At a conference in Rome last year, the BBC’s veteran Vatican correspondent David Willey asked a question which has surely crossed the minds of many secular as well as religious journalists, the world over.

Even when the so-called experts tell you to “take it easy”, don’t waste time worrying, just leave it all in God’s hands.

Megan Walter was raised in the Pentecostal Church but became Catholic earlier this year, largley due to the inspiration of a special Catholic friend.

Born in Kerala, the southernmost tip of India, she grew up in the Middle East, before settling down in Perth. Ann Rodrigues, a nurse at Royal Perth Hospital, tells The Record about growing up Catholic in a predominantly Sunni country, why The Shawshank Redemption is her favourite movie and what her faith really means to her.

After spending 70 years under the rule of the Communist Party, the small country of Mongolia found itself isolated from the world and religion. That was until Bishop Wenceslao Padilla and two other missionary priests brought Catholicism to the nation, as Matthew Biddle explains…

We have recently tried to reintroduce the family Rosary but my sons, aged 11 and 13, say they find it boring. I have not been able to convince them otherwise. Can you help me?

While the fledgling Catholic community in Western Australia was struggling with its own problems, the papacy of Pius IX – the longest in Church history – was getting to grips with revolutionary terror and the rise of modern philosophy and theology, writes historian Dr Robert Andrews.

Ursula Frayne was no newcomer to missionary work when she stepped ashore in the Swan River Colony in 1846. Back in Ireland, the bishop of Perth had told her about more than 5,000 European children and millions of Aboriginal ‘heathens’ awaiting ministry and conversion. It was nothing like the reality, writes Dr Catherine Kovesi.

When an anti-clerical government prevented his ordination, Martin Griver turned to studying medicine. Before that, he worked as a clerk in an accountancy firm. They were skills which would hold him in good stead, more than a decade later, when he was called on to helm a rather difficult diocese, writes Odhran O’Brien.

Construction of Perth’s first cathedral began on 27 December 1843. It was originally a chapel, school house and dwelling. The chapel was designated a cathedral on 6 May 1845, on the elevation of Bishop Brady to the episcopate.