Greg Byrne9 November 2011 One of the workshops at a recent Diocesan gathering, within the Foundation of ‘Identity and Community’, raised the issue of gay people in the Church. The time has come for the Catholic Church to have discussions about this and other topics within the broader field of human sexuality. Society’s attitudes and […]
Gerard Burns9 November 2011 What price a worker’s life? The investigation of safety measures at the Pike River mine, scene of the tragic death of 29 miners last November (2010), reveals the implications of not having the safe working conditions which are central to a healthy workplace. The Royal Commission of Enquiry into the Pike […]
Features Msgr John Broadbent4 April 2011 I noted in my account of the life of St Valentine in last month’s Wel-com that so many of the first to third century accounts of saints’ martyrdoms were added to in the sixth to eighth centuries by monks with little credibility because of their lack of research materials. […]
Features Msgr John Broadbent5 April 2011 The scriptures read at Mass today are a small portion of the often lengthy readings for the Christians of the early church. The Eucharist, which most people attended only on Sunday and in private homes or catacombs, was the climax of their week and lasted for hours. Most early […]
Features Mgsr John Broadbent10 June 2011 We have seen in the lives of the saints, the martyrdom of some of the early Christians in the almost three centuries after Jesus. The final and most bloody of these was under Diocletian as Emperor during the early years of the fourth century (300s). One of the principal […]
Features Mgsr John Broadbent3 May 2011 Catholicism was briefly the official religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century AD before it crumbled in the fifth century. Last month we saw how, at the beginning of the fourth century AD, Diocletian perpetrated perhaps the most ferocious of all the persecutions against the Christians. He […]
Features Msgr John Broadbent8 August 2011 1090–1153 – Feastday August 20 I remember as a fourth former receiving as a class prize The Family that overtook Christ by Fr M Raymond OCSO. The family was that of St Bernard, a young, handsome and brilliant nobleman who, on deciding at 22 to be a monk, chose […]
Features Mgr John Broadbent12 September 2011 St Nicholas, whose feastday occurs on September 10, was born in 1245 in Sant’Angelo of parents who, though childless and in their 40s, made a pilgrimage to the shrine of St Nicholas at Myra to plead for a child. Their prayers were rewarded and a son was born whom […]
Features Mgr John Broadbent3 October 2011 St Francis of Assisi is one of the most popular saints in the Church, not only for Catholics. Certainly no other saint has so appealed to Protestants and even to non-Christians. Francis’ love of animals strikes a chord with so many and on his feast day (October 4) church […]
Features Mgr John Broadbent7 November 2011 St John of the Cross [Feastday November 24] was born in Castile, Spain in 1542. With his mother a widow, the family were poor and he went to a poor school at Medina del Campo and became a servant of the governor of the hospital in that town. He […]