The conference, sponsored by the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, the Australian Catholic Media Council and the Australasian Catholic Press Association, aims to address the evolving challenges and opportunities in sharing the Gospel in today's world.

Gaining valuable insights into modern missionary communication, the Congress is pitched as an excellent opportunity for networking, skill building and learning.

Anyone communicating God's message of hope, faith and love across Catholic media and communications channels is welcome to attend the Congress.

Although a complete schedule is not yet available, organisers have published information about some of the opportunities the Congress will offer.

These include presentations and workshops on digital evangelisation, artificial intelligence, social media, videography, photography, advertising, book publishing, web design, strategic communications and spiritual conversation.

Sister Rose Pacatte, the congress keynote speaker, is a Daughters of St Paul member and the founding Director of the Pauline Center for Media Studies in Los Angeles.

Pacatte is an award-winning film journalist and author or co-author of 15 titles on film, film and scripture, and on media literacy education. She has a Master of Education degree in media studies from the University of London.

Pacatte says she will speak about "Breaking the Silence: The Power and Pitfalls of Catholic Communication in the Digital Landscape".

In this, she will explore the transformative potential and challenges of Catholic communications in the digital era, She will draw on insights from Catholic social teaching and from Pope Francis..

She will also discuss strategies for fostering authentic dialogue, navigating online pitfalls and building bridges in the digital landscape.

Later, during the Congress, Pacatte will run a workshop called "Catholic Creatives Unleashed: Challenges and Opportunities in the Digital Renaissance" where she will examine the intersection of Catholic creativity and digital communication.

This will involve exploring the role of art and vocation, and discerning practical strategies for Catholic communicators, journalists and creatives in the continually developing digital world.

The Congress sessions will be held at the Miller Hotel in North Sydney. An official dinner will be staged at the Kirribilli Club and addressed by Peter Greste, a former foreign correspondent and journalism educator.

Greste worked for Reuters, CNN, the BBC and Al Jazeera predominantly in the Middle East, Latin America and Africa.

Source

• Media Congress
• Australian Catholic Bishops Conference
• Wikipedia
• NCR

This is because NZ Catholic has been the only consistent source of local reporting of events and issues in the Church in New Zealand.

CathNews New Zealand is well established online, but it is primarily an aggregator of material already published by Church or secular sources.

Without NZ Catholic, there will be events and issues — good and bad — that will not be reported. But bad news will probably be covered by secular news sources, whose increasingly opinionated content tends to be antagonistic to the Catholic Church and its beliefs.

News desert

In the United States the disappearance of local media is termed a "news desert", and a New York Times report quoted this comment from one bereft community: "Our community does not know itself and has no idea of important local issues."

When the United States Catholic bishops closed the domestic operations of Catholic News Service in 2022, the director of Fordham University's Center on Religion and Culture, David Gibson, called the decision "bone-headed".

He said the news service had been:

"a critical tool for reliably informing American Catholics about the church beyond their own diocese, and a counter-witness to the proliferation of ideologically driven Catholic media platforms that are driving the church apart, and regular Catholics around the bend — often right out of Catholicism".

The basic theology behind the need for Catholic media is the understanding that a community, such as the Church, cannot be sustained without communication — from top to bottom, bottom to top, and between its members.

So Catholic media are part of the glue that holds the Church together.

What can be done?

The closing of NZ Catholic could be seen as another apparent sign of retrenchment by the Church in New Zealand, and there is nothing anyone can do about it.

I don't share that negative view.

Certainly, the Catholic Church in New Zealand has been slow to use modern communications technology. It is largely absent from the online environment where most New Zealanders (including most Catholics) get their news and information.

We lag well behind our Protestant brothers and sisters, who fund and run multimillion-dollar media operations. We had to go to Shine TV to get Masses screened when Covid-19 hit us.

I believe it is time New Zealand's Catholics had a comprehensive online news and information service, accessible on a range of devices and platforms.

We cannot expect the institutional Church to provide it. Church finances are stretched, Mass attendances are down, and abuse compensations are looming.

That means it must come from outside the institutional Church — just like major Catholic media in England, Ireland, the United States and Europe (for example, Catholic Herald, Irish Catholic, Our Sunday Visitor, La Croix.)

I know how it can be done. I believe the Catholic community can provide the talent and the technological know-how. I hope it can also provide the finance.

• Pat McCarthy was founding editor of NZ Catholic. He has also worked for Zealandia, the non-denominational Christian newspaper Challenge Weekly and CathNews New Zealand.

Journalists can only hope that the hypothesis of imposing the pontifical secret (the highest kind of confidentiality in the Church) on the deliberations will be rejected.

This is a very important issue for those who cover the Vatican, but also for all those - Catholics and non-Catholics - who will follow, more or less intentionally, the October 4-29 session of this Synod assembly on the Church's future.

This is a very important event that has no precedent in the history of the Synod of Bishops, which Paul VI instituted in 1965.

Indeed, in some ways it resembles the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), which spanned four sessions.

Vatican I and Vatican II: from still photos to live television

If the (First) Vatican Council (1869-70) was the council of newspapers and photography, and the pontificates between World War I and World II were in the age of the radio and of cinema, Vatican II was the council of television.

John XXIII was the first pope regularly on TV: when he visited the parishes of Rome and the prison near the Vatican, when he travelled to Loreto and Assisi, and when he signed - live on camera - his last encyclical, Pacem in terris.

At the time, the only mass media outlet in Italy was the RAI (Radiotelevisione Italiana), the national radio and television network funded by taxpayers and under the control of the country's political parties.

It was the beginning of an alliance between Christian-Democrats and Socialists - the so-called "opening to the left", which right-wing Catholics and Vatican officials loathed, but John XXIII actually welcomed.

RAI had a monopoly on the images of the Vatican at the time of Vatican II, and it kept it until 1983 when the Holy See created the Centro Televisivo Vaticano (CTV).

RAI had a very pro-Vatican II stance.

It offered a lot of programs, specials, and documentaries explaining the Council to a wide audience.

Not only did it feature interviews with the council fathers, theological experts (periti), and ecumenical observers from all over the world, but it also showcased historians, artists, filmmakers, and legal thinkers. It was visibly different from Vatican Radio, which only interviewed the bishops.

Television became part of the history of Vatican II right from the beginning, broadcasting the procession of the world episcopate and council fathers during the opening ceremony of October 1962 and John XXIII's "moonlight speech" of that same night.

The communication of the conciliar events by the media, especially through television and film reels, became an integral part of the experience of Vatican II.

Certainly, more people have seen that extensive footage than those who have read the Council's documents, history or commentaries.

Thanks to the mass media, the reception of Vatican II started not at the end but right at the beginning of the council.

Between the Council's first (1962) and the second session (1963), it became clear that the Vatican's attempt to control media access could not work.

Things inevitably became more transparent.

When seeing (on TV) was no longer believing

It was a golden age for the collaboration between the Catholic Church and the media: not just because most or many decision-makers at the RAI (which provided other broadcasting corporations with all kinds of content) were Catholic.

That was an era when television still played an educational, teacher-like role for a trusting and docile public;

• when mass media channels were few and acted like gatekeepers, with an attitude of deference to the institution and the clergy;
• when the Church was still not divided in different parties around the hot-button issues; and
• when the Vatican and the Catholic media system had a large degree of control over the Church's narrative.

There was a different ecclesial dynamic, but also a different relationship between the media and social-political events in the early 1960s.

Then in the late 1960s, shortly after the Council ended, something broke.

The war in Vietnam became the first ever to be played out on television.

People began questioning how fairly the media was covering it and other disruptive events at the time, such as the radical politics that descended on Chicago for the 1968 National Democratic Convention, the students' protests in European and American campuses, or the Black Power salute at the Olympic games in Mexico City.

Different from just a few years earlier at the time of Vatican II, seeing (on TV) was no longer believing; or at least it meant seeing, believing something different from or opposite to the institutional narrative.

It was the beginning of the widespread belief that the media could not be trusted, or that only that media one are already agreed with could be trusted.

One way or another, media will be a part of the synodal process

Fast forward to the Synod assembly of October 2023.

No one expects something like the 1968 National Democratic Convention in Chicago in terms of public demonstrations and violence (as a memento for the next conclave: that year ended with the election of Richard Nixon to the US presidency).

But the changes in the relationship between the media, institutions, and public trust is a lesson that the Catholic Church is learning the hard way because of the abuse crisis.

This is the age of social media and digital media, where the Internet allows anyone to broadcast his or her opinion to the entire world in real-time, and the more divisive, the better for a certain militant mentality.

The dynamics of identity-driven media narratives are essentially contrary to the idea of a shared ecclesial experience.

One way or another, the media will be part of the synodal process.

This is because the Catholic Church lives of tradition but also of history and memory.

How many participants will keep a diary of their Synod experience or write letters that future scholars of Catholicism will be able to study in the future?

A Synod assembly that independent media cannot cover or have access to its participants will not reach many Catholics to say anything of the rest of the world.

Moreover, as French historian Pierre Nora said almost fifty years ago, reflecting on the turbulent events of 1968, "Press, radio, images do not act only as means from which events are relatively independent, but as the very condition of their existence."In other words, having a synodal discernment exercise draped in secrecy is as good as not having it all - or worse.

A question of credibility

The Synod is in a bind.

On the one hand, there is the necessity to avoid media coverage that magnifies existing polarization, where there seem to be only two sides or two parties (and only two) for every issue.

There is also the risk for the Church of what Nora called the "monster event", where the media system tends to make everything sensational or permanently manufacture novelties and feed the hunger for events.

On the other hand, the Church also needs the media to convey the synodal energy and momentum and to create a minimum of commonly accepted information about what is happening inside the Synod assembly.

In order to be credible, this cannot come only from Vatican-controlled media.

The role of the media at Vatican II was crucial because it helped Catholics and non-Catholics discover - and in many cases, see for the first time - the catholicity of Catholicism.

The colourful procession at the opening ceremony on October 11, 1962 - with all the bishops coming to Rome from the Eastern Catholic Churches and the Catholic Churches in the Americas, Africa, and Asia - visually represented the end of centuries of Romanization, Latinization, and Eurocentrism.

Synodality is also about a reformulation of the catholicity of Catholicism in a global Church.

The Synod assembly of 2023-2024 is a test of how to do this while dealing with a 21st-century media system.

• Massimo Faggioli is a Church historian, Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University (Philadelphia) and a much-published author and commentator. He is a visiting professor in Europe and Australia.
• First published in La-Croix International. Republished with permission.

The decision by Bishop Fernando Prado Ayuso was conveyed just two days after the bishop was installed in his role.

"By virtue of the faculties that, as diocesan bishop, I have over the organisation of communications media in the diocese and trying to favour the communion of the diocese with the Successor of Peter, I hereby decree that going forward, and until further notice, no content from the EWTN channel will be broadcast in the diocesan television BETANIA," said the decree dated December 19, 2022.

EWTN is the world's largest Catholic media conglomerate, with an international audience of over 380 million television households in 150 countries and territories.

Ayuso's decision surprised some because Pope Francis has spoken extensively on the role of media in the Catholic Church, emphasising the need for responsible and ethical journalism that promotes the common good and fosters understanding and unity.

Pope Francis praises journalists

In 2021, Pope Francis called on journalists to combat the spread of misinformation and fake news, which he described as a "virus" that poisons the public discourse and undermines democracy.

He urged them to uphold the truth, seek out multiple sources, and report with integrity and impartiality.

While the pope has sometimes been critical of the media, he has also praised journalists' work.

In November 2021, Pope Francis thanked journalists for reporting about "what is wrong in the Church, for helping us not to sweep it under the carpet and for the voice you have given to the victims of abuse".

"A good journalist needs to be curious about reality and passionate about telling it," he said.

Then again, speaking with the members of the Dicastery for Communication, Francis emphasised that communication is a two-way process.

"There is no one-way communication: it goes and comes back; it goes and comes back. And in this we too grow."

"Only parrots communicate without listening to the response of their interlocutors."

Communication, he added, is "a human connection" which should resemble a telephone conversation in which a person speaks but also listens.

The Pope noted that this dialogue "always brings risks" because it means overcoming the temptation toward inertia where nothing changes even if it is poorly received.

He summed up his meaning with the idea of "communicative restlessness", which drives journalists and media professionals to "go towards" their audience.

"Strive forward," he told the Vatican's media professionals. "Take risks and don't be afraid! Take risks, to meet the other in communication."

Sources

Crux Now

Vatican News

Reuters

Vatican News

They also announced that their Rome bureau would remain in operation for now.

As one of the few Catholic news outlets in the English-speaking world that covers the Catholic Church accurately, faithfully, and according to high professional standards, this news stunned the Catholic media community.

The decision was made as part of a "reorganization" of the Communications Department at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), which will result in 21 employees (mostly CNS staff) losing their jobs.

In addition to CNS's domestic operations shutting down, the USCCB Publishing Office—which produces many titles including the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the United States Catholic Catechism for Adults, and the Roman Missal—will also cease operations.

According to the official statement from the USCCB, these changes "will allow the remaining functions—including the Catholic News Service Rome Bureau and the Office of Public Affairs—a more sustainable foundation upon which to do their work."

For over 100 years, CNS has served the Church as a wire service, producing articles and photos (and more recently, videos and other digital content) about the Catholic Church at the local, national, and international level.

Just as local newspapers rely on subscriptions to wire services like the Associated Press and Reuters to cover stories that they don't have the money and resources to cover, Catholic News Service provides content for diocesan newspapers and other Catholic publications like America and Our Sunday Visitor.

In recent decades, as Catholic newspapers—as with the journalism industry as a whole—have struggled to remain financially afloat, CNS has provided them with valuable content that has helped them to survive.

It is important to note that although CNS is owned and funded by the USCCB, they do have a great deal of journalistic independence built into their contract and they are unionized.

CNS journalism is recognized in the industry as being competent and executed with high professional standards.

More important, however—and I know this personally—is the professional integrity of the CNS staff.

This is a veteran team of journalists that's losing their jobs.

Most of them have worked in the field for decades, and have earned the respect of their peers in the industry.

If you speak with journalists from other outlets, they recognize and respect the professionalism and high standards of the CNS organization.

As a Catholic media outlet, Where Peter Is does not primarily do journalism—although we have been known to commit journalism from time to time.

But as a site that regularly provides analysis and commentary on news and events in the Church, we rely on good, professional, and ethical journalism every day. And the quality and standards of the work done by CNS are top-notch.

You might be asking why they are being shut down if they do such good work.

Clearly a major factor is money.

Journalism, especially Catholic journalism, is no longer a profitable industry.

In fact, it's difficult to turn a profit in most areas of Catholic media.

Certainly, I don't ever expect the message of Where Peter Is to be profitable.

It seems the best way to make money in Catholic media in the current environment is to be sensational, ideologically-driven, and self-promoting.

The rest of us, including CNS, have to rely on donations or funding from people or organizations that believe in the mission of our outlets.

And for whatever reason, the US bishops decided that the service CNS provides in informing the public about the Church isn't worth the cost.

But in terms of effectiveness and public visibility, CNS is arguably one of the best things the USCCB has going for it.

I fear that this decision was made in part because some US bishops were not thrilled with the idea of funding a media organization that they don't have complete ideological control over.

Yet the decision to abandon CNS after a century of work seems to oppose the message of the Vatican II decree Inter Mirifica, which says that the Church "considers it one of its duties to announce the Good News of salvation also with the help of the media of social communication and to instruct men in their proper use."

Additionally, ending this service to diocesan newspapers and other Catholic publications seems to be a signal that the end is near when it comes to the US Church following the decree's call that "a good press should be fostered.

To instil a fully Christian spirit into readers, a truly Catholic press should be set up and encouraged…It should disseminate and properly explain news concerning the life of the Church.

Moreover, the faithful ought to be advised of the necessity both to spread and read the Catholic press to formulate Christian judgments for themselves on all events."

If good Catholic journalism is going to exist, someone has to believe it's worth paying for.

And if no one does, then the entire field will be left to people and organizations with ideological agendas and low standards.

I imagine that many US dioceses, assuming their newspapers don't also shut down, will turn to the EWTN-owned Catholic News Agency.

In other words, the shepherds of the US Church will have turned their flocks over to an organization whose constant attacks were described as "the work of the devil" by the pope last year.

On the treatment of Church employees

This story hits particularly close to home for me because I was laid off from my job in the USCCB Communications department during the last reorganization in May 2017.

In late 2016 and early 2017—the months leading up to the layoff—we were told by upper management that our department was going to be reorganized, and how the new structure was going to benefit the staff.

Layoffs were never mentioned.

I was so foolish that I was looking forward to our department's fresh start. Which meant that I was completely blindsided by the news that my position had been eliminated.

At the time, I was already struggling emotionally—my dad had recently died, we had an infant at home—so the trauma of losing my job totally shattered me.

Adding insult to injury was the callous statement of the Conference's chief communications officer about the layoff, "It was based on positions and not people."

In other words: even though we've completely upended your life, your well-being is meaningless to us.

Recovering from the shock and devastation took me a very long time.

Seven years earlier, I turned down a much higher-paying job offer with another company to accept a position at the USCCB because I felt a strong call to work for the Church in the areas of media and communications.

Unfortunately, my experience there was doing mostly administrative tasks and working on dry and repetitive projects.

There was little collaboration and very little opportunity to propose ideas or solve problems.

Morale was low.

Staff members would watch as managers made poor decisions with money, spending huge sums on overpriced failures and cutting corners on things that produced clear results. (One wonders how many jobs could have been saved by repurposing the $28 million the bishops plan to spend to rent out a stadium for a few days in Indianapolis in 2024.)

In the end, it was only after the layoff that I was able to truly respond to that call and help the Church communicate the message of Jesus Christ with a group of my fellow Catholics through this website.

It's hard to ignore the irony that it was only after the institutional Church cast me aside that I was finally able to use my communication skills to serve the Church, share the faith, and to help amplify the message of Pope Francis to others.

But it was a difficult road and all of it came at a high cost.

In May 2017, CNS was untouched by the layoff.

At the time, USCCB leadership explained that CNS was not affected by the reorganization "because of the tremendous content creation capacity that is there…It's a well-respected, well-known brand."

What a difference five years makes.

This week, many of my former colleagues, people I admire—many of whom I consider dear friends—were told they will be losing their jobs. And remarkably much of the leadership team whose vision dictated the last "reorganization" still remains in place.

Please keep these fine journalists and communications professionals in your prayers as they discern what's next in their lives.

And please pray for our Church leaders, that they may realize the importance of a healthy Catholic media environment.

• Mike Lewis is a writer and graphic designer from Maryland, having worked for many years in Catholic publishing. He's a husband, father of four, and a lifelong Catholic. He's active in his parish and community. He is the founding managing editor for Where Peter Is.
• First published in Where Peter Is. Republished with permission.

As the Catholic community gains an accelerated experience of digital consumption, the question becomes particularly relevant for our Catholic media. I believe it is time to launch a comprehensive online news and information service for New Zealand Catholics, accessible on a range of devices and platforms.

Worldwide, the news industry is disrupted. Catholic newspapers are closing, the trend hastened as Covid-19 halts church-door sales. It's an unavoidable fact that most Kiwis now get their news and information online.

The high point of Catholic newspaper circulation in New Zealand was in the mid-1960s when Zealandia and NZ Tablet between them each week published one paper for every 10 census Catholics.

Today NZ Catholic each fortnight prints one paper for every 170 census Catholics.

The other New Zealand-based Catholic news service is the twice-weekly CathNews New Zealand, published by Church Resources Ltd.

Primarily an online aggregator of material already published elsewhere, often by secular sources, it offers little original reporting.

NZ Catholic, published by the Bishop of Auckland, holds a valid place as our national newspaper for two strong reasons: No one else is reporting many of the stories and issues it covers, and many Catholics either still prefer print or are not online.

There are diocesan publications — WelCom, Kete Korero, Tablet and Inform — but their monthly or quarterly frequency makes news reporting difficult.

If NZ Catholic ceased publication, the Catholic community nationally would be in a "news desert" — the term used overseas for the increasingly common situation of a community bereft of local reporting.

Catholics would depend on secular news services, whose reporting of church affairs is generally superficial, and whose increasingly opinionated content is often antagonistic to the Catholic Church and its beliefs.

Catholics relying on two major secular news services, Stuff and the New Zealand Herald, would never have learnt of the appointment of Bishop Michael Gielen last January.

We can also access overseas Catholic news services, but most focus on the United States and some have a distinct conservative or liberal bias.

The Church consistently proclaims the need for Catholic media. The basic theology behind this is the understanding that a community (such as the Church) comes into existence through communication. Without that communication — top to bottom, bottom to top, and between members — a community cannot be sustained.

Catholic media are part of the glue holding the Church together. If they are lost, the Church community suffers.

The Church's key statement on Catholic media, issued nearly 50 years ago, is still relevant:

"Since the development of public opinion within the Church is essential, individual Catholics have the right to all the information they need to play their active role in the life of the Church. In practice, this means that communications media must be available for the task.

"These should not only exist in sufficient number but also reach all the People of God. Where necessary, they may even be owned by the Church as long as they truly fulfil their purpose." (Communio et Progressio, 1971)

As the last sentence suggests, the norm is for Catholic media to be owned outside the institutional Church, such as with major Catholic media outlets in the United Kingdom, North America and Europe.

Bishop Robert Barron, who founded Word on Fire media ministry in the United States, has said: "Word on Fire succeeded largely because it operated outside of the Church bureaucracy . . . . The bureaucratic element of the Church exists to serve the charismatic, but the trouble, and it happens very often in the Church, is that the charismatic element gets smothered by the bureaucratic."

The Catholic Church in New Zealand has been slow to use modern communications technology, lagging well behind our Protestant brothers and sisters. We had to go to a Protestant television channel to get Masses screened during Covid-19. (All three of our free-to-air Christian TV channels are Protestant.)

Evangelical Protestants, whose numbers are much smaller than the Catholic population, fund and operate multimillion-dollar media operations such as Rhema Media and the Christian Broadcasting Association (which produces award-winning Christian programmes for secular radio stations).

I believe an online national Catholic news and information service should be established, to reach those who do not read newspapers. It could:

• Keep online Catholics informed on what is happening in the Church and community, so they can "play their active role in the life of the Church".
• Share Catholic perspectives on issues of the day. • Show we have good news stories to share, even while we face up to issues like abuse cases.
• Build up the identity and confidence of Catholics, and counter the trend to marginalise Christianity.
• Reach youth, inactive Catholics and ethnic communities (through a translation facility) in ways that would be impossible in print.
• Such a project would require the skills of IT people (those I have consulted are enthusiastic), journalists, marketers and managers.

And it would need money. I estimate an adequately resourced news service accessed daily by thousands of Catholics would cost around $500,000 a year — roughly half the cost of a Catholic primary school with 100 students.

Seeking income by paywall would probably be counterproductive. Advertising prospects would be limited. Sponsorship would be problematic, as sponsors might feel entitled to influence content.

Endowment and donations from users would be the most promising sources of funding. The Tablet (London) offers an endowment example: It formed a charitable trust in 1976 after several wealthy backers made donations. The trust invested the money and makes annual grants to the publishing operation.

And, as Pope Francis told members of the Vatican's communications department last year, "No investment is too great for spreading the Word of God".

What I propose may seem a bold leap from a chrysalis, but it would be modest compared to what the smaller evangelical Protestant community has been doing for years. To achieve it would require the Catholic community to provide the will, the talent and the resources.

• Pat McCarthy (pictured) was founding editor of NZ Catholic. He has also worked for Zealandia and CathNews New Zealand.
• This article ran on October 18, 2020, as a feature in NZ Catholic's 600th edition.

The latest magazine to do this is the Nathaniel Report. Click here to read it.

The Nathaniel Report is produced by the Nathaniel Centre, the NZ Catholic Bishops' bioethics centre.

Father Kevin Head, editor of the Marist Messenger said he was delighted with the awards.

He was particularly pleased that the efforts of his small staff, working with few resources, had received some recognition.

The Awards the Marist Messenger received were:

The Best Print Magazine
Citation: Sometimes the best things come in small packages. So it is with the Marist Messenger.

This year the ‘magazine of Catholic spirituality' celebrates 90 years of publication, a truly wonderful achievement for the Marist Fathers in New Zealand.

The magazine is compact in format (and in administration and operation) but is packed with good reads - no admonitory preaching here, just inspiring spiritual reflections from laity and religious, including daily insights into the readings of the day, interesting Marist history, guidance from Pope Francis and short biographies of the month's saints.

The Messenger is both edifying and entertaining - with a jokes section guaranteed to raise your spirits with a laugh.

There's also a crossword.

Happy 90th birthday, Marist Messenger. Ad multos annos.

The Best original photograph
A cropped copy of the award-winning photograph appears above. Click here to view the original.

It was taken on Ash Wednesday by Jonathan Pierce at Challenge 2000 in Johnsonville, just north of Wellington.

Citation: "This photo beautifully displays the intersection between faith and culture in New Zealand, with a poignant moment captured on Ash Wednesday of the ashes being drawn in a cross on the forehead of a man, with two women on either side in the background."

"Using traditional photographic techniques such as the rule of thirds, exquisite details have been captured and sharp focussing communicates a message of hope, and also reverence for the moment."

The best headline
‘A Very Modern Model of a Marist Seminarian!'

Citation: Catchy and a bit of fun without being crass or taking away from the article, the best headline. "A Very Modern Model of a Marist Seminarian"

The citation said, "The loose alliteration cleverly adds to the rhythm of the headline without overpowering its attractiveness to the reader."

The NZ Catholic, Tui Motu and the Nathaniel Report also received awards.

Click here to read the full list of awards.

An article by Rowena Orejana featuring the Vatican astronomer's views on Jesus, Aliens and Faith won a gold award for Best Theological Article from ARPA. Continue reading

Their aim - to develop strategies to counter fake news.

They noted social media is particularly known for spreading false news stories.

The meeting was convened by the World Catholic Association for Communication. Read more

Dr Otto has been acting editor at NZ Catholic since early July.

A former student of St Patrick's School in Panmure, in 1981 Otto was Dux of St Peter's College, Epsom, and went on to study electrical engineering at the University of Auckland, graduating with a PhD.

He worked in electrical engineering research and development for the best part of a decade and also studied for the priesthood at Holy Cross College, Mosgiel.

He earned a degree in theology from the University of Otago and won an Otago University Bookshop prize in theology.

From 2008 until 2014, Otto worked as at NZ Catholic, eventually being appointed associate editor.

He won several Australasian Catholic Press Association awards for his news reporting.

In 2014, Otto changed to freelance journalism, and also worked as a port chaplain in Auckland.

"Having lived for several years in Hawke's Bay and in the seminary at Mosgiel, I appreciate that New Zealand is much more than Auckland", Otto says.

"And I would hope that NZ Catholic's reporting will continue to reflect that."

"And just as New Zealand is not one city, so the universal Church is much broader than one country so I would hope NZ Catholic's readers will continue to receive excellent coverage of global Catholic news.

"Of course, we live in an extraordinary era in the Church under the leadership of Pope Francis, with a strong emphasis on concepts like mercy, synodality and inclusion. "

"There's plenty of debate in Catholic circles as the breadth and depth of these emphases are
further explored, and I would like that to be reflected in NZ Catholic's opinion sections."

Source

• nzcatholic.org.nz

The magazine was judged the Publication of the Year.

"It gives the team here a great sense of achievement to receive this award, amongst so many good publications", said Tui Motu Interislands editor, Fr. Kevin Toomey.

The judges said that Tui Motu Interislands:

• Was editorially excellent
• Was topically relevant
• Had engaging writing
• Made judicious use of imagery
• Draws you in
• Is example of 'less is more' when it comes to the editorial use of graphics and photography to serve the story

Earlier in the week four Tui Motu Interislands contributers picked up awards at the Australasian Catholic Press Association (ACPA) Awards:

Winners

• Cavan Wild: Best Mission Coverage, "The Gift of Vernon Douglas"

Highly Commended

• Robert Consedine: Best Column
• Kevin Toomey: Best Article on Catechesis, "Let's Talk"
• Mary Horn: Best Original Artwork, "Wise Women"

Michael Otto from NZ Catholic was highly commended for his story "Bishop tells activists to change name" at the ACPA Award presentation.

Source:

• Supplied
• Image: Tuimotu.org

Bishop Morris's book "Benedict, Me and the Cardinals Three", published by ATF Press, is banned from sale in Catholic bookshops in Toowoomba and Brisbane.

It is only available on request in Sydney's and Adelaide's Catholic bookshops. It will not appear on bookshelves at these outlets.

Bishop Morris was asked by Pope Benedict to resign in 2009, but negotiated early retirement in 2011.

The book, which was to have been launched on June 17 in Toowoomba, has appendices of the correspondence between Bishop Morris and the Pope.

Bishop Morris could not attend the Toowoomba launch because of illness, but this has been rescheduled and five further launches are planned in Australia.

The day after the launch, the ATF Press's Hilary Regan delivered copies that the Toowoomba Catholic bookshop had ordered.

But an hour later he was told by a diocesan official that Toowoomba's Bishop Robert McGuckin did not wish the book to be sold there.

So it will now be sold from another outlet in Toowoomba.

Two weeks ago, Adelaide's Archbishop Philip Wilson wrote to parishes in his archdiocese stating that publicity about a local launch did not have his permission or authority.

Adelaide's Catholic bookshop will stock the book, but will not display it on bookshelves.

In the book, Bishop Wilson slams a lack of transparency in how Vatican officials dealt with him.

He said he was not allowed to see the accusations levelled against him.

Bishop Morris explains that a conservative pressure group in his diocese had a disproportionate influence in the Vatican, based on selective information, which fatally compromised his role as bishop.

He said three influential cardinals, Francis Arinze, Giovanni Battista Re and William Levada, believed things about him that were not true.

Bishop Morris said he fell foul of a culture of centralised power in the Vatican and was seen as a troublemaker.

Another recently launched ATF Press publication, "Potiphar's Wife: The Vatican's Secret and Child Sexual Abuse", is also not on bookshelves in the Sydney Catholic bookshop, but is available if requested.

Sources

• ATF Press
• ABC Radio
• Toowoomba Chronicle
• Image: Toowoomba Chronicle

The new position as development manager for the school will entail him fundraising for the school's new buildings, board of proprietors chairwoman Phillipa Guerin said.

"The role's sole purpose is raising funds for future-proofing the school's buildings," Guerin said.

Laws made the decision to relocate to South Canterbury as a lifestyle change for his young family.

"I have lived my life in reverse."

"I have had 26 to 27 years in public life, now it is time they [the children] came first in my role as a solo father," Laws said.

"I'm devoted to my children."

"That said, with all my local government and health board experience, I am happy to help if people want me to share that with them," he said.

Source

• Stuff.co.nz
• Image: cdn.radiolive.com

Perhaps because hope springs eternal. This year church media, particularly Catholic media, face a growing challenge: how to deal with bad news about the church.

At stake is their credibility.

This challenge is difficult to meet because of the place that church media typically have within churches.

The print media generally present news of the regional churches. They also tell encouraging stories of Catholics and their work within the wider community.

The writing and production are often very professional, given the lack of staff and financial support available.

Church leaders use their media to address their members.

In that respect church magazines are often like in-house newsletters, subject to control over who may write and about what.

If Catholic media discuss issues that are controversial among Catholics they will generally present only the position taken by church authorities.

More generally they avoid church scandals and matters of dispute. These are more freely discussed in such independent Catholic newspapers as The Tablet and the National Catholic Reporter and a variety of small magazines and blogs.

This formula generally corresponds to the limited resources available to the Catholic Church for communications.

Readers of the magazines and visitors to websites can find some picture of what is going on in the Church, an introduction to people who are significant in its life, and encouragement in their commitments.

More recently the restrictions on Catholic media, and particularly their limited coverage of Church abuse, with comment usually restricted to Catholics in leadership positions, have affected their credibility.

Many Catholics instinctively see what is written in Church media as spin rather than as engagement with truth. They then look to the secular media for a more accurate and honest presentation of the state of affairs than they hope to find in the Catholic media.

There is a loss in this.

The account of the Catholic Church they receive from the secular media often lacks depth and a feel for context. It could helpfully be complemented by an honest insider's perspective. Continue reading

The citation for the award states: "This is the best local newspaper. It seeks to cover the activities of the district from a Catholic perspective and yet is accessible to those who are not part of the district, or of the Faith. However it needs to cover stories from all points of view. That said - the paper is engaging and gives a clear presentation of community views and how the Catholic community responds to local needs and issues."

There are two major ACPA Bishop Philip Kennedy Memorial Prizes. One for a Magazine, one for a Newspaper.

Wel-com has won the award for the Best Editorial.

The citation states that Cecily McNeil's editorial, "Living with the Least" which was published in February, "This well written, concise editorial made a claim about the treatment of workers in New Zealand under the John Key led government, backed it up with apt quotation, related this claim to a then current union-led Living Wage campaign, and applied the topic to Catholic social teaching as articulated in a 2010 NZ Catholic Bishops Conference statement, Working for Life.

"It integrated appropriately, some telling remarks from a couple of interestingly relevant union leaders.

"The editorial was bold enough to come to a strong conclusion underwritten by a clear moral purpose and designed unabashedly to influence its readership."

Other New Zealand Publications to receive awards were:

New Zealand Catholic
Highly Commended: Best Editoral Feature - Peter Grace

Marist Messenger
Highly Commended: Best Editorial - Brian O'Connell
Highly Commended: Best Feature Story - Brian O'Connell

Tui Motu
Winner: Best Article on Catechesis
Highly Commended: Best Original Photograph - Paul Sorrell
Highly Commended: Best Front Cover - Magazine - Donald Moorhead

Tui Motu and The Marist Messenger also each received an award from the Australiasian Religious Press Association, whose conference preceded the ACPA one.

Full list of Awards click here

Source

• Cathnews.com
• Image: Screenshot CathNews.com

The live, half-hour show, scheduled to start in July, is a major step for the broadcaster, whose message is typically expressed through devotional talk shows, replays of Mass and religious education programming such as series on the Eucharist or the saints.

EWTN — the initials stand for Eternal Word Television Network — was started by Mother Mary Angelica of the Annunciation in a garage at her Alabama monastery in 1981.

Its programming now reaches more than 146 million homes in 127 countries and 16 territories on more than 5200 cable systems, wireless cable, direct broadcast satellite, low power television and individual satellite users.

By planting a stake in Washington — in an office space near Capitol Hill — EWTN hopes to raise its profile on issues where religion converges with public affairs: abortion, contraception, stem cell research, immigration, the death penalty, terrorism and repression of Christians abroad, according to a Washington Post report.

"It's a deliberate choice to be in the midst of everything," said Michael P. Warsaw, EWTN's president and chief executive. "We hope it has an impact on policymakers and the inside-the-Beltway crowd."

The Post reported that experts on media and Catholic affairs said EWTN would fill a void, because there is no other daily news TV progamme that is pitched to the estimated 75 million Catholics in the United States.

And while the network's guests include a steady diet of those who represent the conservative wing of the church, EWTN does not stoke right-wing fury like a Fox News commentator.

"EWTN has a lot of people on its air, and they don't all sing from the same songbook," said John L. Allen Jr., a Vatican authority and senior correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter.

The network is almost entirely funded by donations from a committed audience. Its pitch is: "Keep us between your gas and electric bill."

Sources:

TribLive

Eternal Word Television Network (Wikipedia)

Image: The Catholic Company

A few weeks ago, I was sitting in a hotel room in Perth working on my six-weekly (or so) column for NZ Catholic, the newspaper I worked at for five years until 2010. It was not long after my friend James Bergin had given a stellar performance on national television talking about the election of Pope Francis, and I'd also been observing the work of a group of young Catholics in Australia also being asked to comment on the conclave, the papal election, the choice of Pope Francis and so on.

And so I wrote this column:

Did anyone else catch James Bergin on Q&A a few weeks back, talking about the election of Pope Francis?

Now, in the interest of full disclosure, James Bergin is a good friend of mine and someone I work with on a regular basis on Church projects, so I am biased. But I thought he did an outstanding job when being interrogated by a woman who would now be considered one of New Zealand's leading interviewers.

Internationally, this phenomenon of young Catholic professionals speaking about the Church in the media is taking off. My first observation of this effort was during World Youth Day in Sydney, when a small group of young Catholics were part of the Sky News coverage of the event. Rather than having professional reporters trying to explain something they knew nothing about, young Catholics were part of the massive crowds, shared their experiences and, when necessary, explained what was happening during Mass or the Stations of the Cross. Continue reading

Sources

• Gavin Abraham in The Catholic Soapbox
• See also Pat McCarthy in CathNews NZ Pacific
• Image: Planet Blog

Gavin Abraham, a journalist for more than a dozen years, has spent most of the last six years working in Catholic media.

In a column for World Communications Day in his diocesan paper, The Catholic Key, Bishop Finn said he had a responsibility to "instruct the Faithful about the problematic nature of this media source which bears the name ‘Catholic' ".

He said he had been "deluged with emails and other correspondence from Catholics concerned about the editorial stances of the Reporter: officially condemning Church teaching on the ordination of women, insistent undermining of Church teaching on artificial contraception and sexual morality in general, lionizing dissident theologies while rejecting established Magisterial teaching, and a litany of other issues".

Bishop Finn — who was once editor of the St Louis diocesan newspaper — said he had asked the Reporter to "submit their bona fides as a Catholic media outlet in accord with the expectations of Church law" but the paper declined to participate, indicating it considered itself an "independent newspaper which commented on ‘things Catholic' ".

The 49-year-old Reporter, which describes itself as "one of the few independent journalistic outlets for Catholics and others who struggle with the complex moral and societal issues of the day", has won many awards for its journalism.

Last year it called for Bishop Finn to resign after he became the first bishops in the United States to be convicted of failing to report a priest suspected of child sex-abuse.

Reponding to Bishop Finn's column, the Reporter's publisher, Thomas Fox, said his paper had enjoyed cordial relations with most of his predecessors, one of whom blessed its building.

He added: "NCR is proud to call itself a Catholic publication. We report and comment on church matters, including official teachings. We also report and comment on those who call into question some of these official teachings."

Sources:

The Catholic Key

National Catholic Reporter

Image: USA Today

Initially published as a newsletter in early 1984, eventually the publication became an eight-page tabloid in June 1987. Fr Bernie Hehir at the time commented on the challenges he faced, as an experience ‘that helped me appreciate Jesus' words to the disciples at the Last Supper: "'...but your sorrow will turn to joy. A woman in childbirth suffers because her time has come; but when she has given birth to the child, she forgets her suffering in her joy that a man has been born into the world.'

"As the infant paper grew, we suffered the succession of joys and pains that most parents experience."

As well as sharing news around the diocese, Cardinal Williams wanted progress reports on the cathedral project and diocesan finances published.

Wel-Com became a monthly, 20-page tabloid within two years and, by the 150th issue, the print run had risen to 24,400 after the Palmerston North Diocese started taking it in 1998.