Homilies

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 […]

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’ […]

Feast of the Holy Apostle Andrew, St Mary’s Cathedral Sydney, 30 November 2024 At first there was one. Andrew Johnson, fisherman from Capernaum, was a seeker. He had followed the Baptist for a time, until he pointed out Jesus as the real Lamb of God.[1] On one account when that same Jesus called him, Andrew […]

St Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney, 24 November 2024 Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper follows the lives of two young boys, Tom Canty and Edward Tudor, born on the same day in 1537 and looking strikingly alike. For all the similarities their lives could not be more different: Tom lives in poverty with his alcoholic […]

As a genre, prison literature comes in many forms: narrative, poetry, journal entries, spiritual meditations, philosophical dialogue, just to name a few. Its popularity is understandable given the raw emotions that the thought of imprisonment evokes. Whether just or unjust, to be deprived of liberty…

Last week, much of the world watched on in anticipation for the results of the US Presidential Election. Broadcasters ran non-stop coverage of the count in real time, with panels of ‘experts’ analysing the results as they trickled in with fancy…