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Don’t let life get you down

Articles, Editor's Choice
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Seamus Ahearne reflects on life and death, and threats of death, amid all the other day to day happenings in a busy life.
“The brush strokes of nature are also hints and whispers of life. They scatter the colours carelessly. They ask us to notice them and not to forget them. But maybe like nature and autumn, we need to throw around the unruly and incomplete brush strokes in our ministry. The unfinished days; the little celebrations; the Godliness of daily life; the laugher among us; the colours that we cannot take for granted. Possibly nature is talking to us. We too can be so serious (so immersed in the quicksand of problems). What are we doing to God’s world? Is that love song wasted on us?”

A Dialogue of Hope, Critical Thinking for Critical Times

ACP News
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Gerry O’Hanlon alerts us to a new publication that intends to spark a real and “constructive engagement and dialogue between secularists and religious believers, in order to imagine an alternative narrative” to one where “conventional economic models have failed, politics is fractured, what it means to be human is contested, and there is a Punch and Judy show of opposition between secularists and believers.”

Breaking open priesthood

Articles, Editor's Choice
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A speech by Vincent Long Van Nguyen OFM Conv, Bishop of Parramatta, Sydney, gives food for thought about the future of priesthood in the church.
“…. these vestiges of the Tridentine Model of priesthood are powerful symbols of the clerical class. It is part of the ecclesiology that emphasises the ontological change and separation of the ordained from the faithful. It is a powerful ingredient and ideal condition for the disease of clericalism to fester.
I hold that it is time for this exalted model of priesthood to be consigned to the past. Instead, we must rediscover the specific and full charism of the priesthood within the matrix of the universal priesthood of the faithful. The priesthood cannot be lived fully apart from the community of disciples.”
…..
“If we are to break open the priesthood and allow the ministries of the baptised to flourish, I think we will need to revisit the clerical and patriarchal culture along with its many institutional dynamics such as titles, privileges, customs, structures etc.”.

Child Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church: An Interpretive Review of the Literature and Public Inquiry Reports

Articles
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/12/world/australia/australia-catholic-church-child-abuse.html

The New York Times carries an interesting article about a study that examines child sexual abuse worldwide in the Roman Catholic Church that has found the Australian church has done less to safeguard children in its care than its counterparts in similar countries have.

The report, released on Wednesday by the Center for Global Research at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, also found that the church’s requirement that priests be celibate was a major risk factor for abuse.

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