By Carol Glatz The feast of All Saints should prompt Catholics to believe more deeply in eternal life, Pope Benedict XVI said. The day “reminds us of our eternal destiny, where we will dwell, as St Thomas Aquinas says, in true and perfect light, total fulfilment, everlasting joy and gladness without end,” he said on November 1, reciting the Angelus on the feast of All Saints. He ur...

When Christians remember their beloved deceased, they proclaim that their bonds with them are not broken by death and they profess their hope in eternal life, said Pope Benedict XVI. Especially by visiting cemeteries and other burial grounds, the pope said, people “reinforce the bonds of communion that death could not break.” Pope Benedict celebrated a Mass on November 3 in St Peter’s...

The country roads of Limerick wind past modest homes, small churches and businesses, as in many a Pennsylvania town. But now high spires poke out of the Montgomery County landscape, marking where members of Blessed Teresa of Calcutta Parish now worship God – their new church. Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput dedicated the 2000-square-metre Gothic edifice on October 27. The ch...

Standing in the Sistine Chapel under Michelangelo’s famous ceiling frescoes, people are reminded that the world was created by God in a supreme act of love, Pope Benedict XVI said. “With a unique expressive intensity,” the Pope said, Michelangelo depicted the power and majesty of God the creator in a way that proclaimed “the world is not the product of darkness, chaos or absurdity, but d...

Western nations must resist the pressure to “scapegoat, abandon, even kill, the elderly as a cost-cutting measure,” an Australian bishop said in a major bioethics lecture. Bishop Anthony Fisher of Parramatta, a member of the Pontifical Academy for Life, said health economists and utilitarian philosophers were placing the elderly at risk by treating them as a “swarm of voracious but unwor...

Twenty five fortunate Year 11 and 12 Irene McCormack Catholic College Students and four staff made the 9,300km trip to China this year, experiencing the history and culture of a unique and ancient land. The tour took them through Beijing, Xi’an and Shanghai, visiting many famous landmarks including Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, the Great Wall of China, the Ming Tombs, the Summer ...

Kolbe Catholic College staff member, Leanne Joyce was holed up in Lourdes with her fellow pilgrims and City Beach parish priest, Fr Don Kettle when flash flooding hit the region on Saturday, October 20. It resulted in the first halting of processions to the shrine in 25 years. The pilgrim group began their pilgrimage at Fatima, and then went on to Montserrat. At the time of printin...

Proclaiming seven new saints - including St Kateri Tekakwitha and St Marianne Cope - Pope Benedict XVI said they are examples to the world of total dedication to Christ and tireless service to others. In a revised canonisation rite on October 21, the Pope prayed for guidance that the Church would not “err in a matter of such importance” as he used his authority to state that the seven are wi...

By Francis Rocca When Blessed John Paul II launched the project he called the new evangelisation, he made it clear that it was aimed above all at reviving the ancient faith of an increasingly faithless West: “countries and nations where religion and the Christian life were formerly flourishing,” now menaced by a “constant spreading of religious indifference, secularism and atheism.” T...

The increase of restrictions on religion are up worldwide – and, for the first time, those restrictions increased markedly in the US, according to a new report by a leading researcher of religious trends. For the US, it was the first time in the study’s four-year history that both government restrictions and social hostility were up by at least one point on a scale of 0 to 10, according ...