With the recent appointment of Cardinal George Pell to Rome, the Catholic Church in Australia will lose a dominant figure. While there are criticisms, his influence and legacy are broad ranging. Pell’s…
The blame game about child abuse in the Catholic Church continues. While the Vatican are to give due consideration to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child’s demand to remove offenders and hand them…
Pope Francis has been named Time Magazine’s Person of the Year for “pulling the papacy out of the palace and into the streets”. He beat nine others including NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and Bashar…
Pope Francis has openly attacked capitalism in his recently released Apostolic exhortation, which for all intents and purposes is the Pope’s “manifesto”. While Francis has called for the radical decentralisation…
Twelve months ago, I wrote an article encouraging inquiries into child sex abuse to treat the church like a corrupt police force. Today, the first of the nation’s inquiries to child sex abuse, run by the…
Liberals are enthusiastic, while conservative Catholics express deepening dismay. The Pope must be giving interviews again. Reactions to Francis’s sit-down with Antonio Spadaro, editor in chief of La Civilt…
Pope Francis has made headlines recently with comments about abortion, gay marriage, contraception, work and capitalism. Francis has said that he’s “not spoken much about these things [abortion, gay marriage…
On the flight home from World Youth Day in Brazil, Pope Francis gave an unscheduled, no-holds-barred interview to the journalists travelling with him. He spoke on a wide range of topics including the role…
Last week the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) asked the Vatican to disclose details of child sexual abuse cases involving Catholic clergy for the period November 1995 to January 2014. According…
As a young girl in the 1960s, I attended a Catholic boarding school. The nuns could be scary. When they walked the wintry and un-illuminated corridors of the convent, their knee-length rosary beads jangled…
Cardinal George Pell has apologised to victims and survivors of child abuse by Catholic clergy during his appearance before the Victorian parliament’s Inquiry into child abuse by by religious organisations…
Pope Francis I’s weekend announcement of a new council, the Group of Eight (G8), to advise him on Catholic Church governance and reforming the Church’s central administration (the Roman Curia) has been…
The resignation of Pope Benedict XVI and the subsequent election of Pope Francis have provoked intense public interest and media attention across the globe. How could it be otherwise? The Catholic Church…
Today Australia woke up to its first Latin American and Jesuit pope. Although apparently being second choice behind the former pope Benedict when he was elected in 2005, Pope Francis I was seen as an outside…
This morning, Australian Catholics awoke to the news that black smoke billowed from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel. The seat remains vacant, there is no Pope. By now many of us will have learned through…
Not a day goes by without further allegations of rape and sexual abuse being made against the Catholic Church. The vast majority of accusations relate to abuse perpetrated outside the Vatican’s walls…
Pope Benedict XVI announced his historic decision to step aside as Pope yesterday. This is the first time in 600 years a Pope has resigned. And in 1415 when Gregory XII resigned, he did so not to retire…
“There is not, and there never was on this earth, a work of human policy so well deserving examination as the Roman Catholic Church.” So wrote Thomas Babington Macaulay in his review of Leopold von Ranke’s…
The awful record of the institutional Catholic church’s leadership in dealing with the scandal of clerical sex abuse of minors has clearly, and rightly, been a trigger for the federal government’s Royal…
The terms of reference for the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse were released this afternoon in Sydney. In speeches that emphasised the need to acknowledge the experiences…