GLADESVILLE, 9 MARCH 2025 Rob Parsons is an author, speaker and founder of Care for the Family, a UK-based charity that focuses on marriage, parenting and bereavement. His great contribution, however, might never have happened were it not for a remarkable encounter many years ago. One evening, he and his wife Dianne heard a knock […]
DOMUS AUSTRALIA, ROME, 5 MARCH 2025 Is the human attention span shrinking? The question is much discussed by psychologists, educators, tech gurus and social commentators.[i] Many students read only chapters or articles, not whole books. Newspapers prefer 400-word opinion pieces to the old 3,000-word essays. TV keeps news items short, with imagery changing every few […]
ST MARGARET’S AND ALL SAINTS LONDON, 18 FEBRUARY 2025 (FEAST OF BLESSED FRA ANGELICO) In December of last year, NASA telescopes in Chile identified a 100m wide asteroid, with the catchy name ‘2024 YR4’, that will come rather close to the earth in 2032.[1] While it’s not big enough to cause a mass extinction event […]
ST MARY’S CATHEDRAL, SYDNEY, FEAST OF OUR LADY OF LOURDES, 11 FEBRUARY 2025 Most of you will be familiar with that great classic of English literature, The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Authored and illustrated by Eric Carle in 1969, it was on the bestsellers list for children’s picture books for around 19 years and has been […]
ST JEROME’S CHURCH, PUNCHBOWL, 10 FEBRUARY 2025 My beloved Dominican brother, Fr Dominic Murphy, once gave a series on the Theology of the Body in which he proposed that all men are genetically somewhat autistic and all women at least a little neurotic. Men can be so practically-focused that they fail to pick up cues […]
ST MARY’S CATHEDRAL SYDNEY, 9 FEBRUARY 2025 It’s an old fishing trick. In the days leading up to an expedition, experienced anglers cast a handful of bran or other roughage on the waters where they intend to go fishing later. Bran effects fish much as it does people. As a result, when the fishers return […]
ST MARY’S CATHEDRAL, SYDNEY, 3 FEBRUARY 2025 Antoine Quentin Fouquier de Tinville, was the notorious Public Prosecutor during France’s ‘Reign of Terror’. For his outsized role in delivering thousands to the ‘National Razor,’ he earned the nickname ‘Purveyor to the Guillotine.’[1] An industrious lawyer, sympathetic to the ideals of the revolution, Fouquier was appointed Accusateur […]
ST MARY’S CATHEDRAL, SYDNEY, 2 FEBRUARY 2025 A few days ago, the Church celebrated the memorial of St Thomas Aquinas, the great 13th-century Dominican friar who was arguably the greatest ever theologian, and the first person designated a Doctor of the Church since the patristic period. He was famed for the persuasive way he united […]
ST MARY’S CATHEDRAL, SYDNEY, 29 DECEMBER 2024 It’s the original Home Alone story. Like many pious Jews, Joseph, Mary and the kid had their holidays in Jerusalem during the weeklong Passover celebrations (Lk 2:41-52). They did this every year, only this time something went very wrong. Amidst the to-ing and fro-ing of the hundred thousand […]
St Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney, 15 December 2024 Can we measure happiness? One way might simply be to ask people how happy they feel on a scale of 1 to 10. But what about something more ‘scientific’, like the way we assess physical or mental health by testing bloods, VO2 Max and other observable symptoms? Can’t […]
Mine honour is my life; both grow in one.
Take honour from me and my life is done.
Then, dear my liege, mine honour let me try.
In that I live, and for will I die.
St Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney, Thursday 2nd Week of Advent, 12 December 2024 Sometimes in life we feel besieged, as though, in the words of our Gospel, the violent were taking God’s kingdom by storm (Mt 11:11-15). In a report entitled Persecuted and Forgotten? Aid to the Church in Need recently named eighteen countries where Christians […]
St Ambrose Catholic Primary School, 8 December 2024 Today the Parish of St Ambrose has celebrated a century of service to the district. It began as a few dozen Catholic families coming together in each other’s homes to celebrate the Eucharist. They bought some land and built a temporary church that doubled as a school. […]
St Ambrose’s Parish, 8 December 2024 Last week (Lk 21:25-28,34-36) and this (Lk 3:1-6) we read from the Gospel of St Luke and will continue to do so every Sunday for the year ahead. St Luke the Evangelist was something of an overachiever, not content with just one area of expertise or writing just one […]
Holy Innocents Croydon, 1 December 2024 Reading the tea leaves is a common expression for attending to signs and being prescient in interpreting them with a view to knowing the future. Pope John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council used an equivalent Scriptural phrase when they talked of “reading the signs of the times”.[1] ‘Tasse/ography’ […]
