Every year, a bevy of brave, hardened anti-theist journalists complain about Christmas. Greg Craven is sick of their whingeing. This is a great time of year for hack columnists. The opinion editor is hung over. The chief of staff is AWOL. The editor is still trapped in that leather Santa suit. Now is the time to rage over a personal grievance so self-indulgent and intemperate that eve...

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Mgr Ganswein, one of the most powerful figures in the Church, looks on with Pope Benedict XVI during a meeting in Zagreb in 2011. Photo: Allesandro Bianchi, Reuters By Catholic News Service Pope Benedict XVI will ordain his longtime secretary an Archbishop, 6 January, on the feast of the Epiphany. The pope named his closest aide to be prefect of the papal household, a job that inv...

A friend recently told me that you don’t really need to go to Confession since the penitential rite at the beginning of Mass forgives sins. Is this true? This is a good question, and I suspect many people think the same way as your friend. But I also suspect that the underlying reason for the question in some people is a reluctance to go to Confession and that this, in turn, moves the...

Off the coast of Darwin on the remote Tiwi Islands, Record journalist Mark Reidy met with Vietnamese-born priest Peter Nguyen who, against all odds, joined the priesthood to fight the forces of secularism. Beating a crocodile on the head that dares disturb his day off or slicing a python with a machete pale in comparison to the sacrifices Bathurst Island priest Father Peter Nguyen has made f...

In an adversarial and, for the time being, underwhelming political culture like Australia’s, it might be tempting to throw one’s lot in with the side which seems least offensive. In a roundabout way, Tony Abbott reminded his fellow faith-travellers this week that Catholics who cleave to conservative parties and believe that culture war warriors will be our salvation ought to unburden the...

In the early 1980s, Leonie Reid and husband Pat noticed there was something different about their youngest daughter Stephanie. Socially awkward, frustrated and prone to unintentionally disrupting the play of her peers, a proper diagnosis would be many years in coming. All three would later learn that Stephanie had Aspergers Syndrome - a form of autism characterised by an inability to unde...

I remember as a young boy watching the black-and-white Alfred Hitchcock Presents on TV and being enthralled from the start by the simple nine-stroke line-drawing caricature of the famed movie director’s rotund profile. The mischievous theme music set the mood as Hitchcock appeared in silhouette from the right edge of the screen, and then walked into the centre, replacing the caricature. ...

The Greek philosopher Aristotle observed, “There is not great genius without a mixture of madness.” Case in point: Hitchcock (Fox Searchlight), an absorbing portrait of the legendary film director during the making of his biggest success, the 1960 horror classic Psycho. The “Master of Suspense” gets quite a dressing-down in this adaptation of Stephen Rebello’s 1990 book Alfred Hitchco...

Monsignor Michael Keating has spent the past 50 years of his priesthood trying to live out the spirit of the Second Vatican Council. Mgr Keating, Dean of St Mary’s Cathedral, made the comment at the 11am Mass on December 16 which doubled as a celebration of the 50th anniversary of his ordination as a priest. The Cathedral was full to overflowing with family, friends, and well wishers incl...