organisations, less enthusiasm displayed, particularly in reference to the present generation’s plurality of belonging and, lastly, less vocations entering religious life or beginning priestly training. Some may even fear the time when the whole “Catholic system”

The second obstacle lies in the acceptance of the unconsolidated “new system” in such a way as to disregard the heritage of the past. Transitions have always been trying periods. It would be rather irresponsible to exclusively allocate resources, which have been inherited from efforts sustained in the past, to a new vision of Church which is still in the making.

Catholic authors continually return to the celebration of the Eucharist and the idea of a

‘Significant adults’

A sinister cocktail of junk food, marketing, over-competitive schooling and electronic entertainment is poisoning childhood, says a group of British experts in a letter to The Daily Telegraph. The letter is signed by 110 teachers, psychologists, children’s authors and other experts who call on the government to act to prevent the death of childhood. They express deep concern “at the escalating incidence of childhood depression” and say children’s developing brains cannot cope with “ever more rapid technological and cultural change”.

“They still need what developing human beings have always needed, including real food (as opposed to processed ‘junk’), real play (as opposed to sedentary, screenbased entertainment), first-hand experience of the world they live in and regular interaction with the real-life significant adults in their lives.”

The group complains that the primary school curriculum is test-driven, and that children are “pushed by market forces to act and dress like mini-adults and exposed via the electronic media to material which would have been considered unsuitable for children even in the very recent past.”

- FamilyEdge

Empty desks

In 23 out of 30 OECD countries there will be fewer children in schools over the next decade, says the organisation’s latest report on education. In Korea, the population aged 5 to 14 will decline by as much as 29 per cent.

In the Czech Republic, Poland the Slovak Republic, the population aged 15 to 19 will fall by at least 30 per cent. Meanwhile the demand for tertiary education will fall in Spain as the population aged 20 to 29 will fall by 34 per cent.

- FamilyEdge

relationship that I, as an earthly father, had with my heavenly Father. I began to understand my role as a surrogate caregiver. Ana was not mine, but was God’s precious and unique child who had been temporarily entrusted to me. God’s plan was that one day she would return to His loving embrace and that throughout her life on earth He would intimately experience her every moment, whether joyous or sad.

As much as I would love and cherish Ana, I knew that God would do so infinitely more.

My thoughts drifted back to Oxana and I tried to comprehend what God must have felt as she lay alone, curled up between dogs, trying to find warmth and love. It made

Eucharistic community, imbued with a strong link with the living God. This is exercised by means of the so-called Lectio Divina, or an in-depth reading of our religious and cultural heritage. As we have seen, the word of God is always standing alongside human events. A clear grasp of the Revelation of God and Tradition of the Church will inevitably impact on human realities. A return to the essentials of the Christian faith does not in any way suggest the notion of less, but rather indicates more of an under-

me think of the countless other children whose lives had taken a path that God never intended.

I looked at Ana as she awkwardly stretched her delicate limbs and squinted uncomfortably at her new surroundings.

Would I ever abandon her, in any way, and force her to seek shelter outside the loving arms that God intended? Would I ever be seduced by the ways of the world and compromise my primary responsibility as God’s ambassador? I knew that only time would answer those questions.

My hope is that one day, when Ana sees or hears of a child like Oxana, she will truly understand the words of Saint Philip Neri, “There, but by the grace of God, go I.”

standing of the Church, by both believers and non-believers, as well as a move towards the essential nucleus of Christianity. It does not insinuate views of imminent catastrophe; rather, it alerts believers to the perennial youthfulness of the Church of Jesus Christ. History has so far been consistent in upholding the view that whenever the Church has been “pinned up against the wall,” either because of internal squabbles or external persecutions, it has always been able to persevere – guided by an invisible hand.

Tony Paganoni, Scalabrinian

The World FEATURE

There is hope in adult stem-cells

Pope endorses adult stem-cell research

■ By Carol Glatz

Pope Benedict XVI endorsed stem-cell research and therapy utilising stem cells harvested from adults and umbilical-cord blood.

He also called for researchers and doctors to work more closely together in applying the latest research.

“The possibilities opened up by this new chapter in research are in themselves fascinating” because adult stem-cell studies have pointed to actual and potential cures of degenerative diseases that would otherwise lead to disabilities or death, the Pope said at an audience for participants attending a Vatican-sponsored congress on stem-cell therapy.

“How can I not feel compelled to praise those who dedicate themselves to this research and those who support it and its costs,” the Pope said on September 16 to about 260 congress participants at the papal summer residence in Castel Gandolfo, outside Rome.

Scientists, doctors, scholars and bioethicists met in Rome on September 14-16 for an international conference sponsored by the Pontifical Academy for Life and the World Federation of Catholic Medical Associations. The congress addressed the scientific possibilities and ethical implications in the use

of stem cells. The Pope challenged the “frequent and unjust accusations of callousness” aimed against the Church for its unwavering stance against the use of embryonic stem cells. The Church has always been dedicated to curing diseases and helping humanity, he said.

“deserves endorsement and encouragement when it happily merges scientific knowledge, the most advanced technology, and ethics that respect the human being at every stage of life,” Pope Benedict said.

The Pope also asked research

Researchers have cultivated 20 different human tissues using blood from umbilical cords. Stem cells from bone marrow can make bone and cartilage as well as help regenerate blood vessels and revive damaged tissue.

The resistance the Church shows toward embryonic stem-cell research is because the destruction of human embryos to harvest stem cells is “not only devoid of the light of God but is also devoid of humanity” and “does not truly serve humanity,” the Pope said.

No matter how promising the goals of such research may be, he added, the ends can never justify means that are “intrinsically illicit.”

“There can be no compromise and no beating around the bush” when it comes to the direct destruction of human life - even when it is just a freshly conceived embryo, he said.

True progress entails the growth of the person which means boosting humanity’s technical powers and strengthening its “moral capacity,” he said.

Research using adult stem cells

centres which look to the Church for “inspiration” to increase research in non-embryonic stem-cell studies and to strengthen ties with healthcare providers in proposing new therapies.

During the congress, one researcher said that, while there are more than 70 different therapies that utilise adult stem cells, no cures have yet materialised using embryonic stem cells.

Umbilical-cord blood offers a complete cure for children with severe combined immunodeficiency, and it has shown positive results in brain reconstruction for some children starved of oxygen at birth, said Colin McGuckin, professor of regenerative medicine at the British University of Newcastle upon Tyne.

Researchers have cultivated 20 different human tissues using blood from umbilical cords. Stem cells

from bone marrow can make bone and cartilage as well as help regenerate blood vessels and revive damaged tissue, he said.

But despite the numerous success stories using adult stem cells, embryonic stem cells are still getting the bulk of the publicity and funding, said a number of participants.

According to Maureen Condic, an assistant professor of neurobiology and anatomy at the University of Utah, there is a legitimate fascination in finding out how a single cell develops into a complex, functioning human.

Embryonic-cell study “represents a profound and meaningful question for science and biology” she told Catholic News Service on September 15.

But money is also at the root of interest in embryonic stem-cell research, she said. Many who advocate for it “have a clear financial interest” in securing government funding, or “they hold patents or they’re stockholders in companies” that would generate a lot of money.

Scientists also have had to learn to spin their research when trying to secure grants and when they speak to the press, Condic said.

Scientists involved in adult stemcell research are not getting their fair share of the limelight, she said, because they are in a field that is very large and diverse, but the “very small handful” of people actually working with embryonic stem cells “can get together and create a story that’s much more unified and compelling.”

Many adult stem-cell researchers

are too busy helping patients and cannot spend the time or money advocating their work, she said.

McGuckin agreed, saying he hardly ever goes to international meetings to promote his work because of the huge costs involved in travel. He said he was paying out of pocket for all his food and a portion of his travel expenses to attend the Vatican congress.

Getting government funding in the United Kingdom is difficult for nonembryonic studies because “almost everyone” on the panel that decides which projects get money “is an embryonic scientist,” he told CNS.

Richard Doerflinger, interim director of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities, said in his address that drumming up “fairy tales” is more widespread in the embryonic stem-cell field because researchers need to overcome moral objections to destroying life.

He cited cases in which researchers misrepresented their work in major publications ranging from the human-cloning hoax in South Korea to the debunked claim by Dr Robert Lanza, a US researcher, that stem-cell lines were harvested without harming human embryos.

But as those claims have failed to materialise, he said, “researchers have felt obliged to exaggerate and deceive more and more to maintain public trust and financial investments in their efforts.”

Science needs to be absolutely committed to the objective truth, he said.

Maureen Pratt is pictured in her home office in Santa Monica, California, where she worked on her inspirational book, “Peace in the Storm: Meditations on Chronic Pain and Illness.” Diagnosed with the autoimmune disease lupus, she said the spiritual support from family and friends helped her get through the turmoil of a chronic illness.

PHOTO: CNS

The World

Brain death issue resuscitated

Vatican resuscitates issue of whether brain death means total death

■ By Carol Glatz

After years of study and debate, the question of whether an individual declared brain-dead is really dead has been resuscitated once again.

The Pontifical Academy of Sciences, along with the vast majority of the scientific community, has repeatedly upheld that brain death is “the true criterion for death, given that the complete cessation of cardio-respiratory functions leads very quickly to brain death,” said Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, the academy’s chancellor, in a 2005 written statement.

Just months before his death in April 2005, Pope John Paul II had asked the academy to restudy the signs of death and get scientific verification that those signs were still valid.

Pope John Paul, in a 2000 speech to an international congress on transplantation, had agreed with the consensus of the scientific community that “the complete and irreversible cessation of all brain activity (in the cerebrum, cerebellum and brain stem) if rigorously applied, does not seem to conflict with the essential elements of anthropology.”

But the arguments of some that complete cessation of brain activity

does not mean death were apparently enough to persuade Pope John Paul to reopen the debate five years later.

And Pope Benedict XVI has asked that the debate be revived.

The question is crucial since brain-dead people may be suitable organ donors. If a brain-dead person weren’t really dead, then removal of vital organs for transplant would be synonymous to homicide.

Specifically, Pope Benedict asked the Vatican academy to gather top-notch neurologists and other experts together to present statistics on cases of brain death. The Pope

wanted to know if the growing science of transplantation had influenced the ascertainment of brain death. He also asked to see how the criteria determining brain death were applied.

The Vatican academy invited some 20 neurology experts from all over the world to take part in a September 11-12 working group on “The Signs of Death” to go over the latest evidence. The closeddoor meeting brought doctors and researchers renowned for their work on brain damage resulting in coma, persistent vegetative states and brain death.

Bishop Sanchez told Catholic News Service on September 14 that while accurately diagnosing a patient’s level or degree of coma can prove to be tricky, determining whether a person’s brain is dead “is a very simple thing.”

“There are gradual differences in the extent of loss of consciousness,” he said, citing some states such as being awake, asleep, having amnesia, being in a coma, deep coma or permanent vegetative state.

“These are all forms of consciousness of a living brain that has different degrees of cerebral activity,” he said. Pinpointing the level

of consciousness a patient is at can sometimes generate much doubt and debate, he added.

In September scientists in the United Kingdom were astounded to find that brain scans of a woman in a vegetative state suggested awareness. Earlier this year, news reports documented cases in South Africa where a common sleeping pill temporarily revived people thought locked in a permanent vegetative state. Cerebral death, or brain death, however, is not so ambiguous and it is certainly irreversible, Bishop Sanchez said. “Cerebral death is not a different degree (of unconsciousness). Cerebral death is brain loss; it’s like not having a brain anymore,” he said, adding that one participant noted it was even akin to decapitation.

The use of ventilators or life-support systems that keep the heart pumping and oxygen circulating just delays the inevitable decomposition of a body that is only alive artificially, he said. Life-support systems in these cases keep vital organs such as the heart, lungs and liver, viable for transplantation, he said.

But for some, the determination that brain death means death is still contested. Dr Alan Shewmon of Los Angeles, a participant at the Vatican seminar, said he doesn’t consider total brain destruction a criterion of death. Brain death alone “results in a terminally ill, deeply comatose person, not a dead person,” said the vice chair of neurology at the University of California. CNS

Action and prayers needed for Sudan Pope meets old neighbours

Pope meets with crowd, neighbours as he visits home in Pentling

Barriers holding back crowds of well-wishers in front of Pope Benedict XVI’s Pentling home opened upon orders given from inside the Pope’s house.

Suddenly, everyone was allowed on the street just outside the pope’s house, and only minutes later Pope Benedict emerged, thanking the crowd for coming and waiting for him on September 13.

“May God bless you all,” he said, adding the Bavarian phrase “Vergelt’s Gott,” which means “May God repay you for your kindness.”

“I want to thank you for your good neighbourhood spirit; in our thoughts we will always remain connected,” he said.

Then he walked out among the crowd, separated from the people only by a thin plastic band.

A police officer told Catholic News Service, “In Pentling, nobody is going to harm him.

“We do what he asks us to do, and this is what was being asked for, that his people could get really close to him,” said the police officer.

Pope Benedict also met privately with his immediate neighbours.

Farsad Samitt, a pharmacist, and his wife, Anita Penzenstadler, have been living next door to Pope

Benedict’s house for 16 years. Penzenstadler said Pope Benedict took a lot of time to speak with them and asked about their baby.

“Our daughter, Sara, is now 11 months old, and he wanted to meet her. He was ever so happy when I showed her to him, congratulated us on our wonderful child and blessed her,” she told CNS.

“Then he took my hands into his and just looked at me intently,” she said. “It was as though he did not look at me, he looked right through me and into my heart. ... He has really blessed me, and the faith that went forth from his kind eyes was enormous.”

Another neighbour, Therese Hofbauer, said when the Pope walked into his garden he profusely thanked her and her husband, Rupert, for how well they kept it.

The Hofbauers gave the Pope honey from bees that live in his garden. “The fountain was decorated with sunflowers, and at the side stood the jars with honey from his own bees and from his own garden,” said Therese Hofbauer. “He saw that little surprise gift we had prepared for him and was so happy about it. When he left, he took it with him.” She said when she spoke with Pope Benedict she asked him to pray for a friend who was there on a stretcher; when she told the Pope how sick her friend was, “he immediately went up to her, and he blessed her.”

Church leaders join pleas for action to save Darfur population

■ By Catholic News Service

As people around the world joined peace rallies, concerts, prayer vigils and even a “yogathon” to press for action to bring peace to Darfur in Sudan, the head of the US bishops’ international policy committee and others pleaded for more efforts to “end the killings, rape and wanton destruction.”

Events in dozens of cities drew tens of thousands of people on or around September 17, which was designated by peace groups as Global Day for Darfur.

Bishop Thomas G. Wenski of Orlando, Florida, the committee head, said despite hopeful signs of a peace agreement in the spring conflict has been mounting among rebel groups, the Sudanese military and its proxy militias, known as the Janjaweed. The offensive “has trapped innocent and defenceless civilians in the middle of the fighting,” Bishop Wenski wrote in a statement released on September 15 in Washington.

And with the deteriorating situation, it has become “a deadly challenge” to deliver humanitarian

aid to the 2.5 million people who have fled their homes and another million who are at risk of starvation, he said. A dozen aid workers have been killed since June.

He warned that the cycle of vio-

The offensive “has trapped innocent and defenceless civilians in the middle of the fighting,” Bishop Wenski wrote in a statement.

lence in Darfur threatens to spiral completely out of control. “With more people being displaced, an already alarming state of insecurity that has hampered efforts to deliver humanitarian aid may degenerate completely,” he said.

Bishop Wenski said the US bishops support a resolution authorising the United Nations to take over an inadequately equipped and understaffed peacekeeping effort by the African Union, and the appointment of a special envoy to focus diplomatic attention on a lasting solution.

In New York, Franciscan Father Michael Perry, consultant on Africa for Franciscans International, urged people to call members of Congress, write letters to the White House, pray and to educate others about the situation

in Darfur. In a letter to Franciscan friars and “partners in ministry,” Father Perry explained that more than 400,000 people have died in Darfur and another 300,000 face the immediate prospects of hunger and starvation. “Darfur is the size of France and has a population of over 6 million,” he wrote. The war began in 2002 as a local revolt by farmers and others against the government’s abuse of rights and its failure to provide protection from marauding raiders. Although the government and the main rebel group signed a peace agreement in May, neither side has respected it, Father Perry said.

In recent months the government has progressively blocked international aid agencies from delivering food and medical supplies to civilians who have been forcibly displaced by helicopter gunships, bomber planes and military forces. Rebel groups also have committed atrocities and not respected cease-fire agreements, he said.

At one of the September 1617 weekend’s many Darfur events, Cardinal Cormac MurphyO’Connor of Westminster, president of the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, said at a London rally that the situation in Darfur is “catastrophic in terms of the violence, the murders, the displacement of people.” CNS

A portrait of Terri Schindler Schiavo stands surrounded by roses to honour her.

PHOTO: CNS

The World

Amnesty urged to stay neutral

Amnesty International urged not to abandon neutrality on abortion

Amnesty International would risk “its own well-deserved moral credibility” if it were to abandon its neutral stance on abortion, the president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops said in a letter to the secretarygeneral of the international human rights organisation.

“To abandon this long-held position would be a tragic mistake, dividing human rights advocates and diverting Amnesty International from its central and urgent mission of defending human rights as outlined in the UN Declaration of Human Rights,” Bishop William S. Skylstad of Spokane, Washington, said in a letter on September 12 to Irene Khan, who is based at the organisation’s London headquarters. Amnesty International members have been debating the abortion issue at country meetings since 2005, when the International Executive Committee was asked to set policy by the end of 2006 on the questions of “decriminalisation of abortion, access to quality services for the management of complications arising from abortion and legal, safe and accessible abortion in cases of rape, sexual assault, incest and risk to the woman’s life.”

A decision is expected at the next International Council Meeting in August 2007 in Mexico on whether to define abortion as a “human right” and to declare that a woman’s

“right to physical and mental integrity includes her right to terminate her pregnancy.”

Noting that Amnesty International was founded by a Catholic layman, Peter Benenson, Bishop Skylstad said the organisation “has been a beacon of hope to thousands of prisoners of conscience, of abuse and torture and a source of inspiration to millions of supporters, including many Catholics who are Amnesty members.”

“Much more urgent work remains, work which we believe will be harmed by this unprecedented and unnecessary involvement in the

abortion debate,” the bishop added.

The USCCB and Amnesty International have worked together on a number of matters - most recently on campaigns against the use of the death penalty in the United States and against the use of torture, Bishop Skylstad said.

“Please do not dilute or divert (Amnesty’s) mission by adopting a position that many see as fundamentally incompatible with a full commitment to human rights and that will deeply divide those working to defend human rights,” he told Khan.

Copies of the letter also went to four officials of Amnesty

International USA - Rick Halperin, chairman of the board of directors; Larry Cox, executive director; Curt Goering, senior deputy executive director for policy and programs; and Julie Hertzog, deputy executive director for operations.

Bishop Skylstad noted that abortion is not considered a human right under international law and that both the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the U.N. Declaration on Human Cloning “uphold the principle of the dignity of the unborn child and the need for special protection of the unborn in the context of a concern for advancing human rights.” CNS

Homeless

The increasing number of homeless Polish migrants sleeping on Britain’s streets have prompted a Catholic bishop to urge parishes to do all that they can to help the destitute.

An estimated 3,000 of the 600,000 Poles who have arrived in Britain to look for work since their country was admitted to the European Union in May 2004 are believed to be homeless.

Another 45,000 are living in poverty or squalor while a further 100,000 are “in difficulty,” according to the Barka Foundation, a Polish charity that has opened a London office to help Poles either return home or find work and housing in Britain.

In a statement on September 12, Bishop Patrick O’Donoghue of Lancaster, England, called on Catholics to be generous toward such migrants.

“I ask parishes to allow the use of halls so that migrants can meet with one another, deepen fellowship and find a place that they can call home,” said the bishop, chairman of the Office for Refugee and Migration Policy of the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales.

“They also need our support for better employment and human rights,” he added.

His remarks came the day after he attended a meeting in London between a delegation from the Polish-British Mission for Employment and homelessness charities, including the Passage, a hostel run by the Catholic Archdiocese of Westminster, England. CNS

Beatification for nun remembered for her feminine example

Nun killed for sheltering Jews is beatified in Hungary

■ By Jonathan Luxmoore

A nun executed for sheltering Jews during World War II was remembered for her feminine example of holiness during her beatification in Hungary.

Cardinal Peter Erdo of Esztergom-Budapest, Hungary,

the world in brief

said the martyrdom of Sister Sara Salkahazi of the Sisters of Social Service is “close to us, and her example is within our reach.

“She is someone of modest circumstances, who lived through the storms of 20th-century history and gave us an example of the femine. Sister Sara, born in 1899, had a degree in education and founded Hungary’s Catholic Women’s League.

Before she took her vows in 1930, Sister Sara was engaged to be married and worked as a bookbinder

Praise for relief in India

A government official, the successor of Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta and others have praised Catholic Relief Services for six decades of work in India.

The US Catholic bishops’ international relief and development agency deserves to be congratulated for its work among the victims of disasters in India, said Manabendra Mukherjee, a minister in the state of West Bengal. Mukherjee and others spoke at an early September function marking 60 years of service by CRS in India, reported UCA News, an Asian church news agency based in Thailand.

The anniversary was held in Calcutta, the state capital. He applauded CRS in par-

and journalist. In 1944 she was shot and thrown in the Danube River with Jewish people by Nazis for sheltering Jewish women and children at her convent.

Around 550,000 Jews and 50,000 Roma died during the Holocaust in Hungary.

At least 35 Catholic religious orders sheltered Jews.

The Sisters of Social Service organised courses to expose Nazi doctrines and protested against Hungarian legislators’ failure to prevent the unlawful seizure of

ticular for its ability to network with other nongovernmental organisations and local governments. Sister Nirmala Joshi, who succeeded Mother Teresa as head of the Missionaries of Charity, said CRS was the first organisation to support Mother Teresa in the 1950s with food for the sick, children and elderly.

Sex abuse prevention

The US Catholic Church’s response to its child sexual abuse problem has raised the bar on sex abuse prevention for all US Organisations that serve children, said Monica Applewhite, an expert in abuse prevention strategies. Writing in the September 25 issue of America, a national Catholic magazine published by Jesuits, Applewhite said that when the US bishops issued their

Jewish property. The order, founded in 1923 to help the working poor, rescued around 1,000 Jews in several towns.

The order was suppressed in Eastern Europe after the postwar imposition of communist rule, but members currently are working in the US, Canada, Cuba and Puerto Rico.

Father Laszlo Lukacs, media director for the Hungarian church, told Catholic News Service on September 18 that Hungarian Chief Rabbi Jozsef Schweitzer, a

“Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People” in June 2002 “the ‘industry standards’ for child protection changed.” “Formerly unwritten rules, like not allowing a sexual offender to work with children and defining specific boundaries for ministry relationships, were now clearly articulated - not just for the Catholic Church, but for everyone,” she wrote.

Applewhite is president of the religious services division of Praesidium, a Texasbased organisation that provides abuse-prevention training programs for churches, schools and other organisations that serve children and youths.

New Vatican diplomat

Pope Benedict XVI appointed French Archbishop Dominique Mamberti, a 20-year

Holocaust survivor, gave an address at the beatification.

The rabbi said it was Sister Sara’s faith that motivated her, according to Father Lukacs.

Rabbi Schweitzer “expressed gratitude on behalf of persecuted Jews for those Christians who saved Jewish lives, even though they weren’t great in number,” Father Lukacs said.

He added that he hopes the beatification will highlight the Church’s role during the Holocaust.

CNS

veteran of the Vatican diplomatic corps, as the Vatican’s foreign affairs minister. The Pope made the surprise announcement at the end of a ceremony on September 15 to welcome the new secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, and bid farewell to his predecessor, Cardinal Angelo Sodano. Archbishop Mamberti, 54, has been the apostolic nuncio in Sudan since 2002 and also in Eritrea since 2004. Since 1986 when he entered the Vatican diplomatic service, he has held posts in Algeria, Chile, the United Nations in New York and Lebanon, and has worked in the Secretariat of State’s section for foreign affairs.

Born in Morocco, he is said to be knowledgeable about the Muslim world, and speaks French, Italian, English and Spanish. He was ordained in 1981 and has degrees in civil and canon law.

Children hold banners as they take part in a protest against abortion in Seville, Spain. PHOTO: CNS

Benedict’s speech

Pope rejects faith spread by the sword

Here is the text of the lecture given by Pope Benedict XVI at Regensberg on September 12.

It is a moving experience for me to be back again in the university and to be able once again to give a lecture at this podium. I think back to those years when, after a pleasant period at the Freisinger Hochschule, I began teaching at the University of Bonn.

That was in 1959, in the days of the old university made up of ordinary professors. The various chairs had neither assistants nor secretaries, but in recompense there was much direct contact with students and in particular among the professors themselves.

We would meet before and after lessons in the rooms of the teaching staff. There was a lively exchange with historians, philosophers, philologists and, naturally, between the two theological faculties.

Once a semester there was a dies academicus, when professors from every faculty appeared before the students of the entire university, making possible a genuine experience of universitas - something that you too, Magnificent Rector, just mentioned - the experience, in other words, of the fact that despite our specializations which at times make it difficult to communicate with each other, we made up a whole, working in everything on the basis of a single rationality with its various aspects and sharing responsibility for the right use of reason - this reality became a lived experience.

The university was also very proud of its two theological faculties. It was clear that, by inquiring about the reasonableness of faith, they too carried out a work which is necessarily part of the “whole” of the universitas scientiarum, even if not everyone could share the faith which theologians seek to correlate with reason as a whole.

This profound sense of coherence within the universe of reason was not troubled, even when it was once reported that a colleague had said there was something odd about our university: it had two faculties devoted to something that did not exist: God. That even in the face of such radical scepticism it is still necessary and reasonable to raise the question of God through the use of reason, and to do so in the context of the tradition of the Christian faith: this, within the university as a whole, was accepted without question.

I was reminded of all this recently, when I read the edition by Professor Theodore Khoury (Münster) of part of the dialogue carried on - perhaps in 1391 in the winter barracks near Ankara - by the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both.

It was presumably the emperor himself who set down this dialogue, during the siege of Constantinople between 1394 and 1402; and this would explain why his arguments are given in greater detail than those of his Persian interlocutor. The dialogue ranges widely over the structures of faith contained

in the Bible and in the Qur’an, and deals especially with the image of God and of man, while necessarily returning repeatedly to the relationship between - as they were called - three “Laws” or “rules of life”: the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Qur’an.

It is not my intention to discuss this question in the present lecture; here I would like to discuss only one point - itself rather marginal to the dialogue as a whole - which, in the context of the issue of “faith and reason”, I found interesting and which can serve as the startingpoint for my reflections on this issue.

In the seventh conversation (*4V8,>4H - controversy) edited by Professor Khoury, the emperor touches on the theme of the holy war. The emperor must have known that surah 2, 256 reads: “There is no compulsion in religion”. According to the experts, this is one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under threat. But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Qur’an, concerning holy war.

Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the “Book” and the “infidels”, he addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached”.

The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable.

Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. “God”, he says, “is not pleased by blood – and not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats... To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death...”.

The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is selfevident.

But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality. Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazn went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God’s will, we would even have to practise idolatry. At this point, as far as understanding of God and thus the concrete practice of religion is con-

cerned, we are faced with an unavoidable dilemma. Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God’s nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true?

I believe that here we can see the profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the biblical understanding of faith in God. Modifying the first verse of the Book of Genesis, the first verse of the whole Bible, John began the prologue of his Gospel with the words: “In the beginning was the word”. This is the very word used by the emperor: God acts, reason, with logos. Logos means both reason and word - a reason which is creative and capable of self-communication, precisely as reason.

John thus spoke the final word on the biblical concept of God, and in this word all the often toilsome and tortuous threads of biblical faith find their culmination and synthesis.

In the beginning was the logos, and the logos is God, says the Evangelist. The encounter between the Biblical message and Greek thought did not happen by chance.

The vision of Saint Paul, who saw the roads to Asia barred and in a dream saw a Macedonian man plead with him: “Come over to Macedonia and help us!” (cf. Acts 16:6-10) - this vision can be interpreted as a “distillation” of the intrinsic necessity of a rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek inquiry.

In point of fact, this rapprochement had been going on for some time. The mysterious name of God, revealed from the burning bush, a name which separates this God from all other divinities with their

many names and simply declares “I am”, already presents a challenge to the notion of myth, to which Socrates’ attempt to vanquish and transcend myth stands in close analogy.

Within the Old Testament, the process which started at the burning bush came to new maturity at the time of the Exile, when the God of Israel, an Israel now deprived of its land and worship, was proclaimed as the God of heaven and earth and described in a simple formula which echoes the words uttered at the burning bush: “I am”. This new understanding of God is accompanied by a kind of enlightenment, which finds stark expression in the mockery of gods who are merely the work of human hands (cf. Ps 115).

Thus, despite the bitter conflict with those Hellenistic rulers who sought to accommodate it forcibly to the customs and idolatrous cult of the Greeks, biblical faith, in the Hellenistic period, encountered the best of Greek thought at a deep level, resulting in a mutual enrichment evident especially in the later wisdom literature.

Today we know that the Greek translation of the Old Testament produced at Alexandria - the Septuagint - is more than a simple (and in that sense really less than satisfactory) translation of the Hebrew text: it is an independent textual witness and a distinct and important step in the history of revelation, one which brought about this encounter in a way that was decisive for the birth and spread of Christianity. A profound encounter of faith and reason is taking place here, an encounter between gen-

uine enlightenment and religion. From the very heart of Christian faith and, at the same time, the heart of Greek thought now joined to faith, Manuel II was able to say: Not to act “with logos” is contrary to God’s nature.

In all honesty, one must observe that in the late Middle Ages we find trends in theology which would sunder this synthesis between the Greek spirit and the Christian spirit.

In contrast with the so-called intellectualism of Augustine and Thomas, there arose with Duns Scotus a voluntarism which, in its later developments, led to the claim that we can only know God’s voluntas ordinata. Beyond this is the realm of God’s freedom, in virtue of which he could have done the opposite of everything he has actually done.

This gives rise to positions which clearly approach those of Ibn Hazn and might even lead to the image of a capricious God, who is not even bound to truth and goodness. God’s transcendence and otherness are so exalted that our reason, our sense of the true and good, are no longer an authentic mirror of God, whose deepest possibilities remain eternally unattainable and hidden behind his actual decisions.

As opposed to this, the faith of the Church has always insisted that between God and us, between his eternal Creator Spirit and our created reason there exists a real analogy, in which - as the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 stated - unlikeness remains infinitely greater than likeness, yet not to the point of abolishing analogy and its language. God does not become more divine

The lecture: Pope Benedict XVI lectures on faith and reason at the University of Regensburg in Germany on September 12. A quotation from a Byzantine emperor that the Pope used in this talk has provoked outrage in the Muslim world. The Pope said on September 17 that he is “deeply sorry” that Muslims were offended by the quotation he used. PHOTO: CNS

when we push him away from us in a sheer, impenetrable voluntarism; rather, the truly divine God is the God who has revealed himself as logos and, as logos, has acted and continues to act lovingly on our behalf.

Certainly, love, as Saint Paul says, “transcends” knowledge and is thereby capable of perceiving more than thought alone (cf. Eph 3:19); nonetheless it continues to be love of the God who is Logos.

Consequently, Christian worship is, again to quote Paul - “8@(46¬ 8”JD,\””, worship in harmony with the eternal Word and with our reason (cf. Rom 12:1).

This inner rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek philosophical inquiry was an event of decisive importance not only from the standpoint of the history of religions, but also from that of world history - it is an event which concerns us even today.

Given this convergence, it is not surprising that Christianity, despite its origins and some significant developments in the East, finally took on its historically decisive character in Europe.

We can also express this the other way around: this convergence, with the subsequent addition of the Roman heritage, created Europe and remains the foundation of what can rightly be called Europe.

The thesis that the critically purified Greek heritage forms an integral part of Christian faith has been countered by the call for a dehellenisation of Christianity - a call which has more and more dominated theological discussions since the beginning of the modern age.

Viewed more closely, three stages can be observed in the program of dehellenisation: although interconnected, they are clearly distinct from one another in their motivations and objectives.

Dehellenisation first emerges in connection with the postulates of the Reformation in the sixteenth century. Looking at the tradition of scholastic theology, the Reformers thought they were confronted with a faith system totally conditioned by philosophy, that is to say an articulation of the faith based on an alien system of thought.

As a result, faith no longer appeared as a living historical Word but as one element of an overarching philosophical system. The principle of sola scriptura, on the other hand, sought faith in its pure, primordial form, as originally found in the biblical Word.

Metaphysics appeared as a premise derived from another source, from which faith had to be liberated in order to become once more fully itself.

When Kant stated that he needed to set thinking aside in order to make room for faith, he carried this program forward with a radicalism that the Reformers could never have foreseen. He thus anchored faith exclusively in practical reason, denying it access to reality as a whole.

The liberal theology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries ushered in a second stage in the process of dehellenisation, with Adolf von Harnack as its outstanding representative.

When I was a student, and in the early years of my teaching, this program was highly influential in Catholic theology too. It took as its point of departure Pascal’s distinction between the God of the philosophers and the God of Abraham,

Benedict’s speech

Isaac and Jacob. In my inaugural lecture at Bonn in 1959, I tried to address the issue, and I do not intend to repeat here what I said on that occasion, but I would like to describe at least briefly what was new about this second stage of dehellenisation.

Harnack’s central idea was to return simply to the man Jesus and to his simple message, underneath the accretions of theology and indeed of hellenisation: this simple message was seen as the culmination of the religious development of humanity. Jesus was said to have put an end to worship in favour of morality.

In the end he was presented as the father of a humanitarian moral message. Fundamentally, Harnack’s goal was to bring Christianity back into harmony with modern reason, liberating it, that is to say, from seemingly philosophical and theological elements, such as faith in Christ’s divinity and the triune God. In this sense, historical-critical exegesis of the New Testament, as he saw it, restored to theology its place within the university: theology, for Harnack, is something essentially historical and therefore strictly scientific.

What it is able to say critically about Jesus is, so to speak, an expression of practical reason and consequently it can take its rightful place within the university. Behind this thinking lies the modern selflimitation of reason, classically expressed in Kant’s “Critiques”, but in the meantime further radicalised by the impact of the natural sciences.

This modern concept of reason is based, to put it briefly, on a synthesis between Platonism (Cartesianism) and empiricism, a synthesis confirmed by the success of technology.

On the one hand it presupposes the mathematical structure of matter, its intrinsic rationality, which makes it possible to understand how matter works and use it efficiently: this basic premise is, so to speak, the Platonic element in the modern understanding of nature.

On the other hand, there is nature’s capacity to be exploited for our purposes, and here only the possibility of verification or falsification through experimentation can yield ultimate certainty. The weight between the two poles can, depending on the circumstances,

shift from one side to the other. As strongly positivistic a thinker as J. Monod has declared himself a convinced Platonist/Cartesian.

This gives rise to two principles which are crucial for the issue we have raised. First, only the kind of certainty resulting from the interplay of mathematical and empirical elements can be considered scientific.

Anything that would claim to be science must be measured against this criterion. Hence the human sciences, such as history, psychology, sociology and philosophy, attempt to conform themselves to this canon of scientificity.

A second point, which is important for our reflections, is that by its very nature this method excludes the question of God, making it appear an unscientific or pre-scientific question. Consequently, we are faced with a reduction of the radius of science and reason, one which needs to be questioned.

I will return to this problem later. In the meantime, it must be observed that from this standpoint any attempt to maintain theology’s claim to be “scientific” would end up reducing Christianity to a mere fragment of its former self.

But we must say more: if science as a whole is this and this alone, then it is man himself who ends up being reduced, for the specifically human questions about our origin and destiny, the questions raised by religion and ethics, then have no place within the purview of collective reason as defined by “science”, so understood, and must thus be relegated to the realm of the subjective.

The subject then decides, on the basis of his experiences, what he considers tenable in matters of religion, and the subjective “conscience” becomes the sole arbiter of what is ethical.

In this way, though, ethics and religion lose their power to create a community and become a completely personal matter. This is a dangerous state of affairs for humanity, as we see from the disturbing pathologies of religion and reason which necessarily erupt when reason is so reduced that questions of religion and ethics no longer concern it. Attempts to construct an ethic from the rules of evolution or from psychology and sociology, end up being simply inadequate.

if we overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable, and if we once more disclose its vast horizons.

In this sense theology rightly belongs in the university and within the wide-ranging dialogue of sciences, not merely as a historical discipline and one of the human sciences, but precisely as theology, as inquiry into the rationality of faith.

Only thus do we become capable of that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today. In the Western world it is widely held that only positivistic reason and the forms of philosophy based on it are universally valid.

Yet the world’s profoundly religious cultures see this exclusion of the divine from the universality of reason as an attack on their most profound convictions. A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures.

Before I draw the conclusions to which all this has been leading, I must briefly refer to the third stage of dehellenisation, which is now in progress. In the light of our experience with cultural pluralism, it is often said nowadays that the synthesis with Hellenism achieved in the early Church was a preliminary inculturation which ought not to be binding on other cultures.

The latter are said to have the right to return to the simple message of the New Testament prior to that inculturation, in order to inculturate it anew in their own particular milieux.

This thesis is not only false; it is coarse and lacking in precision. The New Testament was written in Greek and bears the imprint of the Greek spirit, which had already come to maturity as the Old Testament developed.

True, there are elements in the evolution of the early Church which do not have to be integrated into all cultures. Nonetheless, the fundamental decisions made about the relationship between faith and the use of human reason are part of the faith itself; they are developments consonant with the nature of faith itself.

And so I come to my conclusion. This attempt, painted with broad strokes, at a critique of modern reason from within has nothing to do with putting the clock back to the time before the Enlightenment and rejecting the insights of the modern age.

The positive aspects of modernity are to be acknowledged unreservedly: we are all grateful for the marvellous possibilities that it has opened up for mankind and for the progress in humanity that has been granted to us. The scientific ethos, moreover, is – as you yourself mentioned, Magnificent Rectorthe will to be obedient to the truth, and, as such, it embodies an attitude which belongs to the essential decisions of the Christian spirit.

The intention here is not one of retrenchment or negative criticism, but of broadening our concept of reason and its application. While we rejoice in the new possibilities open to humanity, we also see the dangers arising from these possibilities and we must ask ourselves how we can overcome them. We will succeed in doing so only if reason and faith come together in a new way,

At the same time, as I have attempted to show, modern scientific reason with its intrinsically Platonic element bears within itself a question which points beyond itself and beyond the possibilities of its methodology. Modern scientific reason quite simply has to accept the rational structure of matter and the correspondence between our spirit and the prevailing rational structures of nature as a given, on which its methodology has to be based.

Yet the question why this has to be so is a real question, and one which has to be remanded by the natural sciences to other modes and planes of thought – to philosophy and theology. For philosophy and, albeit in a different way, for theology, listening to the great experiences and insights of the religious traditions of humanity, and those of the Christian faith in particular, is a source of knowledge, and to ignore it would be an unacceptable restriction of our listening and responding.

Here I am reminded of something Socrates said to Phaedo. In their earlier conversations, many false philosophical opinions had been raised, and so Socrates says: “It would be easily understandable if someone became so annoyed at all these false notions that for the rest of his life he despised and mocked all talk about being - but in this way he would be deprived of the truth of existence and would suffer a great loss”.

The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby.

The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur – this is the program with which a theology grounded in Biblical faith enters into the debates of our time. “Not to act reasonably, not to act with logos, is contrary to the nature of God”, said Manuel II, according to his Christian understanding of God, in response to his Persian interlocutor. It is to this great logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures. To rediscover it constantly is the great task of the university.

Note: The Holy Father intends to supply a subsequent version of this text, complete with footnotes. The present text must therefore be considered provisional.

The response: A Palestinian from the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade attends a Sept. 15 rally in Gaza to protest against remarks regarding Islam made by Pope Benedict XVI. PHOTO: CNS

22

The following speech was given at at the launching of the new edition of The Heart of James McAuley; the book is available from The Record.

■ By Peter Coleman

One of the first things that struck you about Jim McAuley was his sense of fun. The world remembers him as poet, critic and editor. He was indeed a serious poet - tragic, sentimentalisch. But he was a very funny man too. Only a great humorist could have written Ern Malley’s poems. How can you help laughing as you read Ern’s preposterous nonsense?

Princess, you lived in Princess St., Where the urchins pick their nose in the sun

With the left hand.

Another of Jim’s sallies that deserves to be better celebrated was his project of setting up Poets Anonymous, modelled on Alcoholics Anonymous. It would help the clapped-out poet who has nothing to say but who just can’t beat the demon verse. Every day he reaches for the pencil, no matter what pain his addiction inflicts on family or friends.

But at a meeting of Poets Anonymous, he will hear fellow sufferers, who have conquered the habit, stand up and declare frankly: “I am a poet. One small lyric is too much for me, and one endless epic is not enough. I used to write sonnets, two, three or even four a day. Then odes, then epics. Then I found Poets Anonymous…”

Jim said he was having talks with Treasurer Bill McMahon about giving grants to poets who undertake not to write a word for the period of the grant. That might help them give up the addiction.

When I began writing The Heart of James McAuley, Jim had only recently died –in October 1976. His legend was fresh in memory and he was widely and deeply honoured. My contribution to the obsequies then was to bring out a memorial issue of Quadrant

Looking back on it now- the March 1977 number- it confirms the general goodwill towards Jim at that time. It begins with a tribute by his friend, the poet AD Hope:

Standing on this late promontory of time,

I match our spirits, the laggard and the swift:

Though we shared much beside the gift of rhyme, Yours was the surer gift.

It ends with a note by Douglas Stewart, another poet and literary editor, on the Requiem Mass held for McAuley at St John’s College at the University of Sydney. “How well the Catholic Church can do these things!” Stewart wrote. No Catholic himself, and perhaps more humanist than Christian, he was, he reminded his readers, something of a connoisseur of literary

Books

funerals: he had attended the services for Hugh McCrae, Mary Gilmore, Kenneth Slessor, Norman Lindsay and many others.

McAuley’s was, he said, the most beautiful service, the most perfectly in keeping of them all. This was because McAuley’s poems - read by Ron Haddrick and Peter Steele - and his hymns pervaded the whole event.

Between these tributes - Hope’s and Stewart’s - were the homages of other poets (Vivian Smith, Peter Skrzynecki, Les Murray); old New Guinea hands (Harry Jackman), political collaborators (Richard Krygier, Bob Santamaria), and a number of friends and critics (Donald Horne, Peter Hastings).

Too many to list them all, let me mention a couple. The scholar Grahame Johnston described his desolation at what he and our country had lost by McAuley’s death.

Behind the poetry, Johnston felt the pressure of all that Europe and Western civilisation meant and still means. The poet Gwen Harwood, in a different mode, wrote of “the simple, generous and compassionate man that I came to love”, the friend who knew it was better to be vulnerable, and wounded, than to hold oneself aloof in critical reserve.

The composer Richard Connolly wrote: “Ah, James McAuley. Strange, great, loving, knowing, lonely man. I shall have other friends, but none will remotely resemble you. I think I shall not know another man remotely like you. Vale. Pax tecum”.

All that was barely thirty years ago. But - and this is the point - what an extraordinary transformation a New Dunciad has wreaked on McAuley’s reputation in those few years!

Today it is the received view among most OzLit scholars that he is a poor poet, of reactionary politics, and of bad character: no calumny is too gross but someone will pass it on. He is, they tell us, deservedly forgotten - while at the same time they produce a library of books and articles that keep his memory vibrantly alive.

Why these bitter attacks? Where do they come from? One squad of critics is the modernists and postmodernists still seeking revenge for the enormous success of the Ern Malley hoax - played on

them by Jim McAuley and Harold Stewart. Having licked their wounds since 1944, they now pretend that Ern’s forced rhetoric, absurd bathos and banal ideas. are not only advanced high art but McAuley’s (and Harold Stewart’s) best work. They republish or anthologise it and sponsor magazines devoted to its genius.

The hoax can be read at several levels. At one level is the great joke at the heart of the affair. At a deeper level there is the hoaxers’ self-purging. The real target of the hoax is McAuley himself and the sort of poetry he used to write as a younger man.

At another level still - and this is a lasting achievement - Ern’s story, as told in the poems and in the letters of his sister Ethel, is one of the great creations of Australian fiction: the tragic-comic tale of the dying, despairing bohemian poet nursed by his loving sister as he coughs out his last masterwork, sixteen spasms of gibberish. The modernists miss all these readings.

A second cohort of campaigners against McAuley has been the liberal humanists, the freethinkers of Australian Orthodoxy.

Early in the 1950’s McAuley abandoned the anarchist secularism of his youth and returned to Christ. Worse still, he even wrote poems about it. But as Les Murray warned us all, the non-god of Australian atheism is a jealous absence, and the unbelievers will smite the Christian faithful, hip and thigh.

They may tolerate Buddhism or Islam or any superstition from astrology to scientology to The Da Vinci Code ... but not the faith of our fathers. Michael Ackland, for example, in his Damaged Men, writes with sympathy of Harold Stewart’s unworldly Buddhism but shows no sympathy for McAuley’s unworldly Christianity.

When McAuley, for example, published his Letter to John Dryden with its appeal, deep in the heart’s abyss, to the groundplan of the Christian mystery, the godless were furious. Some remained unforgiving.

Jack Lindsay, Amy Witting and ADHope ridiculed him in song and ballad. His old collaborator, Harold Stewart, the other half of Ern Malley, called him a “Popish pomposity.” Max Harris alerted Quadrant readers to the tell-tale detail that McAuley was rumoured to contribute to a Jesuit journal.

These poets form a sort of “unity ticket” with those “smorgasbord Christians”, the liberals who pick and choose among doctrines as their fancy suggests. McAuley had satirised them in his 1963 poem Liberal or Innocent by Definition:

Unbiassed between good and evil…

They can never be convicted,

They have no record of convictions.

A third and vociferous cohort of the New Dunciad is political. McAuley was one of the few Australian poets, perhaps the only one, whose life’s quest comprehended not only poetry and religion but also politics and social life.

He was for over 15 years deeply involved in the crisis in New Guinea and wrote some of the most enduring essays in the literature of decolonisation. When he then moved to academia, he wrote wisely and urgently on the crisis in our schools and universities.

His polemics provoked controversy.

But the most furious critics of all have been the Left, enraged that McAuley’s antiCommunism turned out to be right all along. He was one of the very few Australian writers who engaged with the great theme of his age - the totalitarian temptation that gave the world Auschwitz and the Gulag.

At every stage of his life from youthful anarchist to ALP pamphleteer to DLP cold warrior to self-styled “friend of the Liberal party”, he left behind poetry and polemic of permanent value.

In his last public statement, a sort of dying declaration, he said:

“I am now fortunate enough to be able to say that never in my life have I been an advocate or an apologist for movements or regimes that trample systematically on liberal principles and human rights and are essentially based on murder and lies. I have never defended the misdeeds of any terrorist organisation or dictatorial regime of any complexion. I have never been a retailer of propaganda made in Moscow or Peking or Hanoi or any other centre devoted to the subversion of free countries like Australia. I have never blurred the distinction between free and unfree systems or exalted an unfree system above ours. I have never denied that offensive action by a totalitarian power is aggression; I have never stigmatised defensive action by the victims as provocation.”

For some leftists - Cassandra Pybus in The Devil and James McAuley is a recent case - this merely demonstrates what a neurotic Cold Warrior he was. He must have been, she thought, a repressed homosexual. Such critics set the tone.

In writing The Heart of James McAuley, I set out to do what Grahame Johnston had called for in the 1977 memorial issue of Quadrant, that is, to do justice to all aspects of Jim’s work - his poetry, his politics, his religion: the whole man. I am grateful that Anthony Cappello decided to republish it after some 26 years. My hope is that it will do a little to combat the dunces who are determined to devalue or nullify the work of one of Australia’s greatest poets, perhaps its greatest.

But let me end with a story from an eyewitness (me) of the first meeting of those old combatants, Jim and Max Harris, many years after the Ern Malley hoax but while the passions, rage, and hatred it had aroused still reverberated. (Remember Sid Nolan’s venomous painting of Jim.)

The meeting was in the old Quadrant office. Each of them had been putting out feelers to the other. Jim plainly had respect for Max as a critic. What would be the point of hoaxing a fool? Still, the tension was tangible as we waited. Finally Max strolled in, large as life in bow-tie and cane and stood in the middle of the office, silent. Work stopped. Jim looked up. Each caught the other’s eye. Jim nodded “Hullo Max”. Max nodded “Hullo Jim”…and they settled down to discuss the article Jim had asked Max to write for Quadrant on the achievement of Max’s magazine Angry Penguins. Each recognised the other’s integrity. There’s a lesson there for all of us.

The Heart of James McAuley is published by Connor Court Publishing, and is available from The Record for $29.95 + postage

29 Mass for Fertility Care Centre - Bishop Sproxton

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Ceremony for National Conference of Australian Assn for RE at Santa Maria College and Clergy and Seminarian Day - Bishop Sproxton

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BUILDING TRADES

■ BRICK REPOINTING

Phone Nigel 9242 2952.

■ PERROTT PAINTING PTY LTD

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

■ PICASSO PAINTING

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

FURNITURE REMOVAL

■ ALL AREAS

Mike Murphy 0416 226 434.

Classifieds

Classified ads: $3.30 per line incl. GST 24 hour Hotline 9227 7778 Deadline: 12pm Tuesday

HOLIDAY ACCOMMODATION

■ DENMARK

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

Ph: Maria 0412 083 377.

RELIGIOUS PRODUCTS

■ CATHOLICS CORNER

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

■ REPAIR YOUR LITURGICAL BOOKS

REPAIRS to all sorts of books and leather bindings; reliable, reasonable rates. Ph. (08) 9293 3092

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RELIGIOUS PRODUCTS

■ RICH HARVEST  YOUR CHRISTIAN SHOP Looking for Bibes, CDs, books, card, gifts statues, baptism/communion apparel, religious vestments, etc? Visit us at 39 Hulme Court (off McCoy St), Myaree, 9329 9889 (after 10.30am, Mon-Sat) We are here to serve.

ORGAN RECITAL

AN AFTERNOON of Moser Organ music with Jacinta Jakovcevic (1 Oct) and John Beaverstock (2 Oct). New Norcia Abbey Church 3pm. Pre-recital talk 2.30pm Monastery Parlour. Ticket Sales on Day $15/Adult, $5/Child includes Talk, Recital & Refreshments. Information: 9654 8107

POSITIONS VACANT

CLEANER required to work in a school, south of the river, from 3.30pm each day during term time. Approx 15 hours per week. Duty statement can be obtained by phoning Margaret on 9450 2797.

EDUCATION

“ADVANCED DIPLOMA of Educational Counselling” and “Graduate Diploma of Relationship Eduction and Educational Counselling.” Nationally accredited, Austudy approved. Phone: 040 9405 585.

PANORAMA a roundup of events in the archdiocese

Sunday September 24 to Saturday September 30

FIVE DAY DIRECTED RETREAT

At the Redemptorist Monastery Retreat House, 190 Vincent Street North Perth. Director: Fr Joe Carroll CSSR. For more information contact Jan Broderick.

Sunday September 24

ETERNAL WORD TELEVISION NETWORK ON ACCESS 31

10-11 am: : The New Testament : Acts, Pt 1 / Scott Hahn & Jeff Cavins [Our Father’s Plan ; 12] 1-2 pm: The New Evangelization / Fr Andrew Apostoli [EWTN 25th Anniversary Celebrations in Birmingham, Alabama] Enquiries: 9330-1170.

Wednesday October 4

SFO SILVER JUBILEE

Our Lady’s Assumption Fraternity Balcatta will commemorate its Silver Jubilee at St. Lawrence’s Church, Balcatta. An invitation is extended to all to join with them in celebrating this auspicious occasion. Mass will commence at 6:30 pm, followed by supper in the Alverna Centre. RSVP on 9276 9415 by 27.9.06.

Friday/Saturday October 6 and 7

ALLIANCE AND TRIUMPH OF THE TWO HEARTS

All night vigil: Holy Mass 9pm Friday evening at St Bernadette’s Church, 49 Jugan St, Glandalough followed by all night adoration with rosaries and silent adoration. All are welcome to join us. Saturday parish Mass is at 7.30am (Reconcilliation at 7am). Fr Doug Harris 9444 6131, Dorothy 9342 5845.

Friday/Saturday October 6 and 7

TWO HEARTS DEVOTIONS

Devotion to the 1st Friday of the month to the Scared Heart of Jesus begins with Mass at 9pm Friday followed by prayers, Rosaries and exposition of the blessed Sacrament, concluding with Mass on 1st Saturday 7am to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Please come even for one hour. 9409 4543.

Friday October 6 to 8

BROTHER ANDREW’S SIXTH

Fr Douglas Rowe, All Saint’s Chapel, will give his own retreat, “Awakening” at God’s Farm, 40km south of Busselton to honour Br Andrew. Special permission has been granted for Sr Eliezer and Missionary Sister’s of Charity to share with us. More details ring Betty Peaker 9755 6212, or write: PO Box 24 Cowaramup WA.

Thursday October 12

CARITAS MAKE POVERTY HISTORY  SOLIDARITY LUNCH.

Catholic Pastoral Centre, 40A Mary Street HighgateSeminar Room -12 noon to 1.00 pm. Guest Speaker: Janeen Murphy, Caritas WA Global Education Advisor. Cost: Gold Coin. RSVP: Mon 9th Oct Tel: 94227925 Email: perth@caritas.org.au

Saturday October 14

WORKSHOP

The Emmanuel Centre and The Unconditional Love program will present a workshop on “Living with a Mental Illness.” 1pm– 4pm, at Emmanuel Centre, 25 Windsor St, Perth. The cost is free. Bookings for the workshop are essential. Contact Amanda Olsen, Home: 9454 2241 Mob: 0407 192 64; Email: amandaolsen@bigpond.com

Sunday October 15

WA UNITES TO MAKE POVERTY HISTORY

This event may determine if Australia leads the world to make poverty history. We don’t want your money - we want you! Forrest Place, Perth at 1pm to Make Poverty History. For info or to help promote

the event email wamakepovertyhistory@ca.com.au or ph 0413 022 645.

Sunday October 15

HEALING MASS

“Oh taste and see the Lord is good. He will satisfy the soul.” Catholic Charismatic Renewal invites you to come and experience the healing love of God through Prayer and Praise, the Eucharist and Praying over. The celebration will be held at St Joseph’s Church, 1 Salvado Road, Subiaco, commencing with Prayer and Praise at 5.30pm, Mass at 6pm followed by praying over and supper. All are very welcome to join us in this celebration. Enq. Celine 9446 2147.

Friday October 20

ALAN AMES IN KALAMUNDA

Alan will be speaking of his conversion experiences at Holy Family Catholic Church, 2 Burt St, Kalamunda, after 7 pm Mass. Healing prayers will follow. Enq: Loretti Crameri 9444 4409.

Friday October 20 to 22

MARRIAGE ENCOUNTER WEEKEND

Tell him or her they’re still No.1 in your life. To love the very best in your marriage, treat yourselves to a Marriage Encounter Weekend. Few places still available for the October weekend. Contact Joe & Margaret Cordina on 9417 8750 for further details & Bookings

Sunday October 29

WORLD CENTENARY OF CATHOLIC WOMEN’S LEAGUE

Members of the Catholic Women’s League of WA will be celebrating the Women’s League Centenary, founded in England by Margaret Fletcher in 1906. Mass will be celebrated at the Redemptorist Monastery, 190 Vincent Street, North Perth at 10.30am followed by a lunch at the Royal Park Hall at noon. Members, ex-members and their families are most welcome to attend. For more information contact Margaret Ph: 9328 8978 or Fay Ph: 9284 3084.

Wednesday November 1

BOOK LAUNCH

A history of St Gertrude’s College, New Norcia cowritten by Sr Anne Carter IBVM and Sr Elizabeth Murphy RSJ will be launched at John XXIII College, Mt Claremont at 6.30pm. To attend or order the book, phone Marie on 9275 6307 or email pstrickland@eftel.net.au by October 16.

July - September

CROSS ROADS COMMUNITY

Term 3 Tuesday 25th July until Friday 29th September for: Family & Friends Support Groups of Substance Abusers Wednesdays 7–9pm, Substance Abusers Support Groups Tuesdays 5.30 to 7.30pm and Fridays Day Group for Substance Abusers 9.30am-2pm including Healing Mass Fridays at 12.30pm during term. Rosary Tuesday to Thursday 12.30 to 1pm. Lectio Divina on Tuesdays 7pm.

AL ANON FAMILY GROUPS

If a loved one’s drinking is worrying you – please call Al Anon Family Groups for confidential information meetings etc… Phone Number on 9325 7528 – 24 hrs.

ATTENTION COUPLES

Have you or your spouse been diagnosed with a mental illness? Depression? Anxiety/Panic Attacks? etc. Could you do with some help understanding your/their illness? Do you know how to get help when you need it? We can help you to help each

other through the Unconditional Love Program. For more information contact Amanda Olsen: 0407 192 641, or email: mandyfolsen@bigpond. com.au.

TUESDAY NIGHT PRAYER MEETINGS

St Mary’s Cathedral Parish Centre, 450 Hay Street, Perth, 7pm. Come join us! Overcome the burdens in life making prayer your lifeline with Jesus. Personal healing in prayer, Rosary, meditation, Scripture, praise in song, friendship, refreshments. Be united with Our Lord and Our Lady in prayer with others. Appreciate the heritage of the Faith.

EVERY SUNDAY

Bullsbrook Shrine Sunday Pilgrimage Program. Shrine of Virgin of the Revelation, 36 Chittering Rd Bullsbrook. 2pm Holy Mass, exposition of the Blessed Sacrament with Holy Rosary. Reconciliation is available before every celebration. Enquiries: 9447 3292.

FIRST SUNDAY OF THE MONTH

The Santa Clara Parish Community welcomes anyone from surrounding parishes and beyond to the Santa Clara Church, corner of Coolgardie and Pollock Sts, Bentley on the 1st Sunday of each month for devotions in honour of the Divine Mercy. The afternoon commences with the 3 o’clock prayer, followed by the Divine Mercy Chaplet, Reflection and concludes with Benediction.

YOUNG CATHOLIC WOMEN’S INTERFAITH FELLOWSHIP

The Council for Australian Catholic Women (CACW) seeks to promote the participation of women in the Catholic Church in Australia. CACW is pleased to announce that the 2007 application package for the Young Catholic Women’s Interfaith Fellowship is now available. The package can be downloaded from the website: www.cacw.catholic.org.au. Michelle Wood is the contact person for the CACW in the Archdiocese of Perth. For further information regarding the CACW or the Fellowship, please contact Michelle: michelleww@iinet.net.au or 9345 2555.

NEW WEBSITE

Address for Holy Family Parish, Maddington is http://www.holycatholicfamily.org.au

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.

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.

ST COLUMBA’S BAYSWATER

Information is sought from past and present parishioners of St Columba’s Catholic Church (Roberts St Bayswater) for inclusion in a written history (1905 – 2007) of the parish. Photographs of Parish Priests, parishioners and events depicting the original and current Church greatly appreciated. Contact: Carolyn

The Last Word

Straight to the point

Philip invites us to come and see Jesus

Here is a translation of the address Benedict XVI gave at a recent general audience, held in St Peter’s Square, continuing his reflections on the apostles. The Pope used his talk to present the figure of the Apostle Philip

Dear Brothers and Sisters: Continuing to sketch the portrait of the various apostles, as we have been doing for some weeks, we meet today with Philip. In the lists of the Twelve he always appears in fifth place (in Matthew 10:3; Mark 3:18; Luke 6:14; Acts 1:13), that is, essentially among the first.

Although Philip was of Jewish origin, his name is Greek, as is Andrew’s, which constitutes a small gesture of cultural openness that must not be underestimated. The news we have of him comes from the Gospel of John. He was from the same place as Peter and Andrew, namely, Bethsaida (cf. John 1:44), a small city that belonged to the tetrarchy of one of Herod the Great’s sons, who was also called Philip (cf. Luke 3:1).

The fourth Gospel says that, after being called by Jesus, Philip meets with Nathanael and tells him: “We have found him of whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph” (John 1:45). In the face of Nathanael’s rather skeptical response - “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” - Philip does not give up and answers decisively: “Come and see” (John 1:46).

With this response, dry but clear, Philip demonstrates the characteristics of the authentic witness: He is not content with presenting the announcement as a theory, but

Seeking these girls

Is this you or do you have any information about this photo?

We believe this photo was taken in or around 1929, and shows girls from St Joseph’s School (Victoria Square) enthusiastically supporting the 1930’s Cathedral building appeal.

If

Please contact: Brett Mendez, assistant to Archbishop Hickey on telephone: 9313 2241 or mobile 0412 903 205 or email mendez@mencorp.com.au

questions the interlocutor directly, suggesting that he himself have the personal experience of what was proclaimed.

Jesus uses those two same verbs when two disciples of John the Baptist approach him to ask him where he lives: Jesus answers: “Come and see” (cf. John 1:38-39).

We can think that Philip questions us with those two verbs which imply a personal participation. He also tells us what he said to Nathanael: “Come and see.”

The apostle commits us to know Jesus up close. In fact, friendship, to truly know the other, requires closeness, what is more, in part lives from it. In fact, we must not forget that, according to what Mark writes, Jesus chose the Twelve with

the primary objective that they “be with him” (Mark 3:14), that is, that they share his life and learn directly from him not only the style of his behaviour, but above all who he really was.

Only thus, participating in his life, could they know and proclaim him. Later on, in the Letter of Paul to the Ephesians, we read that what is important is “the Christ that they learned” (4:20), that is, what is important is not only or above all to listen to his teachings, his words, but to know him personally, that is, his humanity and divinity, the mystery of his beauty.

He is not only a Teacher, but a Friend, more than that, a Brother. How can we know him if we are far from him? Intimacy, familiarity, custom, make us discover the true identity of Jesus Christ. This is precisely what the Apostle Philip reminds us. That is why he invites us to “come” and “see,” that is, to enter into a contact of listening, of response and communion of life with Jesus, day after day.

On the occasion of the multiplication of loaves, he received from Jesus a precise request, quite surprising: Where was it possible to buy the bread needed to feed all the people who were following him (cf. John 6:5). Then, Philip answered with much realism: “Two hundred days’ wages worth of food would not be enough for each of them to have a little” (John 6:7).

Here we can see the realism and practical spirit of the apostle, who was able to judge the implications of a situation. We know what happened afterward. We know that Jesus took the loaves, and after praying, distributed them. In this way, he effected the multiplication of the loaves. But it is an interesting fact that Jesus addressed Philip specifically, to have a first impression on the solution of the problem: evident sign that he formed part of the restricted group that surround-

ed him. In another instance, very important for the future history, before the Passion, some Greeks were in Jerusalem on the occasion of the Passover, they “came to Philip … and asked him, ‘Sir, we would like to see Jesus.’ Philip went and told Andrew; then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus” (John 12:20-22). Once again we are before a vestige of his particular prestige within the apostolic college. In this case, in particular, he carries out the functions of intermediary between the request of some Greeks - he probably spoke Greek and was able to act as interpreter - and Jesus; though he joins Andrew, the other apostle with a Greek name, in any case, the foreigners turn to him. This teaches us also to be willing both to accept requests and invocations, wherever they come from, as well as to direct them to the Lord, as only he can satisfy them fully. It is important, in fact, to know that we are not the last recipients of the requests of those who approach us, but the Lord: We must direct to him those who are in difficulties. Each one of us must be an open path to him!

There is another highly particular opportunity in which Philip intervenes. During the Last Supper, after Jesus affirmed that to know him also meant to know the Father (cf. John 14:7), Philip, almost naively asked him: “Master, show us the Father, and that will be enough for us” (John 14:8).

Jesus answered him in a tone of benevolent reproach: “Have I been with you for so long a time and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? […] Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me” (John 14:9-11). They are one of the most sublime words of the Gospel of John. They contain an

authentic revelation. At the end of the “Prologue” of his Gospel, John affirms: “ No one has ever seen God. The only Son, God, who is at the Father’s side, has revealed him” (John 1:18).

Well then, that statement, which is of the evangelist, is taken up and confirmed by Jesus himself, but with a detail. In fact, while John’s “Prologue” speaks of an explanatory intervention of Jesus through the words of his teaching, in his answer to Philip, Jesus makes reference to his own person as such, leading us to understand that he can only be understood through what he says, more than that, through what he is. To help us understand, using the paradox of the Incarnation, we can say that God assumed a human face, that of Jesus, and consequently, from now on, if we really want to know the face of God, we have only to contemplate Jesus’ face! In his face we really see who God is and how he is!

The evangelist does not tell us if Philip understood Jesus’ phrase fully. What is certain is that he handed his life over to him totally. According to some subsequent accounts (“Acts of Philip” and others), our apostle evangelized Greece in the first instance and then Phrygia, and there he faced death, in Hieropolis, with a torture that some mention as crucifixion and others as stoning.

We wish to end our reflection recalling the objective toward which our life should be directed: to find Jesus, as Philip found him, trying to see in him God himself, the heavenly Father. If this commitment is lacking, we find ourselves alone with ourselves, as before a mirror, and we are ever more alone! Instead, Philip invites us to let ourselves be conquered by Jesus, to be with him and to share this indispensable company. In this way, seeing, finding God, we can find true life.

- Zenit

In Brief

Homework, homework, homework

Primary school students get no academic benefit from homework - except reading and some basic skills practiceaccording to Duke University professor Harris Cooper. He adds that there is no academic benefit to high school students after two hours’ study a night, and for middle-schoolers, after one and a half hours.

More importantly, most teachers get little or no training on how to create homework assignments that advance learning. In 1989 Cooper published an analysis of dozens of studies on the link between homework and academic achievement, and has recently reviewed newer studies. He does not agree with the author of a new book, The Homework Myth, by Alfie Kohn, that there is no benefit at all in homework.

Pictured are, left, Millie Richards, Julia Auld, Pat Kennedy, Edna Smith, Jessie Noonan, Kathleen Morrissey and Mollie Sheridan.

you are in this wonderful photograph or know anything about the time or circumstances it was taken, we would love to hear from you.