The Record Newspaper - 22 February 2012

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Changing of the Guard “WA is now my home,” says new Archbishop Timothy Costelloe

Archbishop Barry Hickey shows Archbishop-designate Timothy Costelloe the inside of St Mary’s Cathedral in East Perth on 20 February, the day Pope Benedict XVI announced the Melbourne Auxiliary Bishop’s appointment as the new Archbishop of Perth.

PHOTO: MICHAEL CONNELLY

By Robert Hiini POPE Benedict XVI has appointed Salesian Bishop Timothy Costelloe SDB as the sixth Archbishop of Perth, making the announcement in Rome at noon on Monday 20 February (7pm local time).

Archbishop Costelloe said he felt a sense of “gratitude, humility, and also a certain trepidation” in taking up his new role.

“I am very grateful to his Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI,” he said, “for the confidence he has shown in me by appointing me to this role”.

Born and raised in Melbourne,

Victoria, Bishop Costelloe has served as Auxiliary Bishop of Melbourne since June, 2007.

He was ordained a Salesian Father on 25 October, 1986 and spent the better part of 25 years in a teaching capacity; helping to form seminarians, teaching high school students and lecturing at colleges and universities.

The new Archbishop is no stranger to Perth, serving as Parish Priest of St Joachim’s in Victoria Park from 1996 to 1999 as well as lecturing in Systematic Theology at the University of Notre Dame, Fremantle.

“I came to value the vibrancy

of the faith of the Catholic people of the Archdiocese,” he said.

“We are a very multi-cultural society and, consequently, a very multi-cultural Church. This is a source of strength and hope for us all.”

[He is] a scholar, a pastor and a very amiable companion.

He admired the “commitment and strong sense of solidarity” among Perth’s clergy and hoped “to foster this spirit of mutual respect

and cooperation”. Bishop Costelloe will take possession of the archdiocese on 21 March during a solemn Mass and liturgical reception at St Mary’s Cathedral, Perth.

Retiring Archbishop Barry Hickey said he welcomed the announcement of his successor.

Archbishop Hickey said he knew Bishop Costelloe’s personal qualities well, describing him as “a scholar, a pastor and a very amiable companion”.

The then-Father Costelloe was one of two personal theologians chosen by Archbishop Hickey to advise him at the 1998 Synod of Continued on Page 2

Farewell Mass A special Peoples’ Farewell Mass will be celebrated in St Mary’s Cathedral on Tuesday 6 March at 6.30pm to farewell Archbishop Hickey.

Bishop Donald Sproxton is currently preparing invitations to parish and diocesan representatives as well as friends and personal acquaintances of Archbishop Hickey

Installation Mass The Installation Mass for Archbishop Costelloe will be held on Wednesday 21 March at 6.30pm in St Mary’s Cathedral.

Page 2

22 February 2012, The Record

CHANGING OF THE GUARD

Bishop Timothy Costelloe becomes sixth Archbishop of Perth

Future priests Archbishop’s key legacy

By Robert Hiini PERTH Archbishop Barry Hickey said he was “planning to fade into obscurity” and was “looking forward to it” when introducing his successor Bishop Timothy Costelloe SDB yesterday, employing the understated humour that has been a calling card throughout his 21 years service in the role.

Archbishop Hickey introduced Archbishop-designate Costelloe to a small crowd of local media and church agency workers at St Mary’s Cathedral, fielding several questions after Bishop Costelloe had addressed the gathering.

Archbishop Hickey nominated the opening and re-opening of two seminaries – Redemptorist Mater and St Charles’ – in 1994, as his greatest achievements, subsequently providing the archdiocese and wider Church with almost 100 priests.

Archbishop Hickey also pointed to a greater sense of unity in the archdiocese than before he had taken up the position in 1991.

“There are all sorts of factions and opinions and ideas that can be conflicting at times ... but the unity with the Holy Father ... that acceptance of the Holy Father and his teachings is strong and I think it’s stronger than when I started,” Archbishop Hickey said.

The fostering of “a huge cohort of catholic lay leaders”, particularly in education, was also encouraging, he said, before turning to the ongoing challenges which the new archbishop would also have to face.

“On the one hand I see great positives. On the other I see the forces

Continued from Page 1

Retiring Archbishop Barry Hickey and his successor, Bishop Timothy Costelloe speak to media.

that would take us down increasing, but they never will,” the archbishop said.

“The numbers of people practising the Faith have declined; not significantly, but they have declined.

“Secularism has arisen.

Legislation has passed parliament that is against the Gospel; against what we believe and we’ve fought hard to stop it.

“The secular forces have been too strong but we haven’t given up the fight,” he said.

The archbishop nominated “the reinvigoration of young people” as a sign the Church was trying to meet that fight.

“I would have thought that young people growing up today would have been full of the values of secular society and would find what Jesus is asking to be too hard and not want it.

“I don’t find that mentality among many young people,” Archbishop Hickey said.

“They want the hard bargain, to make the tough choices, to live morally ... They want honesty, justice, sexual morality, and they’re joyful in doing it.

“They’re a great witness. I can’t take any credit for that,” the archbishop said. “They exist and they’re increasing in number and that’s a SAINT OF THE WEEK

Editor office@therecord.com.au

Journalists Mark Reidy mreidy@therecord.com.au Robert Hiini rthiini@therecord.com.au Sarah Motherwell s_motherwell@hotmail.com Sub Editor Chris Jaques

The 11th of 13 children of a distinguished Italian lawyer who served the Papal States, Francesco Possenti was a bright, joyful youth, despite losing his mother when he was 4. Educated at the Jesuit college in Spoleto, he was seriously ill twice and vowed to become a religious if he recovered. He entered the Passionist novitiate in 1856, taking the name Gabriel of Our Lady of Sorrows. He served dutifully, with great piety and cheerfulness, dying from tuberculosis at the age of 24.

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Monday 27th - Violet 1st Reading: Lev 19:1-2,11-18

Be holy Responsorial Ps 18:8-10,15 Psalm: Wisdom for the

simple Gospel Reading: Mt 25:31-46

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joy to me.” As an unmarried man with no family, the first thing he would do upon retirement was to learn how to cook, the archbishop said to some amusement.

“I’ll still be faithful to my call so it won’t be just going off to theatres and going off to the beach,” he said.

“I still must maintain that vocation; that’s an outlook, a mentality – that you still want to give use, even just to the people around my neighbourhood: To care for the poor and people who are down on their luck.

“I hope to do that and I don’t need anyone’s permission to do that,” Archbishop Hickey said. “The Lord’s command is enough.”

Sunday 26th - Violet 1ST SUNDAY OF LENT 1st Reading: Gen 9:8-15 The Covenant sign Responsorial Ps 24:4-9 Psalm Lord teaches the poor 2nd Reading: 1 Pet 3:18-22 Baptism is a pledge Gospel Reading: Mk 1:12-15 Repent and believe!

1838-1862 February 27

CNS

PHOTO: MICHAEL CONNELLY

Oceania in Rome (the other being St Charles Rector, Mgr Kevin Long).

Bishop Tim Costelloe has the daunting task of making an impact in a world that ignores Christ, Archbishop Barry Hickey said.

That task is “at one time a burden and a privilege”.

“Archbishop Costelloe will be different from me in many ways.

That is inevitable,” the archbishop said.

“However, he will be carrying out the same task of caring for the Catholic Church and keeping it united in the Faith, calling back the lost sheep, proclaiming the good news of Christ to the world and holding high in society the standards of behaviour and moral values that we share.”

“He has my blessings,” Archbishop Hickey said.

Bishop Costelloe said it was “both a privilege and a joy” to follow in Archbishop Hickey’s footsteps.

Archbishop Hickey was installed as Archbishop of Perth on 27 August, 1991.

Bishop Costelloe will be the ninth bishop to administer Perth since the appointment of Bishop John Brady to the Swan River Colony in 1845.

Archbishop Patrick Joseph Clune became Perth’s first archbishop on 28 August 1913 when the Perth diocese was elevated to an archdiocese.

READINGS OF THE WEEK

Gabriel Possenti Peter Rosengren

Role both a burden - and a privilege

Tuesday 28th - Violet 1st Reading: Is 55:10-11

God’s word succeeds Responsorial Ps 33:4-7,16-19 Psalm: Glorify the Lord!

Gospel Reading: Mt 6:7-15

Our Father in heaven Wednesday 29th - Violet 1st Reading: Jon 3:1-10

Forty days more Responsorial Ps 50:3-4,12-13, Psalm: 18-19

Blot out my offence Gospel Reading: Lk 11:29-32

A wicked generation

All the readings of the week are taken from the is year’s St Paul Liturgucal Calendar.

You can purchase one for only $5.00 from the Record Bookshop

Thursday 1st - Violet 1st Reading: Esth 4:1,3-5,12-14

Refuge in the Lord Responsorial Ps 137:1-3,7-8 Psalms: I thank you, Lord Gospel Reading: Mt 7:7-12

Ask, seek, knock Friday 2nd - Violet 1st Reading: Ezek 18:21-28

Is what I do unjust?

Responsorial Ps 129 Psalm: Cry to the Lord Gospel Reading: Mt 5:20-26

Deep virtue Saturday 11th - Violet 1st Reading: Deut 26:16-19

Follow God’s ways Responsorial Ps 118:1-2,4-5,7-8 Psalms: Blameless living Gospel Reading: Mt 5:43-48

Love your enemies

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22 February 2012, The Record

Page 3

CHANGING OF THE GUARD

Bishop Timothy Costelloe becomes sixth Archbishop of Perth

Wanting to listen and ready to lead

By Robert Hiini ARCHBISHOP-designate Timothy Costelloe SDB would bring all his energy to his new role as the sixth Archbishop of Perth, he told a media conference at St Mary’s Cathedral on 20 February.

“From now on Perth is my home.

Western Australia is my home and I look forward to becoming very much a part of the Church here in Perth, but also the wider society as well,” Bishop Costelloe said.

“The Bishop is called to be someone who does his very best to be a living sign of the presence of Jesus among his people as their good shepherd,” he said “I will commit all my energy to this role.”

As a Salesian, Bishop Costelloe said he had a special concern for the care and welfare of young peo-

ple – the charism of the order’s founder, St John Bosco.

“But an Archbishop is an Archbishop for everybody. I hope I can assure everyone that I want to be available to everybody. I want to try and serve everybody as best I can.”

In his introductory remarks, Archbishop Hickey said that, like himself, Archbishop Costelloe would be directly responsible to the successor of Peter.

When asked what issues he would tackle, Bishop Costelloe said he would rather get the lie-of-theland before listing specific issues.

“It’s all rather new to me. I really would prefer to come in as someone who wants to listen … to try and understand the reality of the Church and society generally here in Perth and Western Australia,”

he said. “I’m sure certain areas and issues will emerge.”

He said he was “keen to be a faithful voice of the Church”.

In a lighter moment, Cathedral Dean, Michael Keating asked the born and bred Victorian about his Australian Football allegiance.

“In the household I grew up (in) you either barracked for Richmond or you found somewhere else to live,” Archbishop Costelloe replied.

He had developed an affinity for the Fremantle Dockers while lecturing at the University of Notre Dame, in the mid-to-late nineties.

While Richmond would remain his first team, the Dockers “might end up being my second”.

Archbishop-designate Costelloe will be officially installed as the sixth Archbishop of Perth on 21 March in St Mary’s Cathedral.

Perth Archbishop-designate Timothy Costelloe SDB addressing a media conference at St Mary’s Cathedral on 20 February.

PHOTO: FR ROBERT CROSS

Archbishop Timothy Costelloe A chronological timeline of the life and career of the new Archbishop of Perth F E B R UA RY 3: Finally professed Transferred to He was appointed FEBRUARY 20: 1954 Born to Francis 1985 as a Salesian of 1991 Rome where he 2000 as Rector of the 2012 Pope Benedict and Carmel Tasma Costelloe in Don Bosco completed a Licentiate in Sacred Salesian formation community.

XVI appointed Bishop Costelloe Melbourne.

1971

Theology at the Salesian Pontifical University.

Matriculated from Salesian College, Chadstone.

Returning to Melbourne he lectured at Catholic Theological College and worked on the formation of young Salesians.

1986

O C TO B E R 25: Ordained to the priesthood by Archbishop Sir Frank Little.

Transferred to 1996 Perth, he was parish priest at Saint Joachim’s,

Victoria Park, and lecturer at the University of Notre Dame, Fremantle.

Interrupted a 1977 teacher training course at Christ College in

1998

He attended the Synod for Oceania in Rome as Archbishop Hickey’s theological adviser.

1978

JANUARY 31: First profession as a Salesian and graduated from Christ College at the end of that year.

1950 - 70

as the ninth Bishop of Perth and sixth Archbishop of Perth.

He was made 2003 the Provincial Delegate for Formation in the Australian Province until 2007.

He was appointed 2006 as parish priest of Saint John the Baptist, Clifton Hill.

He was made par2007 ish priest of Saint Joseph’s, Collingwood in addition

Melbourne to join the Salesians of Don Bosco.

2002

He was a member of the Provincial Council of the Salesians until 2007.

eturned 1999 RMelbourne.

1980

to

to his current parish.

APRIL 30: Bishop Costelloe was appointed as Titular Bishop of Clonard and Auxiliary Bishop of Melbourne.

JUNE 15: Ordained as a bishop.

1990

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22 February 2012, The Record

CHANGING OF THE GUARD

Bishop Timothy Costelloe becomes sixth Archbishop of Perth

Archbishop to be “very involved” in education Here is how Perth’s Archbishopdesignate Timothy Costelloe SDB answered a question on education during a media conference at St Mary’s Cathedral on 20 February.

Question: With the Gonski Review coming out today, how do you see your role vis-à-vis education?

Do you expect to take a handson role?

I do expect to be very involved in the field of education and Catholic education in particular … I’m a trained teacher myself and taught in secondary schools for some years before I went overseas to do further study.

And since I’ve been bishop I’ve been heavily involved in education – in Catholic education - both in Victoria and also nationally. So it’s

an area about which I feel very passionate.

The Gonski Review, of course, has just been published today. I haven’t had the chance to have a look at it … And so I’m reluctant to make any specific comments but I would just make this point: The Prime Minister and Minister Garrett have spoken often about their determination to make sure

that every child has access to the best possible education.

And whatever funding arrangements emerge from the Gonski Review and whatever decision the government finally takes, it is very important that at the heart of every decision is this conviction of the government - one that I think we would all share - that children and young people have the right to the

Pastoral in management style, youth

Our big loss is Perth’s great gain: Hart

By Robert Hiini SHE worked with him and received marriage instruction from him before he officiated her marriage to husband John on 9 January 2010.

So how does Melbourne youth worker Teresa Wilson rate Perth’s Archbishop-designate, Timothy Costelloe SDB? “He has a real heart for young people, being a Salesian and a teacher,” Ms Wilson said.

“He’s a very lovely pastoral person who really listens to what people have to say and really thinks about how he responds.”

Bishop Costelloe was involved in Ms Wilson’s recruitment to the directorship of Melbourne’s Archdiocesan Youth Office in 2008, helping to launch the agency in the wake of World Youth Day in Sydney.

Ms Wilson, who is currently the Deputy President of the St Vincent de Paul National Council, said it was difficult to delineate what initiatives were the bishop’s as distinct from those of youth office workers.

She puts that down to Bishop Costelloe’s management style.

“It’s part of the way he works,” she said. “He’s very willing to listen to ideas. If it sounds like a reasonable way of doing things, then that something he’s open to. That was my experience,” she said.

The bishop was personally involved in the youth office’s Foundation Series - “getting-backto-basics” formation sessions covering topics such as the Bible and the Eucharist.

The bishop spoke to the topic “Who is Jesus in Our Church”.

very best education they can possibly receive and that’s true even if they happen to go to a Catholic school. So I would be very disappointed if we were to discover that in the process of implementing whatever recommendations the government accepts our funding were to decrease or were not to keep pace with the constant growth in the cost of education.

By Robert Hiini

Archbishops of Perth, retiring and incoming, in discussion at St Mary’s Cathedral.

PHOTO: MICHAEL CONNELLY

Bishop: he is going to be tremendous

By Robert Hiini BISHOP Donald Sproxton welcomed the announcement that Archbishop-designate Timothy Costelloe SDB would be the next Archbishop of Perth.

The archbishop had the right mix of personal qualities and skills to endear him to Perth’s priests, Bishop Sproxton said.

Catholic Social Justice Council Archdiocese of Perth PASSIONATE PROMOTERS OF SOCIAL JUSTICE NEEDED. Do you feel strongly about the dignity of each human person? Are you passionate about Jesus’ calling to bring the Good News to the poor? If so, the Catholic Social Justice Council would love to hear from you as we are currently seeking nominations to join the Council in 2012.

The Council role is to promote Catholic Social Teaching in the Archdiocese and the wider community. Current members of the Council come from a diverse background and possess unique skills sets and we hope to continue this in 2012.

Area of focus for the council in 2012 include: 1. The promotion and education of Social Justice and Catholic Social Teaching within the Catholic Church community 2. Working towards justice within WA prisons 3. Social Justice and Families 4. Increased use of technology and social media in the promotion of Social Justice.

Members of the council support the church to live out Christ’s mission, whilst deepening their understanding and formation in Social Justice and Faith.

If you are interested and are able to give an average of 2 hours a week over a period of a months, please contact the Receptionist, Catholic Pastoral Centre, Highgate, on Ph: 9422 7900 or email reception@highgate-perthcatholic.org.au and obtain an application form.

Applications close on Friday 9th of March 2012.

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“He’s going to be a great theological leader and teacher and he’s a good pastoral man. He’s got great empathic skills - great compassion,” he said.

“I think he’s going to be a tremendous asset to us and, of course, a great loss to Melbourne.”

Bishop Sproxton said archbishop Costelloe had the respect of his fellow bishops throughout the

Australian bishops’ conference.

Archbishop Costelloe’s time as a parish priest and lecturer in Perth, from 1996 to 1999, holds him in good stead.

“Having lived here for a while he’s got a lot of friendships already among the priests so I think he’ll easily move into the diocese and be accepted by them,” Bishop Sproxton said.

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“Set My People on Fire”2012

PERTH’S new archbishop is “a great appointment for Perth and a big loss for Melbourne,” Archbishop Denis Hart told The Record last Monday.

The Melbourne archbishop lauded Archbishop-designate Timothy Costelloe’s work both as a priest and as an auxiliary bishop of Melbourne.

He singled out his work as a lecturer and formator including his contribution as Episcopal Vicar for Tertiary Education and as the bishop responsible for Melbourne’s youth office.

“He’s just been an all rounder who has been a tremendous asset to the diocese,” Archbishop Hart said.

“I’m sure he will be a tremendous asset to Perth.”

Archbishop-designate Tim Costelloe is presently Auxiliary Bishop of the Northern Region of the Melbourne archdiocese and will take up his new position in Perth on 21 March.

He is the second auxiliary bishop Melbourne has lost this month with the Pope appointing Auxiliary Bishop Les Tomlinson to the Bishophric of Sandhurst on 3 February. The post of Auxiliary Bishop in Melbourne has, in recent years, been filled by several well-known bishops, including Canberra-Goulburn’s Archbishop Mark Coleridge.

The details of a farewell Mass for Bishop Costelloe at St Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne will be released shortly.

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22 February 2012, The Record

Page 5

Servite students experience Order’s wider work

By Sarah Motherwell THE only Servite school in Australia is helping its students connect to the Servite Order’s work overseas by giving them the opportunity to be part of an annual pilgrimage.

Servite College in Tuart Hill offers students from Years 10 to 12, the opportunity to participate in a pilgrimage to India, America or Florence.

Most recently, 10 students and four staff returned from the Indian pilgrimage where students spent time in classrooms and school grounds getting to know the children, their lives and their needs.

Servite College Principal, Philip Cox, said the pilgrimages attract different sorts of students for different sorts of reasons.

“We’ve been working hard with the other pilgrimages to create a sense of the Order internationally,” he said.

Students departed for India on 27 December for the three-week pilgrimage, which covered about 4000km of the country.

Principal Cox said the Indian pilgrimage focussed not on sightseeing but on changing the lives of the students.

Over the three weeks, the students visited a number of Servite schools, convents and priories.

Every year Servite College fundraises money for Servite schools and parishes in India.

Principal Cox said in visiting these schools and parishes students support financially, they can see for themselves how important it is that they continue to support these communities.

Servite schools in India teach a range of students and specialise in

Year 11 Servite Student, Georgia Seragusana, is greeted by children at a Servite parish picnic in Chennai.

helping students with special needs.

One isolated rural school the Perth students visited runs a special programme to educate mothers who missed out on school as a child because they were required to work the land for their families.

The school also provides the mothers with the vocational skills to give them and their family’s financial security.

There are more Servite students in India than throughout the rest of the world combined. Servite

College’s next pilgrimage is in September when 14 students will visit a boy’s school in Anaheim and a girl’s school in Omaha.

Students will also visit the Order of the Servants of Mary headquarters in Chicago, staying with the fri-

PHOTO: SERVITE COLLEGE

ars. During the Christmas period, the Florence pilgrimage will take another group of students to the birthplace of the spiritual centre of the Servite Order.

The group will also visit Servite schools in Paris and England.

US governor vetoes ‘same-sex marriage’ NEW JERSEY Governor Chris Christie made good on his pledge to veto a bill legalising same-sex marriage passed by the state Legislature but at the same time said he might name an ombudsman to make sure the state’s current law recognising civil unions is respected.

When the Bill reached his desk and he vetoed it, Christie said “samesex couples in a civil union deserve

the very same rights and benefits enjoyed by married couples, as well as the strict enforcement of those rights and benefits.

“Discrimination should not be tolerated and any complaint alleging a violation of a citizen’s right should be investigated and, if appropriate, remedied,” the Republican governor said, suggesting an ombudsman be appointed.

Nedlands gets new Society man

By Sarah Motherwell Holy Rosary parish in Nedlands has welcomed Fr Joseph Sobb SJ as the new parish priest and said farewell to Fr Gregory Jacobs this month.

The parish officially welcomed Fr Sobb, 71, to the area at a sundowner on Friday, 10 February at the parish centre.

Fr Sobb said the sundowner was beautiful and very welcoming.

“I am feeling very happy to be here,” the incoming priest said, speaking to The Record after the event.

“As a Jesuit, one would bring Ignatian spirituality and adult faith education to the parish, which I have always been involved in.”

After living in Sydney for many years, Fr Sobb’s move to Perth is a return. He lived in Perth during the 60s. Fr Sobb said he is enjoying Perth but it is terribly hot.

He said he is pleased Perth is dry, unlike Sydney, where an unseasonable amount of rain has fallen this month.

Get a copy of Archbishop Hickey’s book

As the same-sex marriage measure moved through the Legislature, Christie, a Catholic, said legalising marriage for same-sex couples should be put on a November ballot. In testimony at a 24 January hearing, the New Jersey Catholic Conference urged state lawmakers “to continue to recognise marriage as a union between one man and one woman.

PRINCIPALSHIP

ST MUNCHIN’S CATHOLIC SCHOOL St Munchin’s Catholic School in Gosnells is a double stream, co-educational primary school catering for students from Pre Kindergarten to Year 6. The school has an enrolment of 385 students and was established in 1953 by the Sisters of Mercy.

The school enjoys a close working relationship with Our Lady of the Most Blessed Sacrament Parish in Gosnells, where the Salvatorian Order administers the Parish. The school motto, Sequere Veritatem, Follow Truth, helps students to focus on what is truly important in the school. Religious Education is the first learning area and it is a valued part of the daily curriculum.

Students have the opportunity to learn from subject specialists in Music, Physical Education, Dance, Information Technology, Library Studies and Italian. The school is an active participant in the Catholic Performing Arts Festival. Enrichment and Extension programs are part of the curriculum and a Before and After School Care program operates. Children can also enrol in this program during the school holidays.

The involvement of parents is valued at St Munchin’s and opportunities to assist in the classroom are encouraged. The Parents and Friends’ Association is an active part of the school and their fundraising support is an asset to the school community.

The successful applicant will be expected to take up this position at the commencement of Term 3, 2012.

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 for Leadership of the Religious Education area or its equivalent. A current WACOT registration number and a Working With Children number must be included with the application.

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

Enquiries regarding this position should be directed to Helen Brennan, Consultant, Leadership, Employment & Community Relations on (08) 6380 5237 or email wrd@ceo.wa.edu.au. All applications, on the official form, should reach The Director of Catholic Education, Catholic Education Office of Western Australia, PO Box 198, Leederville WA 6903 no later than Wednesday 7 March, 2012.

Page 6

22 February 2012, The Record

Perth school reunions bring back the memories

By Glynnis Granger ABOUT 200 women attended the first of three school reunions last Sunday – with one later this month and one next month – held in Perth, though two of the schools have long been demolished.

Last Christmas Day, the Sisters of Our Lady of the Missions began a year of celebration to mark 150 years of their foundation in Lyon, France, by Euphrasie Barbier, in 1861.

One of two of their Perth schools held last weekend’s reunion and

Bishops give cautious support to R18+ rating

another will be held in March.

The now non-existent Sacred Heart Convent in Tuckfield Street, Fremantle, founded 110 years ago, met last Sunday, 12 February, at the Melville Bowling Club, Canning Highway, Alfred Cove.

The school was blessed and opened by Bishop Gibney on 22 July, 1902. In 1964, it became known as Our Lady of the Missions College, and the following year the new building was officially opened

by Bishop Myles McKeon.

In 1980, a decision was made to close the college, due to a decline

in enrolments, and it closed the following year, and was demolished.

The other school established by the Sisters holding a reunion is Sacred Heart Primary in Highgate.

The reunion will be from 2pm to 5pm on Sunday 25 March at the school in Mary Street, at a cost of $20.

The Tuckfield Street School had the same uniform as the Highgate School.

Sacred Heart Highgate was opened by five Sisters on 25 October, 1897, and the Order was present at the school for almost

100 years, which is still open.

The third reunion and the second one this month will be for now non-existent Holy Cross Convent, of Carey Street, Kensington, opened as St Patrick’s School, on 30 January, 1938, by Archbishop Redmond Prendiville.

A central hall for Mass on Sundays and two classrooms had been built. The Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart taught at the school, travelling daily from their convent in South Perth, which is still used by the Sisters. The reunion will be held on Saturday, 25

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February, at the Melville Bowling Club, mentioned above, from 6pm to 10pm, at a cost of $10 per person or $20 per family.

There will be a sausage sizzle, full bar, free tea and coffee and spot prizes and organiser Julie Bowles (nee O’Hara) would appreciate advance payment. Her telephone number is 9397 0638.

In 1952, the Holy Cross parish was set up and the name of the school changed to Holy Cross Convent. In 1970, enrolments were up to 105, but the school closed in 1972.

St Simon Peter sends 300 bears of love for kids

By Mark Reidy

By Mark Reidy

IN AN effort to help parents protect their children from violent and sexually graphic material, Australia’s bishops have opted to support the introduction of legislation that proposes to create an R18+ classification for computer games, the Australian Catholic Office for Film and Broadcasting (ACOFB) have announced.

ACOFB Director, Fr Richard Leonard SJ, said that the bishops wanted to make it clear they did condone the material of games that would fall into the R18+ category, but that the existence of this rating would give parents a clearer understanding of the contents of a specific game.

Fr Leonard said that with current legislation computer game classifiers did not have the G; PG; M; MA15+; R18 and RC (Refused Classification) ratings that is at the disposal of film classifiers and that MA15+ is the highest category that can be placed on a game.

He said this allowed many games that should have received a restricted rating to be rated with an M15+ and this could give parents a false impression of the adult content.

“But, now, at least a parent can see an R18+ classification and know that it is not only illegal for their children to be playing them, it is clearly immoral,” he said.

The bishops have repeatedly argued for the strengthening of the Classification Act so that parents can protect their children from media that demeans humanity.

They had opted to cautiously support the proposal because there was no hope of banning such material, Fr Leonard said.

“The Church opted to support parents to have as much information as possible, and to enable them to work with their children to make the best media decisions for their family.”

A TEDDY bear can be a great source of comfort for a sick or injured child according to Barbara Hunsress, one of the dedicated members of the St Simon Peter Craft Group in Ocean Reef.

Mrs Hunsress told The Record that the group, which has been running since 1995, has provided the Joondalup Hospital Emergency Department with over 300 teddy bears since last February and have received positive feedback from nursing staff.

“Staff working at the hospital have commented how the teddy bears have worked wonders for children who have arrived in a very distressed state”, Mrs Hunsress said.

Prior to February, the Craft Group, which meets every Monday at the Church Community Centre, was providing the teddy bears to St John’s Ambulance to give to children that needed to be transported to hospital, Mrs Hunsress explained, but due to health protocols regarding infection, this project was discontinued.

The group was then invited by the Emergency Department early last year to redirect their teddy bear ministry to those children admitted at the hospital. Mrs Hunsress said that it was pleasing to know that the dedication of the team of volunteers was providing some comfort for young children at such a vulnerable time. “One of members of our group was recently approached by her beaming granddaughter who had been in the Joondalup Emergency Department. ‘Guess what?’ she announced proudly, ‘I got a teddy bear for not crying’.”

The impact of the Craft Group’s labour of love has also, for many years, reached across the globe to Zimbabwe and South Africa, where they provide support and assistance to orphanages and children afflicted with AIDS.

An artist works on the restoration of a statue of Mary in Havana, Cuba, on 8 February in the lead up to the visit by Pope Benedict from 26-28 March.

PHOTO: NANCY PHELAN WIECHEC

Valentine’s Day kit hopes to re-capture true love

By Mark Reidy BECAUSE secular society is increasingly intolerant of Christian beliefs, the Church should take opportunities such as St Valentine’s Day to highlight their shared values, the Bishops’ Commission for Pastoral Life (BCPL) proclaimed in a kit released prior to the annual day for those in love.

In a letter introducing the St Valentine Day kit, designed to reaffirm the importance of Christian marriage, the Chairman of BCPL, Bishop Eugene Hurley, said that by

highlighting the positive good of shared values, the Church will be able to reinforce the need to protect them for the benefit of the whole community.

The kit, which was developed in conjunction with the Australian Catholic Marriage Council, not only provides notes and slides for parishes to use for the Liturgy on 14 February, but also information and suggestions on how to build a marriage friendly community.

“The ‘re-Christianisation’ of what has become a secular feast is a major aspect of what we are trying

to do,” said Ron and Mavis Pirola, Co-chairs of ACMFC. “St Valentine was a priest and

The re-Christianisation of what has become a secular feast is what we are trying to achieve. a martyr of the early Church, so this feast has a religious history, a history which sees the importance of sacramental married love in

society.” The kit, which was first developed in 2010, provides information on St Valentine, describing how he performed secret marriage ceremonies in the mid-third century in defiance of Roman Emperor Claudius II who had suspended all weddings to draw single men to serve in combat.

It is believed he was beheaded on 14 February in the year 269 and became the patron saint of engaged couples, happy marriages, love and lovers.

“In a world of widespread desecration of sexuality and marriage,

the relatable love of married couples is a powerful sign of hope for others,” the kit reads. “In the Catholic tradition, some of the most powerful signs of God’s presence are the sacraments.

“The sacrament of marriage has a vital role in revealing the passionate love that Christ has for his bride, the Church. The steadfast love between a husband and wife witnesses to the reality that Christ loves, forgives, heals and transforms his beloved ‘St Valentine’ people.”

To download the St Valentine Day kit go to: www.catholic.org.au

22 February 2012, The Record

Benedict XVI urges support for big families POPE Benedict XVI called on governments and communities to help large families, saying children represent hope and the well-being of every nation.

“There is no future without children,” he said at the end of his general audience on 15 February in a greeting to members of an Italian association of large families.

“In today’s social context, a family made up of many children constitutes a witness of faith, courage and optimism,” he said.

“I hope that adequate social and legislative measures are promoted that safeguard and sustain large families, which represent richness and hope for the whole country,” he said.

In his catechesis, the pope continued a series of talks on prayer by highlighting some of Jesus’ prayers during his crucifixion.

Jesus’ willingness to forgive his tormenters and executioners is an invitation to all Christians to forgive those who cause harm or are in the wrong, the pope said.

People should pray for those who have done them wrong with “the same attitude of mercy and love that God has for us,” he said.

Jesus called on God to forgive his executioners as they nailed him to the cross and divided up his clothing. He said the soldiers “do not know what they are doing” and, by forgiving them, he showed “the depths of his reconciling love for humanity,” which often sins out of ignorance, the pope said.

His prayer invites all Christians to follow the same “difficult gesture of also praying for those who do us wrong or hurt us – always knowing to forgive so that God’s light may illuminate their hearts,” Pope Benedict said.

Jesus then prayed for the man crucified next to him – the good thief – who recognised Jesus as the Son of God and asked him to “remember me when you come into your kingdom.”

Jesus told him there would be a place for him in paradise, thereby giving the repentant man “unfaltering hope.” His prayer shows “that God’s goodness can touch us even at the last moment of life and that sincere prayer, even after a bad life, encounters the open arms of the good father,” the pope said.

Jesus’ final prayer on the cross was when he commended his spirit to God, showing his complete surrender to his father’s will, the pope said.

“It shows us the certainty that no matter how hard the trials, difficult the problems and oppressive the suffering, we will never fall out of God’s hands - those hands that created us, sustain us and accompany us on the journey of life guided by an infinite and faithful love,” he said.

- CNS Editor’s Note: The text of the pope’s remarks in English is posted online at: www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/ audiences/2012/documents/hf_ben-xvi_ aud_20120215_en.html.

Page 7

US Catholic leaders describe Obama contraceptive compromise ‘an insult’

By Carol Zimmermann A FORMER U.S. ambassador to the Vatican and the president of The Catholic University of America were among 300 signers of a letter who called President Barack Obama’s revision to a federal contraceptive mandate “unacceptable” and said it remains a “grave violation of religious freedom and cannot stand.”

On 10 February, Obama said religious employers could decline to cover contraceptives if they were morally opposed, but the health insurers that provide their health plans would be required to offer contraceptives free of charge to women who requested such coverage.

The change came after three weeks of intensive criticism that Department of Health and Human Services’ contraception mandate would require most religious institutions to pay for coverage they find morally objectionable, despite a limited religious exemption.

Now questions have been raised over how the revision announced by the president will pertain to the many dioceses and Catholic organizations that are self-insured and whether it could still force entities morally opposed to contraception to pay for such services.

The letter signed by former Ambassador Mary Ann Glendon of Harvard and Catholic University’s

John Garvey, along with professors and other academics, and Catholic and other religious leaders, said it was “an insult to the intelligence of Catholics, Protestants, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Jews, Muslims, and other people of faith and conscience to imagine that they will accept an assault on their religious liberty if only it is covered up by a cheap accounting trick.”

Other critics also said the change was a matter of semantics and still failed to address the conscience rights of faith groups and the issue of religious liberty.

Supporters, who included organisations such as Catholics United and Catholic Democrats, said it was a viable response that would keep conscience rights intact and address the health care needs of women.

Still others who opposed the contraceptive mandate said the revision could be a step in the right direction but needed more study because many questions “remained unanswered.”

Michael Galligan-Stierle, president of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities, told CNS that his organisation has “conveyed to the administration that we are interested and deeply committed to ongoing conversation” about the issue.

“We look forward to more indepth, serious negotiations based

on religious liberty being the primary issue on the table,” he added.

Holy Cross Father John Jenkins, president of the University of Notre Dame, who has called the HHS mandate “profoundly disturbing on many levels,” said Obama’s revision was a “welcome step toward recognising the freedom of religious institutions to abide by the principles that define their respective missions.”

In a 10 February statement on the university’s website, he said that a “number of unclear and unresolved issues” must be addressed and he hoped they would be discussed in future meetings of US bishops and other religious leaders and White House officials.

An Obama administration official who asked not to be named told CNS in an email on 13 February that the White House planned in the coming weeks to convene “a series of meetings with faith community leaders” about the HHS mandate. A particular focus of the meetings, he said, would be self-insured group health plans that cover the employees of many Catholic dioceses and institutions.

The Catholic Health Association, in a 13 February statement on its website, said it was looking forward to “reviewing the specifics of the changes in the mandated benefits.” Last autumn, 18 Catholic

colleges asked the Obama administration to exempt all religious individuals and institutions from being forced to participate in the federal contraception mandate.

The Dominican Sisters of Mary Mother of the Eucharist in Michigan, issued a 13 February statement taking the Obama administration to task for failing to “comprehend Catholic moral reasoning and the full-meaning of the principle of religious liberty.”

They called it “insulting” that the Obama administration suggested the revision would be “net cost neutral.”

“It is simply impossible to ensure that the insurance companies will not pass on those costs to the organisations and individuals who conscientiously object to their insurance policies covering abortion-inducing drugs, sterilisation, and artificial contraception,” the statement said.

The US Leadership Conference of Women Religious called the revised mandate “fair and a helpful way for us to move forward.”

“This ruling is a major victory for religious liberty and women’s health,” said a statement signed by several professors at Catholic universities and other religious leaders including Sister Simone Campbell, a Sister of Social Service who leads Network, the Catholic social justice lobby.

- CNS

Rio shouldn’t fail to impress for WYD 2013

Christ the Redeemer statue is seen atop Corcovado Mountain in Rio de Janeiro. World Youth Day will be held in Rio in July, 2013.

PHOTO: CNS/RICARDO MORAES, REUTERS

While an ongoing massacre occurs, the world has forgotten us: Bishop A SUDANESE bishop said the world has forgotten people in his diocese, where thousands of people have sought shelter from a government bombing campaign and aid agencies cannot gain access.

“There is an ongoing forgotten massacre on the Nuba Mountains” where “people are dying of starvation and bombings,” said Bishop

Macram Max Gassis of El Obeid, Sudan.

Bishop Gassis’ diocese straddles a border area of Sudan and South Sudan, and members of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North fought with the South for independence. For months, the Sudanese government has been fighting the SPLM-

North in Sudan’s South Kordofan state. Bishop Gassis told Fides, the Vatican missionary news agency, in mid-February that “even the Church has had its victims.”

However, he told Fides, none of the priests, religious and medical personnel has abandoned the people, despite the constant bombardment and seeing the “man-

gled bodies of civilians, especially children.”

Sudan has allowed only a limited amount of aid into the area, and on 14 February the UN Security Council, expressing “deep and growing alarm with the rising levels of malnutrition and food insecurity,” called on the government to let it send aid workers to South

Kordofan and other states along the Sudan-South Sudan border.

Bishop Gassis expressed concern over increasing tensions between the neighboring countries. He said South Sudan does not want war, but Sudanese President Omar Bashir “tries to solve problems with new wars.”

- CNS

Page 8

22 February 2012, The Record

Fight intolerant secularism: UK minister

New Irish nuncio takes the direct approach

A “DEEPLY intolerant” militant secularism is taking hold of Western societies, said a senior British government minister heading a delegation to the Vatican.

Such secularism “demonstrates similar traits to totalitarian regimes - denying people the right to a religious identity because they were frightened of the concept of multiple identities,” said Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, a Muslim.

She said Europe must counter the threat by becoming “more confident and more comfortable in its Christianity.”

The Cabinet “minister without portfolio” and co-chair of the ruling Conservative Party made her remarks in an article published by the London-based newspaper The Daily Telegraph on 14 February, the first day of a two-day Vatican visit by the delegation of seven gov-

ernment ministers. They were to be joined by Archbishop Vincent Nichols of Westminster before they met the Pope and Vatican officials to discuss a range of policy issues.

The trip was more than “a Valentine’s Day ‘love-in’ with our Catholic neighbours,” said Baroness Warsi.

“This is about recognising the deep and intrinsic role of faith here in Britain and overseas.”

She said that in her address to the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy, which she said she wanted to “ring out beyond the Vatican walls,” she would be arguing that “to create a more just society, people need to feel stronger in their religious identities and more confident in their creeds.”

“In practice this means individuals not diluting their faiths and nations not denying their religious

heritages,” said Baroness Warsi.

“I will be arguing for Europe to become more confident and more comfortable in its Christianity,” she said.

“The point is this: The societies we live in, the cultures we have created, the values we hold and the things we fight for all stem from centuries of discussion, dissent and belief in Christianity.

“These values shine through our politics, our public life, our culture, our economics, our language and our architecture,” she said.

“You cannot and should not extract these Christian foundations from the evolution of our nations any more than you can or should erase the spires from our landscapes.”

The Baroness said she feared “that a militant secularisation is taking hold of our societies. We

see it in any number of things: when signs of religion cannot be displayed or worn in government buildings; when states won’t fund faith schools; and where religion is sidelined, marginalised and downgraded in the public sphere.

“It seems astonishing to me that those who wrote the European Constitution made no mention of God or Christianity,” she said.

The Baroness, the first Muslim female to hold a Cabinet post in a British government, said one of the “most worrying aspects about this militant secularisation is that, at its core and in its instincts, it is deeply intolerant.”

She said in her article that in an audience with Pope Benedict XVI on 15 February, she would give him her “absolute commitment to continue fighting for faith in today’s society.”

- CNS

Bernini’s art drafted to underscore a papal point LEADERS and members of the Catholic Church do not have the authority to determine its teaching and structure but are called to ensure its fidelity to Jesus and to the faith passed on by the apostles, Pope Benedict XVI told the 22 new cardinals he created.

“The Church is not self-regulating, she does not determine her own structure, but receives it from the word of God, to which she listens in faith as she seeks to understand it and to live it,” the Pope said in a homily on 19 February during a Mass concelebrated with the new cardinals in St Peter’s Basilica.

The College of Cardinals was expanded on 18 February, and the new members included Cardinals Timothy Dolan of New York; Edwin O’Brien, grand master of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulcher of Jerusalem and former Archbishop of Baltimore; and Thomas Collins of Toronto.

The family, friends and pilgrims accompanying the new cardinals arrived at St Peter’s extra early after many of them missed the consistory because the basilica was full. While they waited for Mass to begin, they joined in the recitation of the rosary in Latin.

The Mass marked the feast of the Chair of St Peter, a liturgical solemnity focused on the authority Jesus entrusted to his apostles.

The feast usually is celebrated on 22 February but was early because Ash Wednesday falls on that date this year.

The basilica’s bronze statue of St Peter, with its foot worn smooth by centuries of pilgrims’ caresses, was draped with red and gold liturgical vestments for the feast day.

To illustrate his homily, the pope used another artwork, Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s towering sculpture of the Chair of St Peter, which is topped by the Holy Spirit window in the basilica’s apse.

The Catholic Church is like a window into which the light of truth shines and through which a response of love should radiate, he said.

“The Church herself is like a window, the place where God draws near to us, where he comes toward our world,” the Pope said.

Bernini’s sculpture features a large throne, which symbolises the authority Jesus gave to St Peter, supported by four ancient church theologians - two doctors of the church from the East and two from

POPE Benedict XVI is acutely aware that recent years have been tough for Irish Catholics as a result of the clerical sex abuse scandals, said the new apostolic nuncio to Ireland.

Speaking during a Mass to mark his formal welcome as Pope Benedict’s representative in Dublin on 19 February, US Archbishop Charles Brown said the pontiff understands “that these recent years have been difficult for Catholic believers in Ireland.”

Archbishop Brown said the Pope was “scandalised and dismayed as he learned about the tragedy of abuse perpetrated by some members of the clergy and of religious congregations.”

“He felt deeply the wounds of those who had been harmed and who so often had not been listened to,” he said.

Archbishop Brown, a former official in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith said, “I can tell you from my personal experience that he (Pope Benedict) has always had - and he continues to have - a great love for the people of Ireland and a high regard for the Catholic Church in Ireland, with its history of missionary richness and tenacious faith.”

Archbishop Brown presents his credentials to Irish President Michael Higgins in Dublin on 16 February.

PHOTO: CNS/JOHN MCELROY

New Cardinal John Tong Hon of Hong Kong poses for photos with guests during an evening reception in Paul VI hall at the Vatican on 18 February.

PHOTO: CNS/PAUL HARING

the West, representing the unity and diversity within the universal church, he said.

The support of the theologians also “teaches us that love rests

Catholics cannot make things up as they go along. They must follow tradition and Church teachings. upon faith. Love collapses if man no longer trusts in God and disobeys him,” the Pope said.

“Everything in the Church rests

upon faith: the sacraments, the liturgy, evangelisation, charity,” as well as “the law and the Church’s authority,” he said.

Catholics cannot make things up as they go along, he said. They must follow tradition, the sacred Scriptures and the teaching of the apostles, explained and interpreted by the fathers of the Church and the Popes.

All the Church teaches and does in the world must be motivated by love and lead to love, the Pope said.

“A selfish faith would be an unreal faith,” Pope Benedict said.

“Whoever believes in Jesus Christ and enters into the dynamic of love that finds its source in the Eucharist discovers true joy and

becomes capable, in turn, of living according to the logic of gift,” he said. Like the basilica’s Holy Spirit window with its radiating golden rays, “God is not isolation, but glorious and joyful love, spreading outward and radiant with light,” the Pope told the new cardinals.

Entrusted with God’s love, every Christian - and, particularly, each of the Church’s cardinals - has a duty to share it with others, he said.

The altar servers at the Mass were seminarians from the Pontifical North American College, the US seminary in Rome where Cardinals O’Brien and Dolan both had served as rectors before being named bishops.

- CNS

Referring to the pontiff ’s previous role as head of the doctrinal congregation, Archbishop Brown insisted that, “from the beginning, Pope Benedict was resolute and determined to put into place changes, which would give the Church the ability to deal more effectively with those who abuse trust, as well as to provide the necessary assistance to those who had been victimised.

“Pope Benedict has been relentless and consistent on this front, and I assure you that he will continue to be,” he said.

A series of recent independent inquiries uncovered decades of abuse and cover-ups of sexual abuse within the Church and in church-run institutions.

One judicial report accused the Vatican of being “entirely unhelpful” to Irish bishops trying to deal with abuse.

Last July, Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny delivered a speech accusing the Vatican of adopting a “calculated, withering position” on clerical sex abuse. The Vatican then recalled and reassigned Archbishop Brown’s predecessor, Archbishop Giuseppe Leanza.

In opening remarks at the 19 February Mass, Dublin Archbishop Diarmuid Martin said Irish Catholics welcomed “the help of Pope Benedict in leading our wounded church toward repentance and healing.”

“We desire to work together to build a different, more humble church, but also a renewed Church, confident of the contribution of the teaching of Jesus Christ for the Ireland of tomorrow,” he said.

- CNS

22 February 2012, The Record

Page 9

Former Anglicans retrain for the cloth FORTY-TWO former Anglican priests from across the country have officially begun their training to become Catholic priests.

It was both a long-awaited milestone and the beginning of a new journey as they gathered in the Archdiocese of GalvestonHouston for the first formation weekend in late January at St Mary Seminary and Our Lady of Walsingham Church in Houston.

The group included the wives of the Catholic clergy-in-training, so there was a total of 76 participants.

More than 100 former Anglican priests have applied to become Catholic priests for the US Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St Peter. To date, 42 have been accepted into the programme.

The application process for each candidate included a criminal background check, psychological evaluation and recommendations from the Catholic bishop where he lives and from his Anglican ecclesiastical authority, if possible.

Based in Houston, the ordinariate is similar to a diocese, but

national in scope. It is the first US ordinariate established by the Vatican earlier this year to facilitate and shepherd communities of former Anglicans wishing to join the Catholic faith while retaining elements of their Anglican heritage and traditions.

Our Lady of Walsingham serves as the principal church. St Mary Seminary is housing the ninemonth programme of formation.

On 12 February, a Mass of Institution also officially inaugurated the ordinariate.

At the same time, Father Jeffrey Steenson received the title of “monsignor” and officially became its head.

Seminarians currently enrolled at St Mary’s served as hosts during the opening day of the first formation weekend in January.

“I think the seminarians at St Mary understand how significant this is and they have been incredible,” Mgr Steenson told the Texas Catholic Herald, newspaper of the Archdiocese of GalvestonHouston. “They are so energised

about this - they know it is historical.” He credits the “extraordinary efforts and help” and “time and resources” of the archdiocese and Cardinal Daniel DiNardo with bringing about “exactly what Pope Benedict hoped for - the close relationship with the local diocese and the new ordinariate.”

Topics covered during the first

To date, 42 Anglican priests have been accepted into programme to train to become Catholic clergy. formation weekend included “The Life and Work of the Catholic Priest,” “Pope Benedict’s Vision of the Anglican Ordinariate,” and a keynote address and conversation with Marcus Grodi of the “Journey Home” programme on the Eternal Word Television Network.

More formation training comes

in the spring, covering subjects such as “The Petrine Ministry and Catholic Ecclesiology,” “Catechesis and the Stewardship of the Catholic Tradition” and “The Catholic Approach to Scripture.”

There also will be sessions on marriage; baptism/initiation; anointing of the sick; and the sacrament of reconciliation and instruction on the culture of the Catholic Church - from priestly manners to the ecclesial movements. Formation will conclude with individual theological assessments.

Several of those in formation lead Anglican-use Catholic communities throughout the country.

“This is something we have all been waiting for since 2009, and now in 2012, we are not just hearing about it but living it,” Randy Sly of Potomac Falls, Virginia, said of formation.

“It was just astounding to look around the room and realise that all of us have been brought together by the Lord for this very special time.”

Seminarian Charles Hough III of Granbury, Texas, echoed that sentiment.

“I’d been an Episcopal priest for over 30 years and many of us started together, ended in the Episcopal Church together and are now starting again together, moving into the fullness of the Church,” he said.

“It is an incredible time for us.

We have worked so hard and this is the culmination of a long journey, but it is the beginning of a new era for all of us to be in union with the See of Peter.”

Sly and his wife, Sandy, have been Catholics since 2006. Sandy recognised the “novelty” of meeting the other wives of seminarians but said their bond was certainly profound.

“It has been wonderful to meet other wives who are also on this journey, just to see that they are pouring their lives out for the Lord, like our husbands are,” she said.

“We want to be the best support for our husbands and for whatever we can do in ministry. We are just taking it one day at a time.” - CNS

Families who live Gospel will show the way THE FAMILY is the Church’s best ally for raising a new generation resistant to materialism and committed to living out the Gospel, Pope Benedict XVI told bishops from Africa and Europe.

“Europe and Africa need generous young people who know how to take responsibility for their future,” he said.

All institutions, like the family, school and Church, “must be well aware that these young people hold the future and that it is important to do everything possible so that their journey is not marked by uncertainty and darkness,” he said.

The Pope made his remarks during an audience on 16 February with 80 bishops, priests and other participants attending a joint conference organised by the Symposium of Episcopal Conferences of Africa and Madagascar, known as SECAM, and the Council of European Bishops’ Conferences, known by the acronym CCEE. The conference, held in Rome from 13 - 17 February, was dedicated to finding ways in which European and African Catholics can cooperate in evangelisation.

During the symposium, Cardinal Josip Bozanic of Zagreb, Croatia, said that even though economic and social conditions in the two continents are vastly different, the Gospel is universal.

Wherever it finds itself, the Church has a message of faith that

Pope Benedict XVI gives Communion to a US nun during a Mass concelebrated with new cardinals in St Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican on 19 February. She was one of 10 Anglican nuns of the All Saints Sisters of the Poor in Baltimore who joined the Catholic Church last year.

PHOTO: CNS/PAUL HARING

“understands humankind, whether in Europe or Africa, as created in the image and likeness of God and who deep down has basic needs that only God can fully satisfy,” he said.

“Social and spiritual concerns

are both present; one is not separated from the other, but rather, they are dimensions of the one same integral development of the human person and society,” the Cardinal said.

In his speech to the group, the

Pope said a huge obstacle in proclaiming the Gospel is hedonism, “which has contributed to making the crisis of values in people’s daily life spread to the family and how people make sense of one’s life.”

The increasing problems of

pornography and prostitution are symptoms of this “serious social malaise.” The family safeguards traditions, customs, habits, and rituals of faith, and can have a big impact on fostering vocations, he said.

- CNS

Regnum Christi women’s branch leader latest to resign from position THE HEAD of the consecrated women’s branch of Regnum Christi, which is associated with the Legionaries of Christ, has resigned.

Malen Oriol, a Spanish member of Regnum Christi, had been offering to resign since October and did so again on 24 January during a meeting in Rome with Cardinal Velasio De Paolis, whom Pope Benedict XVI appointed in 2010 to oversee the reform of the Legionaries and Regnum Christi.

The reform began after revelations

that the order’s founder, the late Mexican Father Marcial Maciel Degollado, had fathered children and sexually abused seminarians.

Legionaries Father Andreas Schoggl, the Order’s spokesman in Rome, told Catholic News Service on 16 February that Oriol originally was appointed to a six-year term in 2004, but stayed on past 2010 to avoid even more changes as the Legioanaries and Regnum Christi tried to reform their organisations.

In a letter sent on 12 February to Regnum Christi’s 800 consecrated

women, Oriol said she needed “time, prayer and distance to find God’s will for me.”

Oriol also noted that “in recent years, there has been been a growing number of consecrated who have abandoned” the group either because they discerned another vocation for themselves or because of the “history and life of our founder,” Father Maciel.

She did not say whether she personally would continue as a consecrated member of Regnum Christi, join a group of other for-

mer members in seeking to live their consecration under a local bishop or would leave consecrated life.

A statement on the US website of Regnum Christi said the organisation did not have details about the plans of a group wanting to serve under a bishop, “but we wish them all the best in their new endeavor and pray that they will be blessed with great success in their spiritual growth and service to the church. We are deeply grateful for all the years that they have lived as

consecrated members of Regnum Christi.”

Father Schoggl told CNS, “At the beginning of 2012, there were about 900 consecrated members in Regnum Christi: over 800 women and about 100 men. In comparison, at the end of 2008, there were 1,064 consecrated members, 956 women and 108 men.”

About 200 members left between 2009 and 2011 and about 50 new members were consecrated in that period, resulting in a net loss of about 150, he said. - CNS

Page 10

22 February 2012, The Record

The Warmth

Siberia of

A Jew in a prisoner of war camp in the midst of World War II, in Germany. Former South African prisoner of war, Isaac Katzenellenbogen tells his Perth grandson Ben Sacks a remarkable tale of friendship in a setting where he least expected it, and where one slip of the tongue would have meant certain death.

I

paused to consider the best way to begin my email. It was four in the morning, and six hours of amateur detective work had yielded a veritable treasure chest of information about my grandfather’s time as a PoW in the Second World War. Armed with an online translator and driven by my mother’s persistent pleas to “do something about Oupa’s [grandpa’s] story”, I had spent the night immersed in the German War Graves Commission website and the digital archives of forums discussing prisoner of war camps, Polish town planning and German racing car drivers.

My labours had yielded a number of leads: the history and precise location of the building where my grandfather had been interned, as well as the sugar factory where he had worked; a forum post indicating that the factory’s owner had once possessed one of only 43 SSK Mercedes that were ever built; and the rather odd finding that the owner’s granddaughter now sells cosmetics in Portugal.

Most importantly, however, I had ascertained the identity of a central protagonist in my grandfather’s story. A man my grandfather – now 90 years old – often spoke kindly of, and who left a lasting impression on him as an example of kindness and friendship in the most unlikely of settings. I began the email: “Firstly, I found him”.

***

The story begins in September 1943. My maternal grandfather, Isaac ‘Sakkie’ Katzenellenbogen, was a young Jewish man from the Western Cape in South Africa. He enlisted in an anti-aircraft regiment in his country’s armed forces when war broke out, but was captured at Tobruk and taken to a PoW camp in Italy. From there, he was transferred to a German camp in Silesia in what is now western Poland.

Almost immediately, he was sent from the main camp to a working commando in a provincial town called Brieg (now called Brzeg).

Some 150 prisoners were interned in a small hotel, which had converted its beer hall into a barracks.

Most of the inmates were put to work in a sugar factory owned by two German industrialists, Kurt and Ernst Neugebauer.

My grandfather worked on the floor of the factory for several months until he was injured moving metal frames. He was taken to hospital, and after being discharged he was appointed as a cook – Herr Koch.

Because he did not have to work at the factory, he came in close contact with the guards. Having studied German at high school, he was able to communicate relatively easily with the German sentries, workmen and officials. It was in his capacity as Herr Koch that he came to know the German sentry that the inmates called “Siberia”.

about 50km south of Brieg.

While my grandfather was preparing coffee for the other prisoners, Siberia often engaged him in conversation. Most of the time he would “rant about the Nazis’ behaviour”. He called them liars when they claimed to have sunk millions of tonnes of Allied shipping.

As a Catholic, he also complained bitterly about the Nazis’ treatment of the Church. “Sakkie”, he would say, “the retribution will come!” He was deeply embittered with the Nazis and seemed pleased to have found a sympathetic ear to share his grievances with. Indeed

He asked him “Sakkie, what is your name?” My grandfather replied “Katzenellenbogen”. “Yes, Katzenellenbogen”, Siberia repeated.

“My name is Switalla, and I come from a town called Oppeln.

And in Oppeln there was also a Katzenellenbogen. He was a general director of the cement works.

He was a very influential man and married to a German actress. But he was arrested and I don’t know what happened to him.”

He continued his conversation, but my grandfather was shrewd enough to guess his purpose. And

this formed the basis of much of their conversation.

My grandfather never forgot Siberia’s words against the Nazis, and his prediction that they would receive their just deserts. “All this convinced me of his sincerity, and I felt I could trust him. He was generally accepted by all the inmates as a friend.”

These episodes set the tone for my grandfather’s clearest memory of his friend. One morning, Siberia approached my grandfather at the door of his cookhouse.

then he said, “you know Sakkie, I am Catholic”. My grandfather replied that there were many Catholics in South Africa, but that he was a Protestant. Siberia gave a sigh of relief. “That is wonderful you know, the Katzenellenbogen in Oppeln was a Jew”.

“He suspected that I was Jewish, but he was not trying to fish anything from me”, my grandfather told me recently. “He was concerned for me – really he was. I could feel it, one knows. This guy really took to me early on, and we were quite

Above: Desmond Smith (left) with Isaac Katzenellenbogen (right) during their internment in Brieg (Brzeg). Right: A recent photograph of Isaac Katzenellenbogen with his wife Peggy.

PHOTO: COURTESY KATZENELLENBOGEN FAMILY.

My grandfather still remembers his “good friend” clearly after almost 70 years. Siberia – Richard Switalla, to give him his real name – was “quite a big chap”, always dressed in German Army uniform, with a full head of hair and a cleanshaven face.

He had fought in the German army in the First World War, and his nickname was taken from the time he spent in Siberia as a PoW during the conflict. When my father knew him he was in his mid-50s and lived with his wife in a town called Oppeln [now Opole],

close. I was very fond of him and we built a wonderful relationship. I shall always remember him for the way he tried to warn me.”

Siberia’s kindness was not the only example of German compassion in Brieg. The German sentries and factory officials were adamant that there were no Jews among them, despite a prisoner list including names like Selwyn Abrahams and Lionel Jacobs alongside my grandfather.

German women working at the factory even brought food occasionally – including a roast duck – to give to the prisoners as special treats. On my grandfather’s birthday in September 1944, the manager of the sugar factory – Herr Schultz, who had been a waiter before the war – organised for a rabbit to be killed. He then served it to my grandfather himself.

Today my grandfather recalls these stories with incredulity. He remembers his time in Brieg with great fondness, but none more so than his friendship with Siberia.

The main object of his stories, he told me, was to bring out the kindness he experienced in situations where no one would expect it.

This relatively sheltered life in Brieg was eventually disrupted by the war. By January 1945, the Germans were retreating en masse as Soviet armies drove them back.

My grandfather recalls that they could see “thousands of Germans moving along, evacuating from the towns close by to go deeper into Germany”.

On 23 January, the soldiers and PoWs in Brieg were ordered to march into Germany. Preferring freedom to the prospect of a 500km march into the heart of Nazi Germany, my grandfather joined a group of prisoners in an attempt to escape.

The group made themselves scarce in a hidden room in the beer hall that had been used as a dressing room for concerts before the war, and managed to avoid any remaining German soldiers until Soviet forces arrived two weeks later.

The Germans, Siberia included, marched the rest of the prisoners towards West Germany. Siberia never made it back: my grandfather later heard that he had been killed when the camp was shelled on the first night of the march.

22 February 2012, The Record

Page 11

Conscience by the rules leads to our freedom I am confused about an aspect of conscience.

If we are to use our conscience to follow the Church’s teachings, doesn’t that take away our freedom as adult Christians?

Y

My grandfather’s story left me wondering about Siberia. Who was this man?

Despite my grandfather’s vivid memories of his time in the camp, and of Siberia, it was initially difficult to pinpoint his identity. He had introduced himself as “Rudolf Zwitalla”, but my grandfather was unsure of how to spell his surname, which made a broad internet search fiendishly difficult.

My mother then shared our information on a war research forum. We were advised to visit the German War Graves Commission website and using their phonetic search tool, I was able to circumvent the uncertainty surrounding his name. I then cross-referenced dates and locations to find Siberia.

In the end it happened fairly quickly. One name stood out from the hundreds of fair matches to my search: Corporal Richard Switalla, born 1891.

All the pieces slipped decisively into place: his age and rank matched my grandfather’s description; he was killed in an area only a day’s march from Brieg; and, most definitively, he was killed on the 24th of January, which – to the day – dovetailed with my grandfather’s account of when the Germans left and were shelled the next day. He was buried

in Chwalibożyce, a small village a few kilometres northeast of Brieg.

We lodged an enquiry with the German War Graves Commission, asking if he had any living relatives. Within a few weeks we were informed that there were none registered, but that the information was being passed on to their Polish office for further investigation in local records.

"He suspected that I was Jewish but he was not trying to fish anything from me. He was concerned for me. I could feel it."

***

I suppose that is where the story should end. We have no new leads, and it seems that we can only sit tight and hope for good news from the War Graves Commission. But the story doesn’t seem to have ended there at all. My younger brother – who had been in Holland on student exchange – visited Brzeg last week. A first cousin also plans

to travel there in the next few months.

I’m not entirely sure what they’re hoping to find. February weather in Brzeg is bitterly cold, with fog and snow hindering any reconnaissance work. The guesthouse and sugar factory survived the war, but I doubt they would still be standing 60 years on.

As for the grave in Chwalibożyce, getting to the village is challenge enough. If it ever was marked, the grave has probably fallen into disrepair and become undistinguishable from the surrounding necropolis.

And who, in a village of 85 dwellings, would be willing and able to direct an English-speaking tourist to it?

Either way, I still feel a gnawing impulse to follow my brother and cousin to Brzeg and Chwalibożyce with only a hazy plan of walking in my grandfather’s footsteps and paying tribute to his friend.

I’m not sure what I would say or do if I did find the grave, only that I would like it to be something that captures the fondness in my grandfather’s voice when he speaks of his old friend.

Somehow it seems important to commemorate a man who offered friendship, kindness and concern when they were most needed.

Above: Photographs taken inside and outside of the guesthouse used to intern PoW's in Brieg during WWII. Below: A recent photograph of the guesthouse in Brieg (now Brzeg) Poland.

PHOTOS: COURTESY KATZENELLENBOGEN FAMILY.

our question is one many people ask. Let me try to explain how the Church’s teaching, far from taking away our freedom, rather enhances it.

It comes back to the very purpose of freedom. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches: “God created man a rational being, conferring on him the dignity of a person who can initiate and control his own actions. ‘God willed that man should be “left in the hand of his own counsel,” so that he might of his own accord seek his Creator and freely attain his full and blessed perfection by cleaving to him’” (GS 17; Sir 15:14; CCC 1730).

This statement, which quotes the Second Vatican Council’s Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et spes, gives the reason why God made man free: “so that he might of his own accord seek his Creator and freely attain his full and blessed perfection by cleaving to him.”

That is, man is free not in order to do whatever he likes, but in order to seek God of his own accord and find his happiness through union with him.

The following point in the Catechism returns to this idea: “By free will one shapes one’s own life. Human freedom is a force for growth and maturity in truth and goodness; it attains its perfection when directed toward God, our beatitude” (CCC 1731).

By the use of our free will, we shape our lives for better or for worse. We are all aware of people who have ruined their lives by the improper use of freedom: by deciding to use drugs, by joining the wrong group of friends, by having an abortion, by marrying the wrong person, etc.

But at the same time, as the Catechism says, freedom can also be a force for growth and maturity, and it attains its perfection when directed toward God, who is the source of our beatitude.

In this light, the Church's teaching is a great blessing. It shows the way to true human flourishing, pointing out forms of behaviour that are harmful both to ourselves and to others, as well as forms of behaviour that lead to true happiness and ultimately to God. Of course we are always free, psychologically speaking, to go against these teachings. God does not force us to do good or to avoid sin. We are not puppets or automatons, moved

Q&A

By Fr John Flader

by God or the Church at their whim. We are children of God. God is a loving father, like the father in the parable of the Prodigal Son (cf. Lk 15:11-24), who undoubtedly tries to dissuade his son from leaving home, but who in the end lets him go off and ruin his life through sin, but then as a true father welcomes him back with open arms.

Similarly, the Church is a good mother who wants the best for her children, and who shows us the way to happiness, to heaven. Her teachings are like road signs that show us

Even the steel barriers on curves and hillsides help us travel along the road. Nobody would say they take away our freedom. the way to our destination. The signs do not force us to follow them. They do not take away our freedom but rather show us how to use it properly. Even the steel barriers on curves and hillsides help us travel along the road without going off. No one would say they take away our freedom.

The more we use our conscience to follow the Church’s teaching and do what is right, the freer we become. A person who does not know the way to happiness or who is addicted to alcohol or sex feels a prisoner of their ignorance or addiction.

For this reason the Catechism says, “The more one does what is good, the freer one becomes.

There is no true freedom except in the service of what is good and just. The choice to disobey and do evil is an abuse of freedom and leads to ‘the slavery of sin’” (CCC 1733; cf.

Rom 6:17).

In summary, a sensible person listens to what the Church is teaching and uses their conscience to follow this teaching of their own accord, knowing that in so doing they will find the happiness they desire, both here and hereafter.

Page 12

22 February 2012, The Record

W you were Here ish

Amy Wellborn is one of the best-known Catholic writers in the Englishspeaking world but nothing could prepare her for the death of her husband Michael Dubruiel in 2009, leaving her with four young sons to raise.

A panoramic view of Palermo in Sicily. Michael Dubruiel’s ancestors had come from Sicily and his wife Amy Wellborn took their sons there after his sudden and tragic death.

I

raced into the backyard just after midnight.

Barefoot, in pyjamas, I raised an empty brown pill bottle into the frigid Kansas darkness, swept it through the air, snapped the white disc of a lid on top, and then rushed back into the silent house, through the hall into my room, wrote on a slip of paper, and taped it to the bottle.

“Air” the label said “from 1970”.

The bottle still rattles around in a drawer in my father’s house, I think. I wouldn’t throw it away if I ran across it. I wouldn’t open it either. I don’t know why. After all, it’s only air.

***

Here’s what I remember from the first days of a February years later.

Sunday morning, we arrived at Mass at Our Lady of Sorrows parish so late that the only seats left were in the balcony. The first scripture reading was already happening by the time the five of us squeezed into the pew: me; my husband, Mike; our two little boys, Joseph and Michael; and Katie, my teenaged daughter from my first marriage.

The elderly pastor - elfin in appearance, but resonant and dramatic in tone, always ending his sentences with a forceful, downward emphasis as if his words were screws he was forcing into a particularly tough board - began to preach from the sanctuary below us. In the Gospel that morning, Jesus had exorcised demons, but this would not be Monsignor’s subject. That would be death, of course.

Mike and I glanced at each other, amused. For in the five months we

had attended Mass in the parish in our new city of Birmingham, Alabama, we’d noticed this about the pastor: he liked to talk about death. No matter what the Gospel or the feast, it seemed, he’d find his way to it: we are all going to die and there is no more important task than preparing for the certainty.

No surprise, really. The man had spent his adult life ministering to the dying and the grieving, and he was in his late seventies himself.

Death might be on his mind.

So that morning, nodding only briefly to Jesus and the demons, Monsignor moved on to a book he’d been given about life after death experiences, and here we were again at death’s door, where he would talk to us about death and always his most repeated point being prepared for it.

So yes, I remember glancing at Mike and him glancing back and I remember sharing knowing, slight smiles at death’s introduction. We settled back to listen, to pray, to think about work tomorrow, about the next book or article deadline, all of us up there in the balcony, an enormous bas-relief of that Lady of Sorrows cradling her dead son on the sanctuary wall behind the altar straight ahead of us, in plain view.

I remember Mike kneeling beside me after Communion. I remember because his posture was just a little different than normal. He usually looked ahead, or down at a misbehaving son, or just rested his chin on his folded hands. That morning, I remember, he knelt there, his face buried in his hands. I remember that we went to Whole Foods after Mass and the boys picked out

muffins and Katie got a croissant and Mike wandered off to look for something and he came back with a bag of loose tea because that was his latest thing. He said this was part of his renewed project of getting back into shape, a project interrupted by our move and the substantial pressures of his new job as director of evangelisation (and the Pro-Life Office ... and the Family Life Office ... and the Campus Ministry Office ... and the Child Protection Office ... he seemed to add a job every month we’d lived there) for the diocese. Mike was a man of routines,

I remember how Mike grabbed me and hugged me in the middle of the woodlands, boys tramping through the thick brown leaves ... and this transition had messed with his running and lifting schedule in a big way. He wasn’t in the worst shape he’d ever been but neither was he in the best, so in this new year, he’d get back on track.

For some reason, the tea would evidently be a part of that. I remember him walking down the aisle, cradling boxes of tea and a box of filters in his arms. The tea was green, because cutting down on caffeine would be part of the renewed health regime too.

I remember him wrapping his arms around me at the Botanical

Gardens a few hours later. It was February, and although a few weeks later it would snow, that day it was mild enough for a walk in and through the various, quite diverse areas of that beautiful public space: the Japanese garden, hills rich with ferns, the greenhouse desert - all of us except Katie, who stayed back at the apartment, swamped with homework.

I remember how when we had arrived and I was getting ready to close up and lock the car, I held my camera in my hand and debated whether I should bring it along or not.

I looked around at the still mostly dead, not quite budding vegetation.

I considered the boys and Mike waiting for me near the fountain at the entrance. No, I decided. There will be another time - later, when there’s more in bloom and more colour. We’ll all come back then and there will be more pictures.

Yes, I remember how Mike grabbed me and hugged me in the middle of the Alabama Woodlands, boys tramping through the dry brown leaves thick across the ground around us. I remember how happy we were - ecstatic, even - to be back in the South, to never have to endure another northern Indiana winter, those months of backbreaking snow that just seemed to go on and on. Not here. Very soon, the dogwoods would be budding, the pink and violet azaleas would be blossoming, and we would return to walk in the gardens again, to see the colours, to relax in the certainty of new life gently but surely overwhelming the old. It would all happen, we were certain: another

PHOTO: ONLINE SOURCE

walk, another spring. Years of them, stretching ahead.

I remember the next evening, which was 2 February, the Feast of the Presentation, a celebration of the day Joseph and Mary took the baby Jesus to the Temple forty days after his birth as a symbolic offering of their child to God. I decided we would do a special prayer before dinner, so I printed out a very condensed version of Night Prayer: the last of the daily prayers in the Liturgy of the Hours. Now, that Night Prayer, or Compline, always includes a prayer called the Nunc Dimittis, words taken directly from the Gospel of Luke. An elderly man named Simeon met the Holy Family at the Temple that day and thanked God in words very appropriate for those minutes before we release ourselves to sleep: “Now, Master, you may let your servant go in peace, according to your word, for my eyes have seen your salvation, which you prepared in sight of all the peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and glory for your people Israel.”

Those of us who could read, recited it aloud; those of us who couldn’t, fidgeted. Mike knew it by heart because he prayed these prayers every day himself, and had almost his whole adult life, as a seminarian, as a Catholic priest, and after leaving active priestly ministry in 1993, as a layman working in education and Catholic publishing. He never stopped praying those prayers. I remember that deep voice. I can hear it now.

Lord, now you may let your servant go in peace . . .

I remember him sitting on the

22 February 2012, The Record

Page 13

Praying the way leading to encounter with divine

Gerard Koe in his Melbourne office.

SUBJECT: GERARD KOE

T

Michael Dubruiel and son, below, at the Colosseum in Rome on 3 February 2009.

couch after dinner, laughing at a sitcom. I remember him raising himself grudgingly from that couch to head trudging, so tired, into our room, where his computer waited for him, and where he needed to finish up his column for the diocesan newspaper, due tomorrow.

He had been so tired so early in the evenings for the past couple of months, so tired so early at night, it

sometimes seemed as if he wouldn’t make it down that short hall from the living room to the bedroom.

But, he had been saying, getting into shape would take care of it. He would get his energy back.

Still thinking about that column, he posted on Facebook in the early evening. Eventually, he got it done, that column. He wrote things in it like, “None of us knows what

PHOTO: ONLINE SOURCE

the future holds,” and, quoting his friend Fr. Benedict Groeschel, “We have no plans except to be led by God.” That’s what the man wrote.

I remember.

If I could put it all in a bottle, snap the lid on tight, and keep it forever, I would. But this - this is the best I can do.

Continued on Page 14

hirty years ago I read a book by Br Joseph Schmidt FSC, called Praying your experiences. He proposed that everything that happens in life has a lesson or an opportunity for insight and growth in it, and that the Holy Spirit can speak powerfully through our experiences of life, if only we take time to reflect and ponder over them.

Throughout the day, I consciously maintain a posture of prayerful mindfulness so that every event, encounter or experience is quickly processed to understand what God is trying to tell me.

There are more intense prayer times at the beginning and end of each day but I also try to spend about 15-20 minutes daily meditating.

The mantra I recite fluctuates between “Lord Jesus Christ, light of the world, I thank you for awakening my divine soul” and “Lord Jesus Christ, I thank you and absorb your healing Love.” Prayer is a communication between God and me.

I was born in Malaysia where I later joined the De La Salle Brothers for about 17 years.

In 1989 I got a scholarship to study psychology in Illinois followed by another scholarship to do a Masters degree in pastoral counselling at Loyola University, Chicago.

After completing my studies I returned to Malaysia and continued as a Brother till I left two years later in 1995. I married in 1996 and worked in a local university.

In 2001 I migrated to Melbourne where I now live with my wife and three lovely children. I work as a family drug and alcohol counsellor at CatholicCare’s St Mary of the Cross Centre which provides counselling services free of charge to the families of individuals suffering from abuse of alcohol and other drugs.

I see my work with clients more in light of awakening their souls and helping them to live life to the fullest.

I had a case at work where a client’s life fell apart when

PHOTO: COURTESY GERARD KOE

How I

Pray

with Debbie Warrier

he was around 40 because of a series of mishaps. There was post traumatic stress involved which caused depression and emotional distress.

He started drinking excessively and that too spiralled out of control until eventually this got too much for his wife who threatened to leave him.

One problem lead to another until the point when he saw me, he was in the depths of despair and feeling suicidal.

Counselling helped him understand how it had all come to this point.

It generated hope and equipped him with emotional resilience to better manage his problems.

It also helped him see the relationship between the tragedies he normally encountered in life, with his sense of self and emotional maturity which in turn are related to his family of origin and early childhood experiences. I helped him understand the nature of his soul, its journey in life, its purpose, etc, as well.

I believe that awakening to our deepest divine soul is ultimately the purpose of life.

I gradually lead him into that experience through prayer and an increasing devotion to Jesus. Through this he found increased peace; stability and wisdom. In about six sessions he moved from being desperate and suicidal to being hopeful, optimistic and ready to re-engage once again with life purposefully. He has not touched alcohol for the last three months.

Spirituality flows from our openness to life and grace; from struggling with own doubts and fears and allowing the Divine to penetrate our consciousness. It comes from a profound encounter with the Divine both in us and beyond us as in God.

Page 14

22 February 2012, The Record

Continued from Page 13 The next afternoon - it was a Tuesday - I slumped against the cool tiled wall of a hospital emergency room, looking at him for the first time since he and Joseph had left the apartment earlier that morning.

He was covered with a light blue sheet up to his bare shoulders; he looked as if he were dozing on the table on the other side of the room.

But he was dead. He had been dead all day, and I didn’t even know it.

They had left the apartment that morning, he and seven-yearold Joseph, just as they always did, around 7.30. He’d dropped Joseph off at school, then driven directly to the YMCA down the road. He’d just started going there; they didn’t know him at the front desk yet, couldn’t tell you who he was. He went to the locker room, changed his clothes, stepped on a treadmill, and started to run.

After about ten minutes, he raised the speed. I know this because the woman running next to him noticed, impressed because he was holding that quicker pace. Then he dropped to the floor, hard. She was a dentist and had CPR training, so she knew what to do and what to look for. “His eyes were open”, she told me kindly but bluntly over the phone two weeks later, “but there was nothing there”.

I was grateful to her. But I was also jealous. Resentful, even. She’d been with him when my husband, my best friend, drew his last breath.

Not me. So what was I doing while my husband died? Mundane things, the things I did most every day. I had basically spent the morning blogging about churchy matters, throwing some laundry into the wash, reading to four-year-old Michael, and being irritated about the inevitability of dinner. I was at a point of great frustration with everyone’s varied culinary and dietary needs and desires - a daughter convinced she was fat but who wouldn’t eat fresh vegetables, a husband who only wanted to eat fresh vegetables, and two little boys who really

which seems to be the only real street in the village is empty. We pass a large stone fountain in the middle of the tiny square, pouring out fresh acqua from its spout.

We keep walking, suitcase wheels taking a beating, past a vending machine that sells contact lenses, past the parish church, past white plastic tables and chairs in a shaded courtyard, and finally arrive at the pensione where we would spend the next few days of summer.

Just down the hill, a half mile away, the Mediterranean glistened, a brilliant blue. We drove along it on our way here from the Palermo airport, and we would step into its waters several times over the next two weeks to let ourselves be cooled by the sea. We would wade in it and plunge into it here in the north, and a week later, far on the other side, the southern coast of Sicily. In between, we would see ruins and castles, we’d get lost, eat gelato, light candles in dark churches, and pray under stars.

Every moment of it, I would look for him. It was like that every day at home, anyway, so why not?

Why not take that daily routine of remembering and searching, of excavation of life and death, those memories of my husband laughing, of his body cooling under a blue sheet, that constant deep, frantic prayer for his little boys, why not take the cross and the empty tomb, weeping mothers and wounds probed by a doubter.

Why not take it all out of a beige-coloured door apartment in an Alabama summer, heavy with humidity, memories, and landmarks, why not wrest the top off the bottle of the past and spill it out here?

In the pictures in the guidebooks to Sicily, all I saw was the past, remnants of what was dead and gone. It seemed right. Maybe here in Sicily, picking my way on worn-down paths around tumbling ancient walls and broken columns, I will catch a clue as to how to live with it all. Because here the veil between past and present seems as thin as

Author and blogger Amy Welborn with her late husband Mike in 2006.

wouldn’t eat anything that didn’t lie on the colour spectrum from beige to brown. Yes, having to deal with dinner for this picky crowd struck me as a big problem, an obstacle to my complete happiness.

The phone call came at one, just as Michael had gone for his nap on his lower bunk in the boys’ room.

The caller ID screen on the phone in the kitchen identified the source of the call as a local hospital, and I almost didn’t answer it, assuming it was a wrong number. But I did and I listened in growing confusion as the woman on the other end asked if my name was Amy. After I said yes, she told me that there was someone named Mike at the hospital there who was associated with someone named Amy and they wondered if I was the Amy in question so would I please come down so they could check it out. Seriously. That was all I could get out of the woman except the advice to leave my young child at home. They wouldn’t even answer my direct questions. “Is it ‘Mike? Is he alive?”

“Please just come down. Ask for Lee. Do you know where to park?”

So over the course of a hideous forty-five minutes, I put Michael

in the car, trying not to wake him, drove to Katie’s school, got her out of class, and drove back to the apartment, where she would stay with him. On the drive, I whispered a report of the phone call, telling her and telling myself that even if

He looked as if he were dozing on the table on the other side of the room. But he was dead.

He had been dead all day, and I didn’t even know it. something had happened to Mike, he was probably still alive. Surely.

We told ourselves that. But even as I assured her, I was shaking, inside and out.

On the way downtown by myself, I prayed and cried hard. I banged the steering wheel and shook it; I told myself, He’s alive, he’s alive, he’s alive… I tried to tell God - I shouted at God - to make sure he remembered, we just moved her,

PHOTO: ONLINE SOURCE

he’s only fifty … two little boys.

He’s alive, he’s alive.

Please.

***

It’s late June now, almost five months after that day, and the four of us, Katie, the two little boys, and I - without a drop of Italian blood between us - are hauling suitcases over cobblestones in a tiny little town in the north of Sicily. We make a ridiculous, embarrassing amount of noise as we bump our way through a small plaza past a small fountain, headed to one of the three streets in this tiny, quiet village.

I had parked the compact white rental car in the lot outside the village, only understanding later, in retrospect, what the elderly lot attendant had been trying to tell me, in his mix of Italian and English that although cars were prohibited in the village, generally, it would be perfectly all right for me to pull up to the door of the bed and breakfast and unload.

But I didn’t understand, and I see him shake his head at us as we walk away, clattering. Except for all our commotion, the street,

22 February 2012, The Record

Page 15

Questionbox Questions about the Catholic Faith

I am a devout Catholic. Recently, I have been reading messages about the end times. All the other Churches are talking about it but it seems our Church does not think that it is important to talk about this and the fact that there is a HEAVEN and a HELL. Is there any reason why our priests, bishops, etc are not telling the faithful about these End Times?

A

the cooling breeze from the sea, maybe, just once in a while, it will whip aside, it will lift, and I’ll see.

This book is about how we got from here to there, from February to June, from Alabama to Sicily, and why. It’s not my autobiography or his biography or a portrait of our marriage. It’s not a theological treatise on the Last Things, far from it, or a guide on how to live with grief.

It’s a memoir of what we, mostly I, went through, thought, prayed, and did during a trip to Sicily, a place I had never once before thought about going in forty-nine years of life, a trip I impulsively planned about a month after my husband died of a heart attack.

I wrote it because, as a longtime book, column, and blog writer about matters of faith and life, I could not avoid writing about grief and loss and faith in the months after Mike’s death. I did wait, though. I hesitated every time before tapping the “publish” button on my blog because I didn’t want to be seen as seeking sympathy or exploiting it. Exploiting him. But then every time I would go ahead and post a blog entry related to grief, readers’ reactions, as they thanked me and, most helpfully, shared their own experiences, convinced me it might be all right.

There was something else, too. People kept dying. They just wouldn’t stop.

If we are Christians, we have two kinds of hope constantly held out to us: the hope that the cross gives, that our sins have no more power over us, that in our suffering we are not alone, that God knows, that God suffers, mysteriously with us; and the hope of the empty tomb, that death has no more power over us either, that Jesus Christ lives.

But still, in the midst of the hope, the pieta remains. Where is your hope now? We went to Sicily to see.

common mistake made by some Christians is not so much getting something wrong as over exaggerating something that is right. Luther had a correct insight, but he over exaggerated his insight with regard to justification by faith to the point where the subtlety of the teaching got lost and there developed a tit for tat argument between Luther and Church authorities.

I write this as I have no intention of entering into a tit for tat discussion with those who are preaching the end times.

An understanding of the end times is in fact part of the very fabric of Catholicism.

Each year as part of the liturgical cycle the readings for the end of the Church year and those in Advent reflect both an anticipation of the Birth of Jesus and an anticipation of the birth of a new reality when everything is to be made new again in Christ. All Saints Day and All Souls Day are also rich liturgical reminders of heaven and hell and the communion of saints. At each Mass in the midst Eucharist prayer we proclaim “We proclaim your Death, O Lord, and profess your Resurrection until you come again”.

In response to a series of natural disasters in Australia and overseas, some Christians who have a somewhat literal understanding of how to read the Bible see these events as if those who wrote the Bible were writing about them. The technical term for this practice is isogesis. Isogesis is the practice of putting meaning onto the text rather than getting meaning out of the text.

Some classic examples of isogesis include, in their day, seeing the four members of the Beatles as the four horseman of the apocalypse in Rev 6:1-8. Around the same time the European Economic Community which at the time had 10 members was seen as the 10 horned dragon of Rev 12. Clearly this way of interpreting the Bible was wrong then and it is wrong now.

The Bible does not contain secret messages that were placed in the text by the authors at the time when it was written that refer to events or people now. Those who claim that it does are wrong and not in line with a Catholic understanding of how to interpret the Bible.

The best summary of the Catholic understanding of

The cover of the book Wish You Were Here, by Amy Welborn, the story of a woman and her family’s trip to Sicily to grieve the loss of her husband. The book is available for purchase online now.

PHOTO: ONLINE SOURCE

how to interpret the Bible is to be found in the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation from the Second Vatican Council. What follows is just a paragraph of what is a very important document in the Catholic Church.

Since God speaks in sacred Scripture through men in human fashion, the interpreter of Sacred Scripture, in order to see clearly what God wanted to communicate to us, should carefully investigate what meaning the sacred writers really intended, and what God wanted to manifest by means of their words.

To search out the intention of the sacred writers, attention should be given, among other things, to “literary forms.” For truth is set forth and expressed differently in texts which are variously historical, prophetic, poetic, or of other forms of discourse. The interpreter must investigate what meaning the sacred writer intended to express and actually expressed in particular circumstances by using contemporary literary forms in accordance with the situation of his own time and culture. For the correct understanding of what the sacred author wanted to assert, due attention must be paid to the customary and characteristic styles of feeling, speaking and narrating which prevailed at the time of the sacred writer, and to the patterns men normally employed at that period in their everyday dealings with one another.

For all Catholics an awareness of Heaven and Hell and the end times should and does make up part of their religious imagination. These images however, are part of a much larger vision of life and of God with a clear continuation between our life as we live it now and eternal life. Many Catholics wait in eager anticipation of the return of the Lord as they work at making the world a place that is worthy to receive him.

As noted above the mistake that some of our brothers in other Churches make is not so much they have got something wrong as they have exaggerated something right to the point where the one idea crowds out any other understandings we might have about Jesus Christ.

To read the whole document visit the Vatican website. http://www.vatican.va/ archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/ vat-ii_const_19651118_deiverbum_en.html

Is there something about the Catholic faith you want answered?

Contact: Catholic Enquiry Centre info@catholicenquiry.com

THE RECORD

Another great Record editorial

I SHOULD like to draw everyone’s attention to the editorial on page 16 of The Record on 1 February. If you do not normally buy this Perth Catholic paper, please get this one.

It is on the subject of the current US Government’s blunt attack on the Catholic Church’s Healthcare System in that country.

It is a chilling description of the Obama Administration’s” ideological holy grails” (quoting the editorial). As the Editorial says: … ”In many ways the Obama move is hardly surprising … For the president and the Democratic administration he represents, issues such as universal access to abortion, sterilization and contraception are ideological holy grails …”

It ends up, in the last paragraph, by warning that “The lesson for Australia, which tends strongly to adopt social and moral changes enacted in Europe and The United States is also clear.

It seems clear that the possibility of similar moves in this country are not so much an issue of “if ” but “when”…”

The Catholic Healthcare System in the US (in 2002), consisted of 625 hospitals … and was the US’s largest non-profit healthcare system.

The Catholic Bishops of the USA are trying to “rally the faithful” to fight the Government on this matter. Here’s hoping the faithful respond and do not passively sit back and get steam rolled.

As stated above, we in Australia must be vigilant and take an active part in protecting our Catholic Institutions here too. WE vote the politicians into office: don’t let them forget that.

Jerome Gonzalez WILLETTON, WA

Genesis confirms science PROPERLY perceived, there need be no contradiction between the first chapter of Genesis and the revelations of modern science.

What is really necessary is to consider precisely what is revealed in the first chapter of the Bible and, in particular, what the original written recorder of those words meant by the references to the word “day”.

Initially, it should be emphasised that in the very first sentence there is no indication whatsoever of how long it took God to create “the heavens and the earth” prior to any mention of a first day.

There is no compelling reason to believe it was intended to refer to a virtually instantaneous creation of the entirety of the physical universe.

On the contrary, a compelling case has been made to indicate that the use of the word day was a necessary literary device to indicate the sequence in which, in the very earliest era of alphabetic writing the

ab

d the t

It is easy enough to find attractive members of the opposite sex.

The problem is finding prospective candidates for whom words such as ‘Mass’ are not a joke.

Mark Baumgarten Seminarian for the Archdiocese of Perth Rome, Italy

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

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ne of the really great difficulties for Catholics, especially younger Catholics, today is the difficulty in meeting a prospective spouse. It is the greatest desire of life to love and to be loved, to experience the unique joy of meeting another who, one discovers, is the human answer to the question of each and every person’s life, someone who can be described as one’s destiny in this life. The problem for conscientious Christians is that Christianity, and especially Catholicism, interprets and understands the fundamental pattern of relationships we usually describe with words such as ‘marriage’ and ‘family life’ as something far greater than what the rest of the world understands by those words.

For Catholics, especially, marriage is a living icon of the interior life of God and in a very real sense marriage and family life are made in God’s image. Everything to do with marriage and family life, in fact, is based on the nature of the one who is the divine creator of the universe and all life - a communion of persons bound together in eternity by love. As such, it is something precious, a pearl of great price, different to every other arrangement of human society. Catholics see marriage as a sacrament and believe that every marriage involves three people: husband, wife and Christ, who is the source of the divine grace which makes Christian marriage a supernatural reality. The practical problem for Catholics who glimpse the magnificent and divine dimension of marriage is where to find someone with whom this life-giving and lifeaffirming reality can be shared?

As Australian life has rapidly secularised over the last 50 years or so, participation in the life of the Christian community that is the Church has, numerically, declined. Catholic parishes have shrunk and the intensity of the life of many parishes, compared to two or three generations ago, has also declined. The modern secularising forces which regard religious faith as unfashionable, irrelevant and often ridiculous have affected Catholic family life deeply so that numerous Catholic families have been almost unable to pass the faith on to their children.

Once, organisations such as the Young Christian Workers provided social occasions and outings where hundreds of young Catholics could meet and form friendships out of which marriages were born.

Today, such organisations no longer, effectively exist.

Convinced and practising Catholics whose entirely natural aspiration is to find a spouse who shares the same faith and values which will give their marriage an invaluable unity for life have nowhere to go. What was once a pool has now shrunk to a puddle and Catholic singles are, all too often, alone. As a result, PO Box 3075 to be single and to be Christian Adelaide Terrace and/or Catholic and seeking a PERTH WA 6832 spouse is now an intensely difficult experience. The Church office@therecord.com.au should recognise and respect Tel: (08) 9220 5900 this. It is easy enough to find Fax: (08) 9325 4580 attractive members of the opposite sex but the problem has become finding prospective partners for whom words such as ‘prayer,’ ‘Mass’ and ‘Confession’ are not regarded as jokes. For believing Catholic women the problem must be particularly intense. In a society that has, in some respects, become more or less barbarianised, men who will respect their God-given femininity and treat it with the dignity it deserves are increasingly rare. As belief in marriage has crumbled in Australian life, Australian men have become largely ignorant of anything except the semi-pornogrified concepts to do with fidelity and marriage they learned from popular culture and their peers.

The future of the Church in Australia obviously depends, therefore, substantially upon focusing on rebuilding the vision of Catholic marriage and family life. This is little comfort to those who discern their calling - now - is marriage and sharing in the divine vocation of becoming co-creators of the world and history with God. But it is one reason why parishes might wish to consider how to develop the social aspects of their day to day existences. It is through social events that friendships are formed and from which marriages emerge. Catholic parishes have enormous potential to promote the rebirth and growth of Catholic Christian family life and should contemplate throwing as many resources into developing this as realistically possible. The constant description of parishes as ‘communities’ in recent decades has often sounded slightly hollow but it is in the affirming presence of many other peers who share, roughly, the same faith and values that an individual can feel that the path they have chosen in life is not ridiculous. Massive numbers of Catholic women currently grieve for their non-practising husbands who, good men though they may be, have by their indifference to their wives’ deeply held faith, undermined yet another Catholic family and denied their children the opportunity of knowing the freedom God brings. Where parishes promote a strong ethos of faith and a strong sense of belonging for all ages, communities grow, families are born and the future is created.

TWENTY years ago Archbishop Barry James Hickey confirmed me; 5 years ago he accepted me into St. Charles’ Seminary; 2 years ago he sent me to Rome to complete my theological studies. I doubt I will ever be able to fully repay him, but I hope I can in some small measure live up to his remarkably humble priestly example. Thank you Your Grace...

d the t n u

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Why our parishes could become marriage brokers

Fruit of a good Shepherd’s labour

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editorial

22 February 2012, The Record

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Letters to the editor literary medium would have been slabs of very hard rock. (Prior to the invention of vellum scrolls, the method of ensuring that the written record would endure for many centuries, would have been the painstaking chiselling of stone - Creation Revealed in Six Days by PJ Wiseman, 1948.)

Bearing this literary constraint in mind, we may now turn our attention to the condition of the planet earth as it had come to exist over aeons of cosmological development - prior to the moment when the sun began to shine.

It is only very recently that certain scientists have claimed that rocks and water would have been accreted more or less simultaneously over many millions of years during the formation of the Earth.

It had been supposed that the molecular union of hydrogen and oxygen in outer space could not have been possible because of the intensely destructive effect of sunlight on the molecules of water, but this idea overlooks the fact that the sun and the earth evolved simultaneously and that it took billions of years of solar evolution before the sun accreted sufficient mass for its gravitational energy to begin to fuse hydrogen atoms together to form helium and release sufficient explosive energy in the form of electromagnetic energy - including sunlight.

Prior to that vital development, the earth’s watery oceans and atmosphere would have been frozen.

From this perspective, the entirety of the first chapter of Genesis is in perfect accord with modern science’s understanding of evolution; the sun, the moon and the stars would not have become visible, from a planetary perspective, until after the frozen atmosphere had melted.

Hugh Clift LESMURDIE, WA

No problem with wedding registries MR TOUTOUNJI’S article in the 15 February 2012 issue of The Record, while very enlightening about the Aristotelian distinction between friendships of utility, pleasure and goodness, was one of the strangest pieces of Catholic journalism I have ever read. His lambasting of wedding gift registries as “base and utilitarian” is off the mark on a few key points.

First, and most importantly, gift registry cards are a mere suggestion to the potential gift-giver.

They do not - indeed they cannot - compel the gift giver to buy only from the registry, or even to buy a gift at all.

They therefore do not, as Mr Toutounji states, “put conditions on the gift” or create “duress”. I know of no wedded couple who has ever taken offence at receiving a gift not listed on their registry.

Secondly, Mr Toutounji fails to appreciate that gift registries are a form of practical charity to the gift-giver. They take the stress out of deciding what to give to the

newlyweds, if this is an issue, and provide guidance for guests who may not know the couple well.

On this point, the reality is that there are always such guests at weddings, such as friends of the couple’s parents or distant relatives.

Registries also prevent a couple from receiving several of the same gift, and the embarrassment to the gift-giver that can entail.

Thirdly, wedding gifts have traditionally served the practical purpose of helping newlyweds to set up their home at a time of their life when, typically, expenditure is high and finances are low, assuming of course that Mr Toutounji is not writing about couples who have lived together before marriage and therefore “already have everything they need”.

In this way, and without overstating the point, wedding gifts can be seen to serve the ontological purpose of marriage in a special way.

As such, Mr Toutounji’s likening of gift registries to a bratty boy handing out a list of desired gifts to invitees at his sixth birthday is misplaced.

Forgive me if Mr Toutounji’s article was meant to be satirical and I have simply lost my sense of humour in the course of the several weddings I have attended in the past five years, including my own. It is true that gift registries are unnecessary and should not be mandatory.

The lambasting of gift registries as a “base and utilitarian” infiltration into friendship, however, is a case of over-philosophising. If Mr Toutounji’s view is correct, then woe be to the humble weekly envelope “giving” programmes common in parishes throughout the country which would be equally, if not more, “base and utilitarian” than wedding gift registries.

Mr Toutounji has written some excellent articles in The Record, and I continue to follow his column, and your paper, with great interest and affection.

Tom Kwok Turramurra SYDNEY, NSW

First concert misgivings faded

I SHARED Peter Gilet’s misgivings about concerts in our Churches until, coming out of St Patrick’s Basilica after an afternoon of glorious music performed by an incomparable Dominic Perrissinotto, I remarked to an elderly Oblate Priest that I did not think the Blessed Sacrament had been taken away.

The good Priest said “But why?

He enjoys it!” And after all, He gave to these musicians their talent, so why would He not approve?

Jesus is no kill-joy and must rejoice in the enjoyment of His children.

There is also the witness factor to consider. If we show by genuflection/sign of the Cross/bow, that we believe in the Real Presence, our non-Catholic friends might start wondering what it is that we have and want to know more.

By way of a plug, the First Pipe Organ Plus of 2012 will be on 18 March at 2pm in St Patrick’s Fremantle. See you there.

Rosemary Chandler SHELLEY, WA

Not quite correct...

CONCERNING the Concert in the Cathedral issue, I said it was imprudent, not illegal, to hold a concert in the Cathedral.

Peter Gilet BELMONT, WA

22 February 2012, The Record

Page 17

It’s time to give country schools an even break Bishop Greg O’Kelly SJ wonders what news the long-awaited Gonski report on school funding will give country schools.

T

he report of the Gonski Funding Review will soon be made public, and there has been a lot of commentary in the media about the new funding “model”. These commentaries typically focus on the benefits this model will deliver for the future schooling of our young people.

The talk is often about equity.

The Prime Minister had a good phrase: “demography is not destiny” – where you live should not have an untoward effect on your schooling outcomes.

I wonder what the Gonski Report will say about funding country schools, in particular, Catholic country schools.

Will it talk about the punishingly high costs of providing quality schooling in country Australia?

Information technology, formation of staff, bus travel for students to get to school, provision for students with special needs, recruitment costs, school building construction and maintenance costs, teacher accommodation?

Basically, there is a cost premium for every activity in a country Catholic school.

We do not begrudge the extra loadings allocated to government schools. We agree with them.

However, Catholic schools simply do not have the resources to match them, and this represents a failure in equity.

The Diocese of Port Pirie is my demography and it is an excellent example of less-than-reasonable funding equity. My diocese is the same size in area as France and Germany together and includes the lower part of the Northern Territory. We have 13 schools scattered across these distances.

What I say of my diocese pertains to all country dioceses in Australia, particularly the Outback ones.

Few city-dwelling Australians appreciate the challenges that the tyranny of distance brings in the country. City-based thinking is often blind to its impact in rural areas.

An Enterprise Agreement recently gave school staff an allowance of 74 cents per kilometre when travel was required for inservice purposes. Most in-service takes place in the cities.

Consider these examples from

my diocese, which could be matched by every other Catholic rural diocese. A round trip to Adelaide at 74 cents a kilometre costs our school in Peterborough at least $400, and often there are accommodation costs in the city as well. And then there is the cost of the replacement teacher, if one can be found.

Similar costs would apply at our schools in Port Augusta, Gladstone and Jamestown. At Roxby Downs it could cost up to $1400 to pay for the teacher’s travel and overnight stay. There is also a significant personal toll on a teacher who has to drive a thirteen hour round trip.

It is a very different case to simply driving from one Adelaide suburb to a meeting in another.

The government bus may only take Catholic school children as far as the nearest government school.

So 11 students at the Catholic school at Loxton are dropped off 16 kilometres from school at Loxton North. We had to pay $78,500 for a bus with seatbelts to ensure that small numbers of children can come to us. By contrast, to hire a bus to Adelaide and back costs $1,800.

Staff recruitment is a constant and expensive challenge, flying or driving applicants and accommodating them for interviews from the city to the bush.

Building costs in the country are 25 per cent dearer than in the city, and numerous extra costs need to be factored in to any budget for construction. The standard BER

So 11 students at the Catholic school at Loxton are dropped off 16 kilometres away at Loxton North. We had to pay $78,500 for a bus so these children could come to us. project at Roxby Downs gives the school a building shell, not a functioning hall.

Students with special needs also suffer more injustice in country areas and their needs must be met.

In some rural schools there is sim-

ply not the funding available to accommodate children who seek to enrol. We cannot afford to provide the services, and thus these parents are denied choice.

Government schools have all this paid for, and that is right and just. The Catholic schools in the bush struggle. They have dedicated staff and provide excellent teaching. The schools are in demand from parents, and they provide choice for those parents. But we need more government funding if we are to do the right thing by our children and our teachers.

All schools (not only the Catholic schools) need to be allocated the funding that gives them a chance of providing the same level of education city schools offer, on principle.

The people arguing for greater funding equity post-Gonski would do well to concentrate on how the young people in our regional and rural schools are faring, and how the balance can be re-set to give them and their teachers a better chance.

Greg O’Kelly is Bishop of Port Pirie and Chairman of the Australian Catholic Bishops Commission for Catholic Education

Drowning charities in more red tape Legislation to change the way not for profit organisations operate raises more questions than it answers, writes Martin Laverty.

A

quick question: How many not-for-profit organisations are there in Australia? 20,000?

50,000? 100,000?

In fact, there is a staggering 600,000 not-for-profit organisations around the country doing everything from caring for the aged and people with disabilities to running local sports clubs and community gardens and everything in between.

Given the massive scale of notfor-profits and the key role they play in the Australian community, the Federal Government has a process in place it says will reduce red tape for these groups and increase their accountability to donors and taxpayers.

To do this, an Australian Charities and Not-for-profit Commission (ACNC) is in the process of being built. A highly qualified and capable commissioner has been appointed, and legislation has been drafted to give this new body its mandate.

For those of us who promote not-for-profit reform, the ACNC presents an opportunity for it to manage all registration, fundraising oversight and reporting by not-for-profit organisations on behalf of the Commonwealth, State and Territory Governments.

It could be a one-stop-shop.

This national one-stop-shop could drive improvement in governance capacity for those not-forprofit organisations needing assistance to, in turn, improve the quality and scale of the contribution not-for-profit organisations make to the Australian community.

Regrettably, what the Treasury proposes in its draft legislation for the ACNC doesn’t come anywhere near achieving these aims. In fact, it actually proposes giving the commissioner powers that simply cannot be justified.

The draft legislation released in the run-up to Christmas indicates reform won’t be truly national. It does not deal with current State or Territory fundraising, reporting or registration requirements, which means some of the new ACNC requirements will lead to

duplication. The draft legislation despite its stated intention – does not suggest there will be red tape reduction for not-for-profit bodies. It does suggest increased audit compliance costs, less autonomy and a large dollop of legal uncertainty, which may result in making some lawyers rich.

it should recognise that charities do and often should have multiple purposes. Some of these purposes are often commercial in nature, which can generate income that helps cover costs of delivering other charitable services.

By way of illustration from the Catholic Health Australia net-

impact the home’s overall charitable status.

Treasury proposals also suggest changes are needed to current governance laws overseeing not-for-profit groups. Again, no case has been made as to what is wrong with not-for-profit governance. The options being tested by

It’s not clear why public shaming or closing down of a not-for-profit organisation should be a role for the new Commissioner.

A changed definition of charity is central to the Treasury proposals. No case has been made as to why a new definition is needed. Altering the current definition risks legal uncertainty, which could trigger expensive litigation as groups work out what a new definition actually means.

If the definition must be altered,

work, many will understand why a charitable aged care service might also operate a commercial linen business. Aged care homes, after all, wash hundreds of towels and sheets a day. Well run commercial linen services should generate income. When this income goes back into the charitable aged care home, its existence should not

Treasury may trigger more legal uncertainty.

Corporations, associations and trusts law oversees not-forprofit governance well at present.

Proposals to craft new governance rules may unbalance existing governance systems and trigger unjustified set-up costs.

The ACNC is proposed to man-

age this new “one size fits all” governance across vastly different organisations. Attempting to do so ignores the differences of the purposes and scale of not-for-profit groups. It may confuse existing monitoring of some of these by other Commonwealth agencies.

Importantly, governance change may not deliver an obvious benefit. New rules will not change service delivery, but will require organisations to change their compliance systems at unknown costs.

More compliance reporting looks set to result, suggesting red tape will actually increase, rather than increase.

Of perhaps most alarm to those who believe not-for-profit organisations deserve genuine independence from government, the draft legislation proposes to create a new legally uncertain test of “public trust and confidence” to inform when the commissioner can publicly shame, take control of or de-register a not-for-profit body.

Government is entitled to a role, but it’s not clear why public shaming, controlling or closing down of a not-for-profit group should be part of this role.

For-profit small business, regardless of how poorly they are managed, cannot be taken over by the Government. Nor should there be scope for not-for-profit organisations to come under such control, regardless of the credentials and ability of the commissioner.

The draft legislation is currently out for consultation. Its drafting has been rushed. Its well-intended elements have been overwhelmed by there not being time for discussion about the type of relationship government and an independent not-for-profit sector want the legislation to foster.

At the end of the consultation period, hopefully the legislation can be crafted to better engage Australia’s not-for-profit groups as partners of governments. It will ideally better engage State and Territory Governments in an agreement to harmonise all notfor-profit laws.

Martin Laverty is the CEO of Catholic Health Australia.

Page 18

22 February 2012, The Record

PANORAMA

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

SATURDAY, 25 FEBRUARY

Enq: John 9457 7771.

A Reunion for Holy Cross Primary School, Kensington Any ex-students or family members, please contact Julie Bowles (nee O’Hara) on 9397 0638 or email jules7@iinet.net.au.

TUESDAY, 6 MARCH

Thanksgiving and Healing Mass 12 noon at Holy Cross Parish, 1 Dianne St, Hamilton Hill. Archbishop Hickey will celebrate Mass for all VOV and new members. As usual, bring a plate to share. Enq: Frank 9296 7591, 0408 183 325.

NEXT WEEK SUNDAY, 26 FEBRUARY February Latin Mass 2pm at Good Shepherd, Streich Ave, Kelmscott.

Enq: John 9390 6646.

Secular Franciscan Order 2pm at the Polish Franciscan Community House, 35 Eighth Ave, Midland. We are lay people who live a life in Christ inspired by the life of St Francis of Assisi, the first recorded stigmatic. We are called to live simply, humbly and peacefully, recognising God in creation. We are inviting you to the monthly fraternity meeting to discover the richness of Franciscan spirituality for life today. Enq: Angela 9275 5658.

TUESDAY, 28 FEBRUARY Archdiocesan Ecumenical Affairs Committee 6pm at St Denis Parish Centre, 60 Osborne St, Joondanna. Initial meeting to plan ecumenical and interfaith events, and discuss interfaith issues and ecumenism at archdiocesan level. Any person interested in becoming part of this committee contact Fr Peter: 9242 2812.

Lenten preparation 7-8pm at St Benedict’s School Hall Alness St Applecross. Spirituality and The Sunday Gospels.

Make this Lent a time of growth and preparation for an outpouring of grace this Easter. Presented

by Norma Woodcock. Weekly short video broadcast at www.thefaith.org.au. Accredited -CEOFaith Formation for ongoing renewal. There will be a collection. Enq: 9487 1772 or www.normawoodcock.com.

THRUSDAY 1 MARCH Prayer in the style of Taize 7.30-8.30pm at Our Lady of Grace Parish, 3 Kitchener St, North Beach. Prayer, song and silence in candle light. The will be no Taize Prayer night on Thursday 5 April as it falls on Holy Thursday. Mass and ceremonies of the Lord will be conducted in the Parish. Enq: Joan 9448 4888 or 9448 4457 FRIDAY, 2 MARCH Catholic Faith Renewal – Meeting 7.30pm at St John and Paul’s Parish, Pinetree Gully Rd, Willetton. Songs of Praise and Prayer, teaching

by Fr Geoff Aldous on “ Vatican II and the lay vocation”. Followed by thanksgiving Mass and light refreshments. Enq: Kathy 9295 0913 or Ann 0412 166 164 or catholicfaithrenewal@gmail.com.

Pro-life Witness 9.30am at St Brigid’s Parish, cnr Great North Hwy and Morrison Rd, Midland. Begins with holy Mass followed by rosary procession to the nearby abortion clinic, led by the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate. Enq: Helen 9402 0349.

SATURDAY, 3 MARCH Day with Mary 9am-5pm at Good Shepherd Church, 44 Streich Ave, Kelmscott. Day of prayer and instruction based on the Fatima message. 9am video; 10.10am holy Mass; Reconciliation, procession of the Blessed Sacrament, Eucharistic adoration, sermons on Eucharist and on Our Lady, rosaries and stations of the Cross. BYO lunch. Enq: Franciscan Sisters of the Immaculate 9250 8286.

Vigil for Life 8.30am at St Augustine’s Parish, Gladstone St, Rivervale. Begins with holy Mass followed by rosary procession and vigil at nearby abortion clinic, led by Fr Paul. Weekly prayer vigils: Monday, Thursday and Saturday 8.30-10.30am. Enq. Helen 9402 0349.

SATURDAY, 3 TO SUNDAY, 4 MARCH Renewal Seminar John Paul Prayer Ministry 9.30am-5pm at Orana School Hall, Querrin Rd, Willetton (off Vahland Ave). Presented by John Paul Prayer ministry of Ss John and Paul Parish.

Fr Varghese and his team will be leading this seminar. BYO lunch. Refreshments provided. Cost: offering. Enq: Michelle 9456 4215.

UPCOMING SUNDAY, 4 MARCH Divine Mercy 1.30pm at St Francis Xavier Parish, 25 Windsor St, Perth. Begins with Mass, main celebrant to be decided. Homily: ‘St John Joseph of the Cross’.

Followed by holy rosary, Chaplet of Divine Mercy and concludes with veneration of First Class Relics of St Faustina Kowalska. Refreshments afterwards.

‘Set My People on Fire’ Catholic Bible Seminar 7.30pm at The Faith Centre, 450 Hay St, Perth.

Runs every Tuesday until 12 June. See programme and details: flameministries.org/smpof.html. Enq: Flame Ministries International 9382 3668 or fmi@ flameministries.org.

SATURDAY 10 MARCH Healing Mass 2.30 at St Francis Xavier Parish, Windsor St, East Perth. the Divine Mercy Healing Mass will be offered. Divine Mercy prayers followed

by Veneration of First Class Relic of St Faustina Kowalska. Refreshments afterwards. Enq: John 9457 7771.

St Padre Pio Day of Prayer 8.30am at St Anne North Fremantle Cnr Stirling Hwy and Alfred Rd. St Padre Rio DVD in Parish Centre.10am Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament, Rosary, Divine Mercy, silent Adoration and Benediction. 11am Holy Mass, St Padre Pio Liturgy, Confession available. 12pm Bring a plate for a shared lunch tea/ coffee supplied.

FRIDAY, 16 TO SUNDAY, 18 MARCH Lenten Retreat 7pm at God’s Farm, 40km south of Busselton. Fr Tony Chiera VG will give the retreat. Enq: For bus bookings ring Yvonne 9343 1897; other reservations Betty 9755 6212 or mail to PO Box 24, Cowaramup, WA, 6284.

SUNDAY 18 MARCH Meditative Prayer in the Style of Taize 7 pm - 8 pm at St Joseph’s Convent Chapel, 16 York Street, South Perth. Includes, Scripture, prayer, song (mantra) and silence in candlelight. Chapel door open 6:30pm Bring a friend and a torch. Enq: Sr Maree Riddler 0414 683 926.

Feast of St Joseph – Pligrimage to St Anne’s, Bindoon 12pm BYO lunch. 1pm Holy Hour, Prayers to St Joseph and Exposition. 2pm Euch Proc’n Rosary, Hymns/Benediction. 2:30 Holy Mass followed by D/Mercy Chaplet. 3:45 cuppa provided. 4.30 return to Perth. Transport Enq: Francis 9459 3873 or 0404 893 877 or Laurine 9576-0491 or 0448833472 or Fr Paul 9571 1839.

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

Pilgrim Mass - Shrine of the Virgin of the Revelation 2pm at Shrine, 36 Chittering Rd, Bullsbrook.

Commencing with rosary followed by benediction.

Reconciliation is available before every celebration.

Anointing of the sick administered during Mass every second Sunday of the month. Pilgrimage in honour of the Virgin of the Revelation last Sunday of the month. Side entrance to church and shrine open daily between 9am-5pm. Enq Sacri 9447 3292.

EVERY FIRST SUNDAY St Mary’s Cathedral Youth Group – Fellowship with Pizza 5pm at Mary’s Cathedral, 17 Victoria Sq, Perth.

Begins with youth Mass followed by fellowship downstairs in parish centre. Bring a plate to share.

Enq: Bradley on youthfromsmc@gmail.com.

EVERY THIRD SUNDAY Oblates of St Benedict – Meeting 2pm at St Joseph’s Convent, York St, South Perth.

For all interested in studying the Rule of St Benedict and its relevance to the everyday life of today for laypeople: Vespers and afternoon tea afterwards. Enq: Secretary 9457 5758.

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

EVERY LAST SUNDAY OF THE MONTH Filipino Mass 3pm at Notre Dame Church, cnr Daley St and Wright St, Cloverdale. Please bring a plate to share for socialisation after the Mass. Enq: Fr Nelson Po 0410 843 412, Elsa 0404 03 8483.

FRIDAY, 23 TO SUNDAY, 25 MARCH

EVERY MONDAY

Inner Healing Retreat (Live-in) 7.30pm at St John of God Retreat Centre, 47 Gloucester Cr, Shoalwater. A time to be healed and renewed. The retreat is led by the Vincentian Fathers. Registration and enq: Melanie 0410 605 743 or vincetiansperth@yahoo.com.

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

SATURDAY, 24 TO SUNDAY, 25 MARCH

The Life and Mission of St Mary MacKillop 9.30-11.30am at Infant Jesus Parish Centre, cnr Wellington Rd and Smith St, Morley. Cost: $15.

Enq: Shelley 9276 8500.

St Joseph’s Central School Oberon Centenary Celebration 7pm St Joseph’s Central School Oberon, 129 Queen St, Oberon, NSW. The school opened when four Josephite Sisters from Perthville arrived in Oberon in 1912. Saturday begins with dinner and Sunday begins with 10am Mass. All past students are cordially invited to attend centenary celebrations to meet up with old friends and to share memories.

Enq: Secretary 02 6336 1384.

SATURDAY, 31 MARCH Love Ministry Healing After the 6.30pm Mass at St Brigid Parish, 69 Morrison Rd, Midland. The Love Ministry healing team includes Fr Nishan and Fr David Watt. All welcome, come and be prayed over, healed from the past or present issues or stand in for a loved one who may be ill or facing problems at this time. Enq: Gilbert 0431 570 322 or Fr David Watt on 9376 1734.

SUNDAY, 6 MAY 2012 Busselton May Rosary Pilgrimage in Honour of Our Lady 2.30pm at Queen of the Holy Rosary Shrine, Bove’s Farm, Roy Rd, Jindong, Busselton. Begins with hymn singing and concelebrated Mass led by Fr Tony at 1pm. Followed by rosary procession, benediction and afternoon tea. Note: Roy Rd runs off Bussell Hwy, approx halfway between Busselton and Margaret River. Enq and bus bookings: Francis 0404 893 877 or 9459 3873.

SUNDAY 1 APRIL Goliath Music Festival Perth Catholic Youth Ministry will be hosting an original Catholic music festival and we’re seeking local musicians and songwriters to get involved.

Open mic nights will be held fortnightly from Wed 15th Feb after CYM Holy Hours to feature original Catholic music. Enq: admin@cym.com.au or 9422 7912.

SUNDAY 29 APRIL 75th Anniversary 10am Mass at St Francis Xavier Church Quairading followed by lunch. Celebrating the Anniversary of the blessing and opening of the Parish. Enq: Boyle 08 9645 1513 or Box 163 Quairading 6383.

EVERY FIRST WEDNESDAY Holy Hour Prayer for Priests 7.30-8.30pm at Holy Spirit Parish, 2 Keaney Pl, City Beach. All welcome. Enq: Linda 9341 3079.

Novena to St Mary of the Cross MacKillop 7-7.45pm at Blessed Mary MacKillop Parish, cnr Cassowary Dr and Pelican Pde, Ballajura. Begins with Mass, novena prayers and benediction.

Followed by healing prayers and anointing of the sick. Enq: Madi 9249 9093 or Gerry 0417 187 240.

EVERY SECOND WEDNESDAY Chaplets of the Divine Mercy 7.30pm at St Thomas More Parish, Dean Rd, Bateman. A beautiful, prayerful, sung devotion.

Includes exposition followed by benediction. Enq: George 9310 9493 or 9325 2010(w).

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

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

EVERY FIRST THURSDAY OF THE MONTH Prayer in Style of Taize 7.30-8.30pm at Our Lady of Grace Parish, 3 Kitchener St, North Beach. Includes prayer, song and silence in candlelight – symbol of Christ the light of the world. Taize info: www.taize.fr. Enq: secretary 9448 4888 or 9448 4457.

Group Fifty – Charismatic Renewal Group 7.30pm at the Redemptorist Monastery, 150 Vincent St, North Perth. Includes prayer, praise and Mass. Enq: Elaine 9440 3661.

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

Healing Mass 7pm at St Peter’s Parish, Inglewood. Praise and worship, exposition and Eucharistic adoration, benediction and anointing of the sick, followed by holy Mass and fellowship. Celebrants Fr Dat and invited priests. 6.45pm Reconciliation. Enq: Mary Ann 0409 672 304, Prescilla 043 3457 352 and Catherine 043 3923 083.

EVERY TUESDAY

Holy Hour for Vocations to the Priesthood and Religious Life 7pm at Little Sisters of the Poor Chapel, 2 Rawlins St, Glendalough. Mass followed by adoration with Fr Doug Harris. All welcome. Refreshments provided.

Catholic Faith Renewal Evening 7.30pm at Ss John and Paul Parish, Pinetree Gully Rd, Willetton. Songs of praise, sharing by a priest followed by thanksgiving Mass and light refreshments. All welcome to attend and bring your family and friends. Enq: Kathy 9295 0913, Ann 041 2166 164 or catholicfaithrenewal@gmail.com.

Bible Teaching with a Difference 7.30pm at St Joachim’s parish hall, Victoria Park.

Exciting revelations with meaningful applications that will change your life. Bring Bible, a notebook and a friend. Enq: Jan 9284 1662.

Healing and Anointing Mass 8.45am Pater Noster Church, Evershed St, Myaree.

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

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

EVERY FIRST SATURDAY OF THE MONTH Healing Mass 12.35pm at St Thomas Parish, cnr Melville St and College Rd, Claremont. Spiritual leader Fr Waddell.

Enq: Kim 9384 0598, claremont@perthcatholic.org. au.

LAST MONDAY OF THE MONTH Be Still in His Presence – Ecumenical Christian Programme 7.30-8.45pm at St Swithun Anglican Church, 195 Lesmurdie St, Lesmurdie (hall behind church).

Begins with songs of praise and worship, silent time, lectio divina, small group sharing and a cuppa at the end. Enq: Lynne 9293 3848 or 043 5252 941.

EVERY FIRST TUESDAY Short MMP Cenacle for Priests 2pm at Edel Quinn Centre, 36 Windsor St, East Perth. Enq: Fr Watt 9376 1734.

EVERY WEDNESDAY Holy Spirit of Freedom Community 7.30pm at The Church of Christ, 111 Stirling St, Perth. We are delighted to welcome everyone to attend our Holy Spirit of Freedom praise meeting.

Enq: 042 3907 869 or hsofperth@gmail.com.

Bible Study at Cathedral 6.15pm at St Mary’s Cathedral, 17 Victoria Sq, Perth.

Deepen your faith through reading and reflecting on holy scripture by Fr Jean-Noel. Meeting room beneath Cathedral. Enq: Marie 9223 1372.

Holy Hour - Catholic Youth Ministry CYM is back in 2012, followed by $5 supper and fellowship. Mass at 5.30pm and Holy Hour (adoration) at 6.30pm at the Catholic Pastoral Centre, 40A Mary St, Highgate. Enq: www.cym.com or 9422 7912.

EVERY LAST SATURDAY Novena devotions – Our Lady Vailankanni of Good Health 5pm at Holy Trinity Parish, 8 Burnett St, Embleton.

Followed by Mass at 6pm. Enq: George 9272 1379.

GENERAL Free Divine Mercy Image for Parishes High quality oil painting and glossy print – Divine Mercy Promotions. Images are of very high quality.

For any parish willing to accept and place inside the church. Oil paintings - 160 x 90cm and glossy print - 100 x 60cm. Enq: Irene 9417 3267 (w).

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

St Philomena’s Chapel 3/24 Juna Drive, Malaga. Mass of the day: Monday

6.45am. Vigil Masses: Mon-Fri 4.45pm. Enq: Fr David 9376 1734.

Mary Mackillop 2012 Calendars and Merchandise 2012 Josephite Calendars with quotes from St Mary of the Cross and Mary MacKillop merchandise.

Available for sale from the Mary MacKillop Centre.

Enq: Sr Maree 041 4683 926 or 08 9334 0933.

Financially Disadvantaged People requiring Low Care Aged Care Placement The Little Sisters of the Poor community - set in beautiful gardens in the suburb of Glendalough.

“Making the elderly happy, that is everything!” St Jeanne Jugan (foundress). Registration and enq: Sr Marie 9443 3155.

Resource Centre for Personal Development The Holistic Health Seminar “The Instinct to Heal’’, every Tuesday 3-4.30pm; and RCPD2 “Internalise Principles of Successful Relationships and Use Emotional Intelligence and Communication Skills’ every Tuesday 4.30-6.30pm, 197 High St, Fremantle - Tuesdays 3-4.30pm. Beginning 21 Feb. Enq: Eva 0409 405 585. Bookings are essential.

Courses held at The Faith Centre in 2012 450 Hay St, Perth 1. Christian Foundations This course is designed to guide you to a greater understanding and deeper appreciation of the foundational beliefs of our Catholic faith.

(Maranatha Lecturer: Sr Philomena Burrell pvbm).

Thursdays: 1-3.30pm, from 16 Feb–22 Mar. For enquiries or bookings ph 9241 5222.

2. RCPD2 - Internalise Principles of Successful Relationships and Use Emotional Intelligence and Communication Skills This course provides knowledge of principles that, if applied, will improve all relationships. Skills of self-analysis are taught as well as communication skills. Mondays: 5-7pm, from 20 Feb–10 Dec. For enquiries or bookings ph Paul 0402 222 578.

3. RCPD4 – Increase Personal and Spiritual Awareness and Improve Relationships This course promotes self-awareness and spiritual growth. Emotional development is explained in order to improve understanding between persons. Study of Psychology and Theology. Mondays: 10am–12.30pm, from 20 Feb–10 Dec. For enquiries or bookings ph Eva 0409 405 585.

4. Higher Certificate in Biblical Studies The Higher Certificate of Biblical Studies is a distance education programme that can be followed in your own home at your own pace with periodic face-to-face contact workshops. Tutorial assistance is available as required. It is equivalent to a one-year tertiary course, although it is recommended that you aim to complete it in two years.

For enquiries and enrolment, ph The Faith Centre on 6140 2420.

Is your son or daughter unsure of what to do this year?

Suggest a Certificate IV course to discern God’s purpose for their life. They will also learn more about the Catholic faith and develop skills in communication and leadership. Acts 2 College of Mission & Evangelisation (National Code 51452).

Enq: Jane 9202 6859.

AA Alcoholics Anonymous Is alcohol costing you more than just money? Enq: AA 3253 5666.

Saints and Sacred Relics Apostolate Invitation SSRA, Perth invites interested parties, parish priests, leaders of religious communities, lay associations, to organise relic visitations to their own parishes, communities, etc. We have available authenticated relics, mostly first-class, of Catholic saints and blesseds including Saints Mary Mackillop, Padre Pio, Anthony of Padua, Therese of Lisieux, Maximilian Kolbe and Simon Stock and Blessed Pope John Paul II. Free of charge and all are welcome. Enq: Giovanny 0478 201 092 or ssraperth@catholic.org.

Divine Mercy – Santa Clara There will be no Divine mercy for February.

40 Days For Life Campaign Pray to end abortion. Take part in the world-wide, pro-life campaign to pray for mothers and their unborn children, as well as all those involved in the abortion industry. Runs from Wednesday, 22 February to Sunday, 1 April. Join the 40 day challenge: www.40daysforlife.com/PerthWA. Enq: Helen 9402 0349 or Tina 0415 382 541.

A Different Lenten Programme WAVN (Western Australian Vocations Network) - short Lenten programme to reflect on the significance of the psalms in Christian worship. Sundays: 6-7.30pm. Dates: 19 and 26 February; 4, 11, 18 and 25 March; 1 April. Venue: Archbishop Clune Lecture Theatre, Newman Siena Centre, 33 Williamstown Rd, Doubleview. Enq: Kathy 0418 926 590.

Classifieds

22 February 2012, The Record

1

CLASSIFIEDS RELIGIOUS PRODUCTS

FURNITURE REMOVAL

PILGRIMAGES

CATHOLICS CORNER Retailer of Catholic products specialising in gifts, cards and apparel for Baptism, Communion and Confirmation. Ph 9456 1777.

Shop 12, 64-66 Bannister Rd, Canning Vale. Open Mon-Sat.

ALL AREAS. Competitive rates.

Mike Murphy Ph 0416 226 434.

TO OUR LADY OF VELANKANNI, ST FRANCIS XAVIER, ST PHILOMENA, ST MOTHER THERESA OF KOLKATA Tour covers all main cities in India: Chennai, Pondicherry, Velankanni, Bangalore, Mysore, Cochin, Goa, Delhi, Thaij Mahal, Kolkata, Darjeeling and more.

Contact Charles Donovan 0400 216 257 or F Sam 0426 506 510.

RICH HARVEST YOUR CHRISTIAN SHOP Looking for Bibles, CDs, books, cards, gifts, statues, Baptism/Communion apparel, religious vestments, etc? Visit us at 39 Hulme Ct (off McCoy St), Myaree. Ph 9329 9889 (after 10.30am Mon to Sat).

We are here to serve.

KINLAR VESTMENTS Quality handmade and decorated vestments: albs, stoles, chasubles, altar linen, banners, etc. 12 Favenc Way, Padbury.

By appointment only. Ph Vickii on 9402 1318, 0409 114 093 or kinlar.vestments@gmail.com.

MISSION ACTIVITIES LEARN HOW TO MAKE ROSARY BEADS for the missions and special rosaries for family and friends. Phone: (02) 6822 1474 or visit our website: OurLadysRosaryMakers.org.au.

MISSIO IMMACULATAE THE FRANCISCAN FRIARS OF THE IMMACULATE MARIAN CATECHETICAL MAGAZINE $36 for five issues Ph 08 9437 2792 or ffimunster@gmail.com.

All for the Immaculate.

TAX SERVICE QUALITY TAX RETURNS PREPARED by registered tax agent with over 35 years experience.

Call Tony Marchei on 0412 055 184 for appointment. AXXO Accounting & Management, Unit 20/222 Walter Rd, Morley.

SETTLEMENTS ARE YOU BUYING OR SELLING real estate or a business?

Why not ask Excel Settlements for a quote for your settlement.

We offer reasonable fees, excellent service and no hidden costs.

Ring Excel on 9481 4499 for a quote. Check our web site on www.excelsettlements.com.au.

BOOK BINDING NEW BOOK BINDING, general book repairs; rebinding; new ribbons; old leather bindings restored. Tydewi Bindery 0422 968 572.

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

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

BRICK RE-POINTING Ph Nigel 9242 2952.

PICASSO PAINTING Top service. Ph 0419 915 836, 9345 0557 or fax 9345 0505.

PERROTT PAINTING Pty Ltd For all your residential, commercial painting requirements. Ph Tom Perrott 9444 1200.

LAWNMOWING AND WEED SPRAYING Garden clean ups and rubbish removal. Get rid of bindii, jojo and other unsightly weeds. Based in Tuart Hill. Enq: 9443 9243 or 0402 326 637.

HELP NEEDED GROWING APOSTOLATE NEEDS HELP Do you want to help evangelise and form people using Catholic audio CDs? Lighthouse Catholic Media is looking for motivated Account Managers who are energetic, organized, and enthusiastic about sharing their Catholic faith.

Work is at least few hours per week and pay is by commission.

Contact: Justin McGinnity on 0432 715 263.

INTENTIONS OH MOST BEAUTIFUL FLOWER OF MT CARMEL, FRUITFUL VINE, splendour of Heaven.

Blessed Mother of the Son of God, Immaculate Virgin assist me in this my necessity. Oh Star of the Sea, help me and show me herein you are my Mother. Oh holy Mary Mother of God, Queen of Heaven and Earth, I humbly beseech you from the bottom of my heart to succour me my necessity (make request). There are none that can withstand your power. Oh Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee (3 times). Holy Mary, I place this cause in your hands (3 times) Amen. Say this prayer for three consecutive days.

THANK YOU ST JUDE and all the saints for answering my prayers.

RENT ROOM FOR RENT Secure, luxury house – Midland. Owner/good cook - motivated person required.

0419 968 051.

HEALTH ACHES, PAIN, STRESS Indian mature male masseur. Reflex Relax Massage $30 per hour Jai 0438 520 993.

ST PAUL LITURGICAL CALENDAR 2012

ONLY

$5

2

6

Deadline: 11am Monday

TRADE SERVICES

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OPTION 1: 25 DAYS: PILGRIMAGE TO HOLY LAND, ROME, COLLAVALENZA, DUBLIN (IRELAND FOR EUCHARISTIC CONGRESS), KNOCK AND MEDJUGORJE Departing 22 May, from $7,790, includes flight transfers, bed, breakfast, evening meals, guide, taxes. Spiritual Director Fr Ronan Murphy. Leader Yolanda Nardizzi. Tel: 9245 2222, Mob 0413 707 707.

OPTION 2: 19 DAYS: PILGRIMAGE TO ROME, COLLAVALENZA, DUBLIN (IRELAND FOR EUCHARISTIC CONGRESS), KNOCK AND MEDJUGORJE. Departing 29 May, from $5,990, includes flight transfers, bed, breakfast, evening meals, guide, taxes. Spiritual Director Fr Ronan Murphy. Leader Yolanda Nardizzi. Tel: 9245 2222, Mob 0413 707 707.

PILGRIMAGE DEPART PERTH 30 APRIL, RETURN 17/18 MAY (early hours) for Paris (3 nights) visit Lisieux (St Therese), Notre Dame for Relics of The Passion, Sacre Coeur, Miraculous Medal Shrine, St Vincent De Paul. Flight to Lourdes 5 nights stay, flight to Split 7 nights stay in Medjurgorje.

Spiritual Director Fr Bogoni.

Costs $5,395: includes flight transfers, bed, breakfast, evening meals, guide, tipping and taxes.

Contact: Eileen 9402 2480 Mob 0407 471 256, or medjugorje@ y7mail.com.

POSITIONS AVAILABLE CARETAKER WESTCARE ACCOMMODATION SERVICES We require a live-in caretaker who is to be available, manage our after-hours attendance and provide support to our residents with a disability who live in our village in Shenton Park.

A furnished unit will be provided rent free for the caretaker on a seven day basis. This after-hours position also involves approx 10 hours paid casual employment per week. Interested applicants please contact the manager (Jim Mason) on 9318 1916 during business hours.

ACCOMODATION HOLIDAY ACCOMMODATION Esperance holiday accommodation, 3 bedroom house f/furnished. Phone 08 9076 5083.

LAST WEEK’S SOLUTION C L S P A I S Y R A I L N D E G A O N I G E O E F O U D P R E N E I E D E S A S E

A N G N L N O U R M Y B S G R E R T R T H E W R A E L E S K E

E R E V B I S E E D P H R E C O T O R G Y

I V X T R E M I S M I T E M A G L E S N L A T I E E A G A P D R A A R C M O S O W E P T S

H E A R T A N G E H A R K

www.wordgamesforcatholics.com

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ACROSS 3 Assist at Mass 6 John XXIII’s surname 8 “O, ___ of wonder…”

9 Female members of religious orders (abbr.)

11 Superior of convent 13 St. ___ de Marillac 15 Commander of the army who was made king over Israel (1 Kings 16:16) 17 Pharaoh refused to give this (Ex 5:10) 20 Peter (with “The”) 21 What you do not use in unleavened bread 23 Chi follower 24 Dismas, the Good ___ 26 “…thy kingdom ___” 27 State in which the Diocese of Dallas is found 30 “…and the secret of his heart will be laid ___.” (1 Cor 14:25) 32 Blend of oil and balsam 34 Jesus, on the third day 37 He gave Hannah words of comfort 38 Father of Cain 39 Arrival of the Magi 40 Character in one of Jesus’ parables DOWN 1 It was empty Easter morning 2 “___ homo”

W O R D S L E U T H

3 4 5 7 10 11 12 14 16

18 19 20 22 25 27 28 29 31 32 33 35 36

Martha, to Mary He gave up his birthright to his brother “Light from light, ___ God from…”

Commits a capital sin “…___ to anger and abounding in steadfast love.” (Ps 103:8) ___ in the Garden OT book First word in the name of a Parisian basilica A nation, indeed an assembly of nations, shall stem from you, and kings shall ___ from your loins.” (Gen 35:11) Number of Persons in God Diocese of Honolulu greeting She saved Joshua’s spies He walked with God (Gen 5:24) Judas’ blood money bought it (Mt 27:6-8) “…and a ___ for every matter under heaven” (Eccl 3:1) Patron of Australia, St. Francis ___ Wife of Abram Jesus entered Jerusalem this type of animal Adam was made from this Doctrines OT historical book Volcano in the Italian Ecclesiastical Province of Catania

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TheTRecord he Record LastBookshop W in ord 1911 The

15 February 2012, The Record

February Catalogue RESOURCES FOR EVERY CATHOLIC FROM

$19

NEW STOCK IN FOR 2012 FROM

$25 BIBIANA KWARAMBA Bookshop Manager

Telephone: 9220 5912 Email: bookshop@therecord.com.au Address: 21 Victoria Square, Perth 6000