Rooftop view of Rome

By Archbishop Coleridge

My first full day in Rome … and there’s a transport strike!  I really know I’m back here when that sort of thing happens.  I think the first word I ever learnt in Italian was “sciopero”, which means “strike”.  Some things never change in the Eternal City.  I’m staying for a couple of nights at Domus Australia because I can’t move into my Synod residence till Saturday.

Bishop Eugene Hurley and I will be staying at a place called the Istituto Maria Santissima Bambina, which means the Institute of the Most Holy Child Mary.  The name is a bit baroque but it’s a great place to be for a Synod, as a few us learnt when we were here a few years back for the Synod on the Word of God.   Continue reading →

By Archbishop Coleridge

Sitting in the lounge at Dubai airport waiting for my flight to Rome, I’ve been thinking that the Synod needs to deal with facts – the world as it actually is rather than the world as we might wish it to be.  Yes, we need to hold firmly to the vision of the way things ought to be (that we’ve received from Jesus) but also deal with the facts on the ground as they are at present.

Many of the facts may seem unfriendly to the Christian vision of things, but I’m reminded of Carl Rogers’ words: “The facts are friendly”.  They mightn’t seem so at first, but the challenge is to discover how what seems to be unfriendly is, in the end, friendly. Perhaps the facts are friendly because God is in the facts, somewhere – and God is always friendly, even though that isn’t always obvious either.
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