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| "Priests are the backbone": Bishop Anthony Fisher. Photo: Steven Siewert |
Extracts from Bishop Fisher's Message for Lent 2011
Lent is, then, a time to renounce some simple pleasures like chocolate or alcohol for 40 days, to abstain from meat on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, to adopt other penances especially on Fridays, to give to the poor especially through Project Compassion, and to offer extra prayers and devotions (such as the Stations of the Cross).
But there’s a kind of fasting in Confession too. We have to give up something – our attachment to sin, our bad habits, our exaggerated pride in ourselves. It is humbling. Sometimes it is hard. It’s a harder kind of self-denial than giving up chocolate.
George Cardinal Pell
Some of the hysteric and extreme claims about global warming are also a symptom of pagan emptiness, of Western fear when confronted by the immense and basically uncontrollable forces of nature. Belief in a benign God who is master of the universe has a steadying psychological effect, although it is no guarantee of Utopia, no guarantee that the continuing climate and geographic changes will be benign.
In the past pagans sacrificed animals and even humans in vain attempts to placate capricious and cruel gods. Today they demand a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions. We await news of the Cardinal'e response to #Laudatosi
In my own reading of the Koran, I began to note down invocations to violence. There are so many of them, however, that I abandoned this exercise after 50 or 60 or 70 pages.
February 4 2006
Homosexual activity is a much greater health hazard than smoking.
Archbishop Mark Coleridge
A Swag of Views
Father Eric Hodgens, of Melbourne, an elder statesman among the clergy, also savaged Australia's Catholic bishops for what he regards as an abject performance during their five-yearly visit to Rome last month, particularly in failing to stand up for Bill Morris, sacked earlier this year as bishop of Toowoomba.
"They eat their own when fingered by Rome," Father Hodgens wrote of the bishops in The Swag, the national journal of Catholic priests. "How can you trust them?
''They are reckless with our patrimony. They seem incapable of protecting their own rights, let alone ours, in a system which is corrupt by today's secular standards. No wonder the attitude of so many priests and observant laity is moving from disappointment to disgust," he wrote.
Father Hodgens said the Domus Australia guest house in Rome - a beautifully refurbished old religious house with 33 rooms for paying visitors, a richly restored grand chapel and organ and a 150-seat auditorium opened by Pope Benedict XVI last month - cost between $30 million and $85 million, according to different estimates.
He said Cardinal Pell, the Archbishop of Sydney, had hoped all Australian dioceses would pay for it, but only Melbourne, Perth and Lismore had made contributions and the Sydney Archdiocese had paid the bulk.
He said Catholics of the four dioceses were not consulted, there was no prospect of a reasonable financial return and no accountability. "What does it say of us who trust bishops? The ethics of our secular state are higher than those of our church."
Secrecy also surrounded the sacking of Bishop Morris, who never saw the charges against him or the report by an "inquisitorial visitor", Archbishop Charles Chaput, then of Denver, he said.
"And the Australian bishops simply rolled over … . they thanked their humiliators for being generous with their time," Father Hodgens wrote.
"Thank God we live in a secular state and not in a Catholic theocracy," he said.
Photo Credits:
Archbishop Fisher SMH Feb 25 2014
Cardinal Pell
Group of Catholic Bishops in Rome (Catholic Media )
Photo Credits:
Archbishop Fisher SMH Feb 25 2014
Cardinal Pell
Group of Catholic Bishops in Rome (Catholic Media )
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