Mission & Justice

13/10/08

Iraq on Sunday deployed nearly 1,000 policemen to Mosul to protect Christians fleeing violence in the country, the government said. Interior Ministry spokesman Abdul Karim Khalaf said two brigades were sent to Christian areas in the northern Iraqi city. Nearly 1,000 Christian families have fled their homes in the city since Friday, taking shelter on the outskirts of Nineveh province. Mosul has witnessed a wave of assassinations by Al Qaida targeting the Christian minority in the past week, Brigadier General Khalid Abdul Sattar told Gulf News.

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Sean Parnell; 13/9/08

The protagonist in a row over the liberal St Mary’s parish at South Brisbane has asked police to press charges against the parish priest after a mobile phone camera was knocked from his hand yesterday during a baptism service. Richard Stokes has written to the Vatican, the Archbishop of Brisbane, John Bathersby, and rallied fellow Catholics in a long-running campaign to have St Mary’s and its priest, Peter Kennedy, follow official protocols or be removed from the church. While Archbishop Bathersby has advised St Mary’s it is “out of communion with the Roman Catholic Church” in its liturgical practices, so far no further action has been taken against the liberal, inner-city parish. Yesterday, after travelling 40 minutes from his home in Caboolture to attend morning mass at St Mary’s, Mr Stokes stayed behind to watch some baptisms, which have brought the church into controversy on previous occasions.

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10/10/08

Perth’s Catholic Archbishop Barry Hickey has issued a defamation writ against the West Australian newspaper for being labelled a hypocrite over his stance on women. An article and cartoon on October 2 referred to University of WA philosophy professor Michael Levine’s view that a television message currently being aired by the church was misleading and manipulative. In the ad Archbishop Hickey asks for women’s rights to be acknowledged. Professor Levine told the paper the Catholic Church had failed to show leadership because it did not allow women to become bishops or acknowledge same-sex marriages.

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Angus Hohenboken; 10/10/08

A 63-year-old Catholic priest from the Hunter Valley, in NSW, was charged yesterday over 22 child sex offences dating back to the 1970s, after handing himself in to police. Peter Julian Brock is the third serving priest from the Newcastle area to be charged with child sex or related offences since the beginning of August. The priest presented himself at Newcastle police station yesterday morning after discussions between lawyers and officers from Strike Force Georgiana, which was set up to investigate child sex abuse in the area. A second man, 56-year-old dentist Ashleigh Edward Jarrold, who also fronted up to police yesterday, faces 13 similar charges.

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Ron Rolheiser: 5/10/05

There is a story told about the Russian poet, Anna Akhmatova. During the Stalin purges, she was standing one morning outside a prison along with some other women, all of whom were trying to deliver letters and packages to their loved ones inside. Their waiting was made more painful because they were not even sure whether their loved ones were still alive and by the fact that the guards made them wait needlessly for hours simply to assert their authority. But, if they wanted to get messages to their loved ones, they had no other option but to wait. On this particular morning, another woman recognized the poet, approached her, and asked: “Can you describe this?” Akhmatova replied: “I can,” and a smile passed between the two women.

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Selma Milovanovic; 4/10/08

Five years after he resigned over a child sexual abuse scandal, former governor-general Peter Hollingworth says he should never have accepted the vice-regal job. In a rare interview since his controversial departure in May 2003, Dr Hollingworth told The Big Issue he had underestimated concerns about the separation between church and state. Asked whether he would have been better off declining the job offer, he said: “With the benefit of hindsight, yes.” Dr Hollingworth said he had asked then prime minister John Howard why he was an appropriate choice. “He (Mr Howard) went through a whole lot of things … and I was thinking, ‘I can do this job. I do know Australia, I do know the Australian people, I know about government, I know about the constitution and can make reasonable speeches,” he said.

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Nicky Trup; 4/10/08

Victims of Paul Raymond Evans clapped and cheered from the public gallery of the NSW District Court yesterday after the Catholic priest was handed a 15-year prison sentence for sexually abusing teenage boys in his care. Evans, 57, who was a parish priest on the NSW central coast for 15 years, was convicted in July of committing 18 sexual offences against seven boys when he worked at Boys Town Catholic boarding school in Engadine, in Sydney’s south, between 1977 and 1988. Evans was found guilty of nine counts of homosexual intercourse by a teacher, seven of indecent assault and two acts of indecency.

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Andrew Fraser ; 4/10/08

It sounds like something out of a thriller novel, not the doings of a suburban Catholic parish in Brisbane. There are letters to the Pope setting off a train of events that could lead to excommunication, parishioners who tell those who have worshipped alongside them that they will fry in hell for their actions, and talk of spies, Opus Dei, and storming the church to break the locks if the Vatican changes them. All of this has resulted from a letter from Brisbane Archbishop John Bathersby to St Mary’s parish priest Peter Kennedy. Bathersby’s letter says that St Mary’s is “out of communion” with the Roman Catholic Church, the grounds being the liturgical practices, or form of service. The letter lists several areas where St Mary’s needs to conform.

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3/10/08

Pope Benedict XVI today reaffirmed the Catholic Church’s condemnation of artificial birth control, a position that has driven millions of people away from the faith. Contraception “means negating the intimate truth of conjugal love, with which the divine gift (of life) is communicated”, the leader of the world’s 1.1 billion Roman Catholics wrote on the 40th anniversary of a papal encyclical on the controversial topic. In reaffirming the position, the Pope rejected an appeal for a retraction by some 60 Catholic groups in July who said the Church’s stance had been “catastrophic” for the world’s poorest and weakest. The letter by dissident Catholic bodies from countries including Britain, Brazil, Canada, France and the United States said the Church’s opposition to birth control endangered women’s lives and exposed millions of people to the risk of contracting AIDS.

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Tess Livingstone; 2/10/08

Despite four years of pressure from Brisbane Archbishop John Bathersby and a recent Vatican crackdown on invalid baptisms, the controversial St Mary’s South Brisbane has again defied church authorities. A recent baptism, captured on video and dated September 21, has been posted on the YouTube internet site. The clip shows resident priest Terry Fitzpatrick baptising a young child with the words, “We baptise you in the name of the creator, sustainer and liberator of life”, adding “who is also father, son and spirit”. The priest then added: “That’s good, nice and cool” and invited “everyone to put water on him”. The Australian put several questions to Father Fitzpatrick yesterday but he declined to comment.

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