The Catholic Church delegation to the United Nations cops constant criticism and characterisation as fundamentalist and radical but its point man is not disheartened, reports Fiona Basile …

A new Pope has repeatedly made his preference of a Church for the poor clear. Yet there’s no denying the Church also controls some huge sums of money …

It’s time to admit that after 27 years of effort my career in the kitchen has been less than spectacular. But there’s a lesson in that …

I have always been intrigued, a reader asks, by the Holy Spirit coming down on the apostles on the Jewish feast of Pentecost. What exactly was this feast and is there any connection between it and our celebration of the coming of the Holy Spirit?

It does not appear to be grasped by much of the Church in Australia, including not a few of those in leadership roles within it and its burgeoning bureaucracy, that a key work of the Church must be to do not with money and structures but with families. Instead, it sometimes seems that the Church is viewed by its own members more as an institution or a corporation, much as one would look at a federal government department – only much bigger.

Not all women are comfortable with the way that the newly approved RU486 offers women the capacity to pharmaceutically self-abort. Anna Krohn and Beth Doherty reflect on some of the darker and less-discussed aspects of the abortion drug’s reality …

Abraham Lincoln’s leadership has lessons for Australians convinced they should lead the nation, writes Dr Andrew Kania.

Australians can be football-made – that’s true – but one of the more interesting events in religious affairs in recent weeks was the public statement by AFL North Melbourne captain Andrew Swallow praising the AFL for not scheduling football matches on Good Friday – interesting because to risk so obviously publicly identifying one’s self as a Christian these days is also to risk inviting ridicule from many quarters.

Although Perth born priest, Father Kevin Bartlett, was not ordained until he was in his mid-fifties, he spent the last 22 years of his life bringing the love of Christ to isolated communities in the highlands of central Taiwan.