As I write these words I have just returned to the parish, having made my annual retreat with a group of about twenty priests. There were the usual elements in any clergy retreat: Holy Mass; Liturgy of the Hours; Eucharistic adoration; devotions; spiritual...
The death on 10 October 2007 in Miami, Florida, USA, after a long battle with leukaemia, of the Papal Nuncio to Australia, His Excellency the Most Rev Ambrose B. De Pauli, was received with great sadness by the ACCC. My last contact with the Nuncio was driving him to...
Some of you probably saw a film that came out last year, The Children of Men. The story is set in Britain in the year 2021, and the premise is that there hasn’t been a child born on the planet since 1995. Nobody knows the reason why. Humans have somehow become...
Sometimes art can shine more light on the way things really are than a newspaper or history book. And I think that’s true of P. D. James’ The Children of Men. James imagines a future where the voices of children are no longer heard, because children are extinct. She...
Believing in history I’d like to start with a proposition. Here it is: To be a Christian is to believe in history. Now, what do I mean by that? Well, I can tell you what I don’t mean. I don’t mean the “history of progress”, which has been the guiding faith in the West...
Living the mystery I have titled today’s talk, “The Priest as Evangelical Witness,” and in doing so am picking up on a point made the last time I addressed the ACCC (see, “Practice what you teach,” The Priest, November 2002 and “Believe what you read”, The Priest, May...
Such is the embrace of the communion of Saints that today’s commemoration of St Maria Goretti, whom the Church reveres for her witness to virginal chastity one century ago, easily takes the Christian mind back to the memory of the martyrs of her early centuries —...
As an avid map-reader and navigator, I like to know where I am, so I can work out where to go next. This practical habit developed at the age of eleven, while steering dazed parents and a grizzling younger brother around post-War London, where we spent six months....
In the early hours on the feast of the Little Flower, Father Cyril Thomas Cartwright’s 90-year-long earthly pilgrimage came to an end. Father died at Sacred Heart Home, Brockville, Dunedin, where he had been a resident for only a few months, in the care of the Little...
Through catechisms, we are all familiar with the ends for which the Eucharistic Sacrifice is offered: in praise and adoration, for intercession and atonement. But in recent decades much less emphasis has been placed on the fourth end – that the Sacrifice of the Mass...