When Pope Urban IV decided to extend the feast of Corpus Christi to the universal Church, he wisely chose the great Dominican theologian, St. Thomas Aquinas, to compose the Mass and Liturgy of the Hours for this great feast. Thus he bequeathed to us the Sacris Solemniis with its Panis Angelicus, the Verbum Supernum, the Lauda Sion, the Adoro …

When hundreds of thousands of the young people of the world gathered here in Sydney ten years ago to celebrate the World Youth Day, they were encouraged to make their way to the Cathedral as pilgrims have always done. Here they were able to consecrate themselves to Our Lady after the example …

What to give the woman who has everything? We can imagine Pope Francis kneeling at his prie-dieu thinking just this: what present can I give Mary on the 160th anniversary of the Lourdes apparitions and, more importantly, the 50th anniversary of her Schœnstatt shrine in Australia?

In the 1987 humorous detective novel, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, the eponymous detective, Dirk Gently, declares that ‘if it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family Anatidae on our hands.

Jeremiah O’Flynn was a ‘character’. Born in County Kerry to a tenant farmer and his wife, he suffered from wanderlust and joined a Trappist mission to the West Indies. When the monks were expelled from Martinique he stayed on, though still only a deacon, tending the Catholic slaves until he was declared …

here’s an old story about a man caught in a flood who determinedly stayed in his house when all the surrounding ones were evacuated, insisting he would trust in God. As the waters rose, people in a car stopped to offer him a lift, but he told them ‘God will save me’. As the flood …