Homilies

Fifty years ago yesterday, on July 20 1969, I was nine years old and along with my class of excited fourth-graders at St Michael’s Lane Cove – and 20% of the world’s population

Three great and related ideas inspire and compete for the soul today: Christianity, Islam, and Secularism. Christianity, that is, faith in the person and Gospel of Jesus Christ,

What are they staring at? In Paul Newton’s painting of The Catholic Community in Sydney c. 1818 the youngest are the most intensely focused on what they would have called ‘the Blessed Sacrament’.

Today we bless a new work of sacred art, The Mother of Divine Wisdom with St Joseph and St Mary of the Cross MacKillop, created by Chiara Perinetti Casoni, whom we welcome today to Australia and celebrate in the University.

Trials and errors, courts and appeals have been very much in the air of late! In our two readings this morning both Peter and Paul are on trial, and their further trials are prophesied. Paul had been imprisoned by the Governor of Judea, Antonius Felix,

In the 1987 humorous detective novel, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, the eponymous detective declares that “if it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility

Though today is the feast of St Justin Martyr and this evening the Vigil of the Solemnity of the Ascension, our Order seems to stand outside ordinary time and space.

It’s a hard time to be a priest. First the Royal Commission, then the conviction of Cardinal Pell; the media are getting ready for further excitement around that latter in the weeks ahead. At his request I’ve said very little publicly,

שָׁלוֹם עֲלֵיכֶם Shalom Aleikhem (Peace be with you) is how Jews says hello and goodbye to each other.

Jesus loved his Mum, loved her lots. We see Jesus with her on many occasions in the Gospels: his birth, presentation, flight into Egypt, finding in the Temple,

The dispute had been brewing for some time. Luke’s rather tactful description was that in Antioch and elsewhere there had been ook oligis οὐκ ὀλίγης ‘no small’

We’re all familiar with crosses. They mark churches and hospitals, pharmacies and ambulances, firetrucks, blood banks, graves and more.