At the moment there is not a great deal of interest in who the next pope will be as Pope Benedict XVI seems to be in good health. According to John L Allen Jr, though, “with an 85-year-old pope beginning to show his age, speculation about who might come next is always in the background, Read more
In his Encyclical Laborem Exercens John John Paul II said “The rights of workers must take priority over the maximisation of profits” . “It is important not to quote selectively from Church documents to justify a predetermined position”, says Brian O’Connell. “So this quotation from the encyclical does not mean that the social teaching of the Catholic Church always favours the Read more
Business New Zealand, a business lobby group, is supporting a series of discussions that aim to ensure that child poverty in New Zealand is given due consideration. Working with the Every Child Counts campaign (a group of NGO’s including Plunket, Save the Children and Barnados), Business New Zealand’s Phil O’Reilly says that “Businesses first and foremost Read more
Prime Minister John Key has announced the rolling out of what he termed “tough new measures to deter potential mass arrivals of illegal immigrants and people smuggling to New Zealand.” Did the visit of the US Secretary for Homeland Security (1-3 May) have anything to do with this hasty amendment to the 2009 Immigration Law? Read more
Maybe the election of the Bishop Justin Duckworth as bishop of Wellington says much more about the grey heads ‘hungry for Justin’ than it does about the Rev’d Duckworth. For no individual, whatever their dream or commitment to a better world has been able to significantly change an institution, and it’s not for want of trying. Organisations have a Read more
Last week the Australian Catholic Media Congress took place in Sydney. Monsignor Paul Tighe, a media adviser from the Vatican, told the assembly that new media technologies “enable the forming of community, they have extraordinary potential for the wellbeing of the church”. In his CathBlog Michael Visontay points out that over 150 years ago, under Read more
The iPad and other similar electronic “books” in the liturgy are not the only intrusion of gadgetry in the liturgy. So what is the appropriate use of technology in liturgy? Data projectors are almost universally used. Powerpoint has become a must. What about recorded music? In a recent Blog Bosco Peters looks at a few Read more
In one sense it is correct to say that the crackdown on the LCWR would seem to be “Rome vs. America”, in that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has declared that the Leadership Conference of Women Religious needs renewing. But, says John L Allen Jr in his National Catholic Reporter column, “At Read more
Labour MP Maryan Street says that there is “massive support” for her proposed bill to make euthanasia legal, and to set up a bureaucratic system to monitor the bill’s application. In her weekly column Rosemary McLeod contends that euthanasia is none of the Government’s business. She says that the case of the man who assisted his Read more
A professor at MIT who is also a psychologist, Sherry Turkle says that her students are almost able to keep eye contact with someone while texting to another person. In her opinion, such people are “alone together … a tribe of one”. Those who have 3,000 Facebook friends have no friends. In his opinion piece, Simon Jenkins Read more