Homilies

John Donne is remembered today as a metaphysical poet, and especially for phrases such as “for whom the bell tolls” and one-liners like “Love built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies” and “When a man dies, [his] chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language”.

This week past the first results of last year’s controversial census were released. It told us that the typical Australian is a 38-year-old Catholic woman, born in Australia of Anglo-Celtic descent, married with two kids, living in her own three-bedroom home in Sydney.

On Pentecost three years ago the Holy Father hosted a prayer meeting for peace with the Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople; the President of Israel, Shimon Peres, and the President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas.

Help of Christians. You might think Christian-helper is a funny sort of surname for Mary.

Like many people’s lives, the 1999 film The Mummy, and its 2001 sequel The Mummy Returns, are part action-adventure, part horror, part comedy and part romance.

Elizabeth Joice was 32 years old when an MRI detected aggressive spinal cancer. She decided not to fight it; she’d just enjoy whatever time she had left.

On this day, 13 May, 100 years ago a woman, “brighter than the sun”, wearing a white mantle edged with gold and holding a rosary, appeared to three children.

When on visitation some years ago in this very parish of North Sydney, I went to the parish primary school. As I entered a tiny-tot, who saw I was unusually dressed, asked what I was.

People have reflected upon the meaning of friendship ever since the Book of Genesis described the first one – between Adam and Eve.

‘Total war.’ Even today it has an ominous ring. The phrase was coined by the German General Erich Ludendorff to describe what happened in the First World War.