Preparing for Christmas
December 20, 2024
What preparations do you have in place for this upcoming Christmas?
The days leading up to Christmas are often filled with joy and excitement. Conversations revolve around choosing the perfect gifts, planning festive meals, and deciding who will host the celebrations — these are all part of the everyday preparations for that special day.
But for those with faith, Christmas goes a little further.
Catholic Religious welcome Jubilee Year with a Song
December 16, 2024Catholic Religious Australia (CRA) has captured the spirit of the Jubilee Year by releasing a song and music video, titled Journey of Faith – CRA, that expresses the wide range of ministries in which Religious women and men live and share the joy of the Gospel (including some of our Josephites).
Educational Book of the Year Winners Announced
December 12, 2024
Congratulations to Sr Mary-Ann Casanova PhD whose book, We Care for God’s Earth, has been jointly selected as Garratt Publishing’s Educational Book of the Year!
Sr Mary-Ann shares the award with Kathryn Robinson and her book, Know Your Bible.
We Care for God’s Earth and Know your Bible are both part of Garratt Publishing’s Living Your Faith series. The publishers said it was “impossible to choose one above the other. Therefore, the winner is actually two books!”.
A Reflection for International Migrants Day 2024
December 8, 2024
Honouring the Contributions and Upholding the Rights of People who are Migrants: A Reflection for International Migrants Day 2024
Every year on 18 December, the world comes together to observe International Migrants Day – a day to celebrate the incredible contributions migrants make to societies across the globe and to reaffirm our collective responsibility to respect and protect their human rights. As we commemorate this important occasion in 2024, we reflect not only on the progress made but also on the urgent work still needed to ensure that people who are migrants can live with dignity and opportunity wherever they are.
Human Rights Day
The year was 1945. I was 10 years old that year, old enough to understand the horror of Hiroshima, to remember the newspapers showing young soldiers with limbs amputated, to learn about the holocaust, to watch the pain of our neighbour’s children when their father, a prisoner of war, returned a different man, a man needing care in a psychiatric hospital.
People throughout the world were devastated about the accumulation of pain. Leaders of 51 nations from across the planet gathered to lament the carnage of World War II. They grieved together and together made a pact to do all in their power to avoid such a thing happening again.
Christian Hope – Jubilee 2025
December 6, 2024
As Pope Francis expressed many times, we are currently living in a world that needs hope. As pilgrims in this world, we are all journeying and experiencing life with all its challenges and opportunities, bad and good, struggles and breakthroughs.
This Christmas, give the gift of education
December 5, 2024
Timor-Leste may be one of our closest neighbours but for many of its children, schooling – something that is taken for granted by most Australian children – remains a distant dream. Sadly, nearly 42% of Timor-Leste’s population lives below the poverty line, and children miss out on vital opportunities for learning. [1]
Saint Mary MacKillop was a pioneer of schooling for the most marginalised children – just like Juliana. Juliana lives only one hour from Australia, and yet her world couldn’t be more different from ours. She’s the youngest of five siblings living in a remote farming community in Timor-Leste. Her family regularly goes without food so there’s money for her to go to school instead.
Children like Juliana know only too well that school is a way to break the cycle of poverty and create a brighter future for their families. But while Timor-Leste is making astonishing progress at rebuilding itself to become a strong and stable nation – after gaining its independence 25 years ago – there are still many challenges, especially when it comes to providing quality education for its young people.
Feast of St Francis Xavier
December 2, 2024
Sr Virginia shares a reflection for the feast of St Francis Xavier, 3 December, missioner in Asia and formerly patron of Australia.
I first ‘met’ Francis the day I entered religious life in 1963 and received the religious name ‘Xavier’. It was the day Paul VI became Pope. Soon after, the local parish priest loaned me a life of Saint Francis Xavier by James Brodrick SJ. Because it held the saint’s missionary letters, he told me it would be good for me.