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Keywords: Saint

  • AUSTRALIA

    Fast-tracking Prince William and John Paul II

    • Michael Mullins
    • 02 May 2011
    17 Comments

    Many argue that the holiness attributed to John Paul, who was beatified yesterday just six years after his death, is tempered by evil deeds that took place under his watch. Arguably, fast-tracking his route to sainthood is an offence against due process, as fast-tracking Prince William's route to the throne would be.

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  • EDUCATION

    Germaine Greer's Catholic education

    • Gregory Day
    • 23 February 2011
    15 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.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Saints and cats

    • Various cat poets
    • 22 February 2011
    4 Comments

    I didn't have much hope. Soon I would be 50. Love was fitful and glorious and painful. There will always be thugs in caves murdering children and crowing. But we are capable of creating wonders beyond our imagination every second of the game.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Cancelling Valentine's Day

    • Michael Mullins
    • 13 February 2011
    14 Comments

    St Valentine's Day is always painful for frustrated lovers. It reminds them of what they want but have not got, and may never get. We need to cancel St Valentine's Day and find a 'real' saint, one whom we know dealt effectively with the demons that were getting in the way of his or her object of desire.

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  • RELIGION

    Best of 2010: Mary MacKillop's Australian story

    • Katharine Massam
    • 11 January 2011
    1 Comment

    Mary MacKillop's face is on the Sydney Habour Bridge, at least temporarily. Is she becoming one of the clichés for Australia, alongside bushmen and Hills Hoist mums in our catalogue of national identity?

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Praying to Santa

    • Frank O'Shea
    • 15 December 2010
    6 Comments

    We invented you, Santa, and named you after a hirsute Russian bishop. For anyone who thought about it, you were a kind of parable; you helped us to believe that prayers could be answered, that there was a bounty that was not diminished by the number of clients.

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  • RELIGION

    'Sheila' MacKillop boosts Catholic brand

    • Paul Collins
    • 19 November 2010
    9 Comments

    This week it was reported that the canonisation of Mary MacKillop boosted enquiries at Australia's Catholic Enquiry Centre by 63 per cent in the past year. The saturation media coverage of the event suggests the Church may not be as much 'on the nose' as is popularly thought.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Meaning amid wedding chaos

    • Brian Matthews
    • 12 November 2010
    1 Comment

    At the edge of each knot of resplendent women stood the groom. Uncomfortable in a constricting collar or a slightly askew bow tie or colours they'd never worn before and would never wear again. Many looked curiously grumpy. Wasn't this their day of days? What was going wrong here?

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  • RELIGION

    Questions miracles raise

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 04 November 2010
    12 Comments

    In the 1970s Latin American theologians began to explore the connections of faith to a public world marked by great injustice. Some of them initially criticised such popular expressions of faith such as devotions, fiestas and processions. The miracles dimension of the coverage of Mary MacKillop's recent canonisation uncovered a similar tension.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Mary MacKillop's lesson for Murray-Darling irrigators

    • Michael Mullins
    • 18 October 2010
    7 Comments

    Tony Windsor is proving himself to be a politician of integrity and tact, but has his work cut out for him in the case of the Murray-Darling Basin irrigators. Mary MacKillop was a champion of rural and regional Australians. It is worth considering her strategy in the context of the irrigators' struggle for survival.

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  • RELIGION

    Mary MacKillop's Australian story

    • Katharine Massam
    • 15 October 2010
    1 Comment

    Mary MacKillop's face is on the Sydney Habour Bridge, at least temporarily. Is she becoming one of the clichés for Australia, alongside bushmen and Hills Hoist mums in our catalogue of national identity?

    READ MORE
  • RELIGION

    The Mary MacKillop reality test

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 14 October 2010
    4 Comments

    It is possible to represent MacKillop as a brave woman, a feisty woman, her own woman, a feminist before her time, a woman who resisted clerical tyranny, a scourge of pedophilia and an activist for the poor. Each of these descriptions misses what was central in her.

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