Image of PureGift Resource

Pure Gift promotional video clip

‘Pure Gift’ is Catholic Earthcare Australia’s new resource for adults and senior secondary students. The core of this resource package is an animation of a legacy letter written by Luke Edwards to his three young sons. Luke Edwards has developed a range of prayerful exercises and contemplative reflections based on themes contained within the animated clip.

The ‘Pure Gift’ resource has a flexible design and offers a selection of options for the user within each theme.

The ‘Pure Gift’ resource package is a growing series.   As additional resources are developed, these will be added to the resource package.Material is intended to assist the user in the growth and understanding of their emerging ecological consciousness. It is hoped that these exercises might provide moments of insight and transformation to stimulate and sustain the movement for ecological conversion at a personal and communal level.

To find out more about this resource, follow the link:

http://www.catholicearthcare.org.au/PureGiftPreview.html

Bishop Pat Power at St Peter's Square

By Bishop Pat Power

This article was first published on CathBlog, a daily service of CathNews.

Planning a two week holiday in Italy, I had overlooked the fact that October 11 would mark the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council.

So on that day I travelled by train from Spoleto in Umbria to Rome for the historic occasion which was marked by a Mass celebrated in St Peter’s Square by Pope  Benedict XVI with hundreds of bishops, many of whom were present in Rome for the Synod of Bishops. Read the rest of this entry »

Image courtesy of The Age

By John Ferguson, Executive Officer, Australian Catholic Social Justice Council

In March 2004, a Senate Committee issued its report on poverty and hardship. It was the most exhaustive investigation of the causes, effects and extent of poverty in Australia since Ronald Henderson’s Commission of Inquiry into Poverty, thirty years earlier.

The 2004 report, A hand up not a hand out: Renewing the fight against poverty, was wide ranging – addressing everything from poverty measures to wages and income support, from education and training to gambling addiction, from the circumstances of sole parents to the decline of rural communities.

This inquiry called for the establishment of a National Poverty Strategy and a commitment to action within 12 months of the report being tabled. It warned, ‘Australia will face a crisis of poverty and disadvantage in the coming years … [with] the implication that Australians are increasingly at risk of falling into poverty and indeed more so now than at any time in the post-war era.

The recommended Strategy did not eventuate and the lack of political consensus across parties saw the report and its recommendations shelved.

Read the rest of this entry »

By Devett O’Brien

“It’s time to stop the hand wringing” this was the main message from Cardinal Timothy Dolan when he sat down this morning with a group of around 10 english speaking journalists including myself to discuss his views on the Synod so far.

Cardinal Dolan is the Archbishop of New York and President of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

He told us that the thing he is most surprised and “tantalized” by is the number of Bishops who acknowledge the power of secularism but are saying “it’s time we stopped wringing our hands over this.” Read the rest of this entry »