A Morley woman has come out swinging against the best selling book Fifty Shades of Grey, saying erotic fiction is not the harmless fun it purports to be. Consecrated virgin Maureen Togher shared her personal experience with hundreds of online friends last week, citing the book’s massive sales and her own desire to prevent harm to others. Dubbed “mummy porn” by much of the mainstream m...

Mission statements are not enough, only embodied values make Catholic health care worthwhile, former managing director of a US based international investment giant told Australian Catholic health care professionals on Monday, August 20. Speaking to around 380 delegates from Australia, Singapore and New Zealand, Chris Lowney,  Trustee of the US-based Catholic Health Initiatives, said he h...

Tina De Sousa and Christine Stock decided it was time to stop wondering. The St Bernadette’s, Port Kennedy, pre-primary teacher and teacher’s assistant had both been privately thinking about the plight of Perth’s homeless for some time when Mrs Stock heard an ad for Sonshine fm’s Helping Bags for the Homeless on the radio. The pair put out the word to their fellow staff and the famili...

St John of God set the benchmark for health care services and the people of Midland would be thankful for access to them, State health minister Kim Hames told dignitaries at a foundation laying ceremony on August 8. Dr Hames was joined by his Federal counterpart, Tanya Plibersek, Bishop Donald Sproxton and senior SJOG staff for speeches and a fly-over video of the SJOG-run public and pri...

A small group of protesters awaited Federal and State politicians as they arrived for the laying of foundations of Midland’s new St John of God-run public and private hospitals on August 8. Made up of members from United Voice and the Health Services Union, the protesters said they were unhappy the State Government had put the management of a public hospital in private hands. “We don’...

“We rely on the help of the Lord God and Our Saviour Jesus Christ and we choose this man Victor, our brother, for the Order of Deacons.” A packed church, at St Gerard Majella Parish, Mirrabooka erupted in aplause at the words of Archbishop Timothy Costelloe SDB as Victor Lujano was put forward and accepted as fit for ordination to the diaconate on Friday, July 27. The night was moment...

The strain of dealing with historic cases of child sex abuse was one reason Bishop of Ballarat Peter Connors sought early retirement from his diocese, he told The Record last week. Bishop Connors will be the diocese’s Apostolic Administrator until his newly announced successor, Fr Paul Bird CSSR, assumes the role on October 16. In his 15 years as bishop of Ballarat, Bishop Connors sai...

When Chris De Sousa made the decision to discern a Religious vocation with the Somascans, most people were more than a little confused. “‘What are you doing? Are you serious?”, that’s what most people said,” Mr De Sousa, 28, told The Record. He had been practising law for five years, steadily working his way up from office dogsbody, just after graduating, to the level of Associate. ...

The Venezuelan native is a long way away from his home city of Barinas, close to the Andes, and many years have elapsed since fear of a very concrete kind gripped him as a younger man. Victor Lujano was 19 when he stepped forward at a gathering of the Neocatechumenal Way to say he felt called to ordained ministry but for five years afterwards, he was plagued by a mysterious neurological ...

To say St Charles’ Seminarian Mariusz Grzech made a decision to become a priest, would be to get things the wrong way around, he told The Record earlier this week. The 35-year-old former accountant is now in his third year at St Charles Seminary at Guildford. Like a lot of men at the seminary, to all outward appearances, his life before entering was a highly successful one. He had ...