Support Life Sunday is a day set aside to encourage Catholics everywhere to reflect on life and the human dignity of every person. “Every person matters… always! He mea nui te ora o ngā tāngata katoa… i ngā wā katoa!” So reads New Zealand’s Support Life Sunday tagline. Inspired by the Vatican document Dignitas Infinita Read more
Miss Kingi – Dame Georgina, that is – has been at St Joseph Māori Girls’ College just about forever. Several generations … as a pupil, as a teacher, as principal. She took over as principal in 1987 when the Sisters of Our Lady of the Mission stepped away from running the school. Always known as Read more
John Titchener once volunteered for a wide range of organisations. The energetic recent retiree was involved with Rotary, the Alternatives to Violence Project, the Community Organisations Grants Scheme, and his church among others. But he has now stepped down from virtually all his charitable work because of what he sees as discrimination against volunteers by Read more
All Saints in Nelson has started a community-focused initiative that takes the church outside the building. On Sunday morning, instead of attending their regular church service, the congregation shared breakfast of bacon sandwiches and coffee before being anointed with oil and the words from Matthew 10, “freely you have received, so freely give”. And with Read more
New Zealand Catholics who communicated with CathNews are unsurprised but remain disappointed that the Vatican has ruled out women deacons. They see it as a wasted opportunity to address the gender divide in the Church, and ask if God did not create men and women in his own likeness. They feel confused by an outdated Read more
Take one church community, a 150-year old church – and insufficient money to keep church and community together. It’s a story most parishes could tell. Finding the funds to keep both church and community together can take a concerted effort as a Wairarapa parish can attest. Keeping it together Martinborough’s First Church gets funding from Read more
A new highly transmissible variant of COVID-19 has been detected in Australia, raising questions about whether it will lead to a wave of COVID-19 cases over summer. The XEC strain has been reported in 29 countries including the United States, United Kingdom and China, according to global health data platform GISAID. Here’s what we know Read more
Ensuring he was fully prepared for the Synod of Synodality’s second session kept Archbishop Paul Martin extra busy before leaving for Rome. Commenting on Facebook, Martin said it was difficult to examine Synod’s first session synthesis and see how it was expressed in the second session’s instrumentum laboris (agenda). It’s not what you’d call a Read more
Religious affiliation in New Zealand shows an almost even split between those identifying with an organised religion and those who don’t, Statistics New Zealand data shows. Census 2023 found that almost half of New Zealanders (48 percent) identified as belonging to an organised religion while 51.6 percent said they had none at all. Further Census Read more