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Keywords: Saint

  • AUSTRALIA

    Mary MacKillop's advice for today's politicians

    • Michael Mullins
    • 06 May 2013
    13 Comments

    'Never see a need without doing something about it' is the principle that guided Australia's first saint Mary MacKillop. This is also what drives successful politicians, and the NDIS is a good but rare example of this. Unfortunately few political leaders are able to see a real need and successfully legislate to do something about it.

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  • RELIGION

    Pope for a new Reformation

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 14 March 2013
    28 Comments

    If the Church is to be a school for holiness it must reassure Catholics above all that it is a safe school. In schools, this normally demands a change of culture to shift focus from reputation and power to the dignity, growth and empowerment of students. In the Church it will mean dealing decisively with the abuse of power by clergy.

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  • RELIGION

    Blindsided by a saint at the Catholic Worker

    • Brian Doyle
    • 07 November 2012
    8 Comments

    I showed up on First Street one day, when I was about twenty, thinking that I would perhaps magnanimously volunteer for the day, or get into a long cool intense conversation with Dorothy Day, or be instantly hired as genius-writer-in-residence, or something like that.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Rembrandt's denial of Christ

    • Grant Fraser
    • 30 October 2012
    5 Comments

    Peter, I gave you such handsome possibilities, had your face shining like a saint, and yet still, on this third occasion, you can only find a lie.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Hearing God in Soviet Russia

    • Michael Sariban
    • 23 October 2012
    4 Comments

    When ideology smashed the cathedrals, turned icons into rubble, congregation into crime, religion fell down in a heap, or seemed to ... Most people believed they knew better: countless lips kept doggedly whispering the fine-print headlines of saints. If the State was a rock, religion flowed round it.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The two St Patricks

    • Frank O'Shea
    • 14 March 2012
    6 Comments

    The theory that the person we know as St Patrick is an amalgam of a number of holy men is now respectably mainstream. The idea that Patrick came to pagan Ireland and changed it to an island of saints and scholars is an attractive one, however shaky that conversion has often seemed.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Parenting habits of Mormons and Catholics

    • Brian Doyle
    • 18 January 2012
    9 Comments

    In Mormon families, the first kid has to be a bishop or scout leader, and the second through fifth are trained fpr football. In the Catholic system, a family produces a priest or nun, a cop, a teacher, and a solider, after which the rest of the kids can be whatever they want, even Lutherans in some cases.

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  • EDUCATION

    Best of 2011: Germaine Greer's Catholic education

    • Gregory Day
    • 06 January 2012
    3 Comments

    In trying to convince my atheist goddaughter to embrace her Catholic schooling, I found an unlikely role model. I'd never thought of Greer as a chip off the old block of a convent education. Now I realised that that's exactly what she was. Published 22 February 2011

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Ghosts of children passed

    • Alison Sampson
    • 02 November 2011
    22 Comments

    'Did I have a brother once?' asks a little boy, no longer sure. His mother's eyes fill with tears. 'Yes, darling. A long time ago, you had a baby brother of your own.' He shouts triumphantly, 'I did have a brother!' and runs off. We mothers glance at each other, then look away. There are no words.

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  • RELIGION

    What difference does it make now that Mary MacKillop is a saint?

    • Frank Brennan
    • 14 October 2011

    Mary visited Rome as a young religious woman when she was being persecuted by local bishops for being too independent. She got a good hearing from the Pope and great assistance from Fr Anderledy who became the Superior General of the Jesuits. If only Bishop Bill Morris could have received the same sympathetic hearing.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Not quite Saint Steve

    • Michael Mullins
    • 10 October 2011
    5 Comments

    Steve Jobs did not fear death. He had the inner freedom we see in mystics and saints. But he should be judged by his actions, which include ruthlessly calculated decisions to tolerate poor conditions for workers manufacturing Apple products in China.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Homeless Grace

    • Brian Doyle
    • 02 August 2011
    7 Comments

    She lived in an alcove outside Saint Brigid's Church. She had been an artist. She drank. She married a man who slept on the avenue, not near the church; he didn't like the church, said it talked to him at night in a stern rumble. He beat her. Her name was Grace.

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