The Apostle of our age, St John Paul II, wrote many documents, delivered thousands of homilies and addresses, published books, plays, poems.

“Say to all faint hearts: ‘Have courage! Do not be afraid!’” (Isa 35:4-7) It’s a recurring antiphon in the Bible. Jesus said it to His disciples so many times you’d be excused for thinking He was getting repetitive! God, His Son, the prophets and evangelists come again and again to quell our anxieties and strengthen our resolve.

English sci-fi writer, John Wyndham, is best known for novels like The Day of the Triffids and The Village of the Damned. But short stories were really his thing. In one, entitled “The Wheel”, a young boy playing in the yard discovers pulling his cart is easier if he attaches turning round bits of wood to it.

Dominicans can be very black and white: St Dominic’s mother dreamed of him before his birth as a black-and-white dog carrying a torch to light up the world;[i] their habit, given by Our Lady, is also black and white;[ii] and so is their coat of arms.[iii] Why those colours? Let me suggest five reasons…

Martin Scorsese’s film, Shutter Island, is a neo-noir psychological thriller set in 1954. Leonardo DiCaprio plays U.S. Marshall Teddy Daniels who visits the island with his partner to investigate the disappearance of a patient from the Hospital for the Criminally Insane.

London-based Aesthetics and Anti-Aging Consultant, Cindy Jackson, was six years old when she was given a Barbie doll and she long fantasised about looking like her.

When Mary MacKillop was about 20 years old, living in Portland, Victoria, she was accidentally locked in the church overnight. Sounds rather spooky, but Mary counted it an opportunity to spend all-night in vigil with Our Lord.

You could call it the Council of the Friars – yet none was there, or only one. “The Great Council”, as the Fourth Lateran was known, included the greatest mediaeval pope, Innocent III, 71 patriarchs and metropolitans, 412 other bishops, around 900 abbots, priors and periti, together with envoys of the emperor and monarchs.

The true (verum), the good (bonum) and the beautiful (pulchrum) – it was a 13th century German Dominican and Doctor of the Church, Albert the Great, who first identified these as the three ‘transcendental properties of being’.

There are 37 miracles recorded in the Gospels, most of them in Matthew, Mark and Luke. John’s Gospel, which we heard today, is different. John only reports eight miracles, six of them uniquely among the evangelists, and all of them at much greater length.