Flashes
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Restoring kneelers!
Sydney clergy must now restore kneelers everywhere, treating contested history as fact and recasting decades of reverent standing as a deficiency.
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Being heard
In a saturated media landscape reaching beyond shrinking parishes means embracing fresh tools that carries the Message further.
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When life seems unfair
Clinging to a sense of being wronged narrows our world. Letting go of resentment isn’t weakness — it’s the first step toward growth.
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Tend the flame
Valuing tradition means keeping its living fire alight. A dynamic tradition fosters maturity and freedom.
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TikTok theology — garbage in, gospel out?
Attention is increasingly being recognised not as a private commodity, but as a strategic resource shaping democracy, public debate and social stability.
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Coptic patriarch praying in Venice matters more than it looks
The Coptic Church does not treat sacred space casually. That Pope Tawadros celebrated liturgy at a Catholic basilica — not once, but twice in three years — signals a quiet theological recognition that cuts deeper than diplomatic courtesy or interchurch goodwill.
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Leo’s slavery teaching opens door for women’s ordination
In “Magnificent Humanity,” Pope Leo describes the Church’s condemnation of slavery as a genuine development in doctrine, not a clarification of existing teaching. That admission, echoing Cardinal Newman, creates a powerful precedent for revisiting the supposedly final ban on ordaining women as priests.
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Insufficient Courage
A boy raised on Mass, confession and Saturday novenas in the West of Ireland took his vows at eighteen. Now nearing eighty and suspended from ministry for fourteen years, he finds the certainties of his upbringing replaced by searching questions about the Church.
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Buddhists, Jesuits and the truth about taxi drivers
Buddhist philosophy calls it conceptual proliferation. Catholic theology calls it a failure of reverence for the imago Dei. Fr. John Kerr Locke, a Jesuit who spent fifty years in Nepal, called it something simpler: a mistake. Reducing an entire culture to one bad afternoon with a taxi driver is, he insisted, just factually wrong.
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Can the church compete?
We do not live the faith alone — but fewer young people are choosing to live it at all. With church attendance competing with sport, children’s parties, and endless leisure alternatives, parishes need to actively reimagine how they engage young people, or there maybe no one left!
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