After a billion dollars of subsidies in Australian taxpayer funds have flowed into the ongoing effort to sustain Ford Australia in the last 10 years, the company has announced, as almost everyone knows, that it will cease production of its motor vehicles in Australia by 2016. For the estimated 1,200 workers who will lose their jobs at the Geelong engine factory and Broadmeadows vehicle assembly facility, and the hundreds or thousands more in dependant industries, the news is crushing.

It was prophesied that France would be ruined by a woman and restored by a virgin from the borders of Lorraine … So begins the legendary story of Joan of Arc, patron saint of France, protector of soldiers, a symbol of hope and courage, and patron of The Record, writes Juanita Shepherd.

I was recently invited to a charismatic prayer meeting and, among other things, saw people praying in tongues. I found it very strange and was wondering what to make of it. Does the Church approve of this?

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 …