Pope Francis will mark the 400th anniversary of the death of St Francis de Sales, ‘the gentleman saint’ from Savoy, with a new letter planned for the end of the year. A native of Savoy, where he lived a large part of his life, Francis de Sales was appointed bishop of Geneva but was forced […]
American priest Fr Mike Schmitz says he hopes people ‘will not only grow in information but real transformation’ through listening to a new Catechism in a Year podcast, set to launch on January 1. The Catechism in a Year podcast from Ascension Press follows the Bible in a Year podcast, which has a global audience of more than 1.5 million people. The aim of the daily podcast is to make the Catechism accessible for the common person.
New figures on clerical numbers in Ireland show that a quarter of all priests currently serving in the Irish Church are expected to retire over the next 15 years. The research, carried out by the Association of Catholic Priests, revealed that 547 priests of the 2,100 working priests in the Irish Church currently are aged between 61 and 75 and nearly 300 or 15 per cent of working priests are aged 75 or over. The survey also revealed that across all 26 Irish dioceses, 52 priests or fewer than 2.5 per cent of working priests are younger than 40 and there are just 47 seminarians in Maynooth.
A retired French cardinal has offered to hand himself into the police after he admitted to abusing a 14-year-old girl nearly four decades ago.
Rabbi A. James Rudin, the long-time inter-religious affairs director for the American Jewish Committee, has been made a Papal Knight of St Gregory.
World Youth Day on Sunday November 20 was a full day for the archdiocese’s Young Church (YC) team with young people from across the diocese joining together for a range of events to celebrate all that’s happening in the Young Church.
The latest issue of WelCom is available to read here.
Hato Pāora College, the Catholic Māori boarding school for boys north of Feilding, celebrated its 75th Jubilee over Labour Weekend.
The Archdiocese of Wellington’s Hill Street site in Thorndon, home of the archdiocesan Catholic Centre, is to be re-developed, following several adverse seismic assessment reports.
The next stage of Pope Francis’ Synod on Synodality has begun with the Vatican on 27 October publishing the working document that brings together the many Synod syntheses from around the Catholic world including Aotearoa New Zealand’s.