The unemployment rate of young New Zealanders has decreased following initial COVID-19 impacts but youth unemployment is three times the national average, Stats NZ said today. In the September 2021 quarter, the unemployment rate (not seasonally adjusted) for people aged 15–24 was 9.6 percent, compared with a national rate of 3.2 percent and a rate Read more
Christian groups and conservative Liberals attacked commitments the Prime Minister made to amend the Sex Discrimination Act – after pressure from moderate Liberals – to ensure gay students would not be expelled or suspended over their sexual orientation or gender identity. The Australian Christian Lobby and Christian school groups threatened to withdraw their support for Read more
Catholic dioceses and parishes around Aotearoa New Zealand will be welcoming the Vatican’s four-month extension for the local phase of the Synod process. The General Secretariat of the Synod of Bishops recently extended the deadline of the first (local) phase of the two-year international synodal process from next April to next 15 August. Bishop Stephen Read more
Pope Francis, at an emotional meeting with migrants, said on Friday he had a responsibility to tell the hard truth about the suffering of refugees, many held in conditions he compared to those in Nazi and Soviet camps. Francis, who has made defence of migrants and refugees a cornerstone of his pontificate, spoke at the Read more
Archbishop Georg Gänswein has said that both he and Benedict XVI have received three COVID-19 vaccine doses “out of conviction.” The pope emeritus’ private secretary made the remark in a nine-page interview in the December edition of the German publication Vatican-magazin. The Vatican began administering doses of the Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine in January and confirmed in Read more
Phil Saviano, a clergy sex abuse survivor and whistleblower who played a pivotal role in exposing decades of predatory assaults by Catholic priests in the US, has died. He was 69. Saviano’s story figured prominently in the 2015 Oscar-winning film Spotlight, about the Boston Globe investigation that revealed how scores of priests molested children and Read more
“To put it simply, there is no point solving someone’s transport barrier by giving them a taxi chit if the taxi drives them towards a racist health service,” Dr Emma Espiner writes. It’s the line in her paper in Friday’s New Zealand Medical Journal a reviewer advised her to take out, because it didn’t sound Read more
Last fall, when Roman Catholic archbishop Brian Dunn moved into his position, replacing longtime archbishop Anthony Mancini, he wrote a pastoral letter outlining four priorities for his sphere of influence, the Halifax-Yarmouth archdiocese. Three of those are very specific to church affairs, including the religious teaching called catechesis. The other priority is homelessness. “It was Read more
New Zealand’s Catholic Women’s League (CWLANZ) has found a novel way of raising funds and awareness of the very real danger many Vietnamese people face – being kidnapped and used by human traffickers. Susan Dickson who is the CWLANZ National President says the 1445km Vietnam Chinese border is a known area for human trafficking. Women Read more
Pope Francis said on Monday that migrants were being exploited as “pawns” on a political chessboard in an apparent reference to the crisis at the Belarus border. Thousands of migrants are stuck on the European Union’s eastern frontier in what the EU says is a crisis Minsk engineered by distributing Belarusian visas in the Middle Read more