WelCom’s Journey of Faith continues this month to visit the Lower Hutt Parish of the Holy Spirit – Te Wairua Tapu. Formed in 2015, the parish covers four main Lower Hutt suburbs and their constituent areas geographically located across the harbour from Wellington city and surrounded by coastlines and bush tracks.
Sex change operations, gender theory and surrogate motherhood pose grave threats to human dignity, according to a major new Vatican document released in April.
Pope Francis has decided some of the most controversial issues raised at the first assembly of the Synod of Bishops on synodality will be examined by study groups that will work beyond the synod’s final assembly in October this year.
The stabbing of Assyrian Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel and Fr Isaac Royel is ‘shocking and has caused distress to many in the community,’ says Sydney Catholic Archbishop, Anthony Fisher op.
The United Kingdom is gripped by the ‘aggressive promotion’ of doctor-assisted killing, according to a British archbishop who has urged Catholics to write to their local MPs to resist changes to laws prohibiting euthanasia.
A new formation programme at United States seminaries will see first-year seminarians have more prayer time and less screen time.
For hundreds of years, visitors have descended on Rome’s Trevi Fountain to make a wish, following a ritual coin toss. But the coins the tourists rarely give a second thought to actually provide practical help to people they will never meet.
Pope Francis will make an Apostolic Journey to Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Timor-Leste, and Singapore on September 2–13, 2024. His four-nation visit will be one of the longest trips he has undertaken. Indonesia and Singapore have a very small minority of Catholics while 32 per cent of the people in Papua New Guinea are Catholic.
Twenty-seven preachers and theologians from North America, Europe and Asia have asked the Church to change Canon Law to allow qualified lay preachers to preach the homily at Mass to ‘reflect a synodal Church more fully’.
Church, refugee and human rights groups have described the passing of the UK Government’s Rwanda Bill, which will see asylum-seekers sent from the UK to Rwanda, as ‘a dark day’ and ‘cruel’. Parliament passed Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s flagship Rwanda bill after months of ‘ping-pong’ between the Houses of Parliament.