I’ve been following the St Mary’s saga with detached interest. Having once been to a mass there I found the service powerful, but I’ve been fascinated that Peter Kennedy thought that he could stay there as a Catholic priest at the same time as he defied and criticised the church. So when Mark Bahnisch suggested [...]

I was playing with my son and looking at Google Earth. We went from discussing how Vikings navigated the inland waterways in Russia all the way from the Baltic to the Black Sea, to Mercator projections, and twisting and turning the globe. So, low and behold, what did I find lurking under the summer Arctic [...]

That Christianity, and Judaism, demand a secular, or at least dualist society where church and state are separate, was the theme of Father Robert Sirico at the CIS’s Acton Lecture last night. (The CIS doesn’t have a transcript or speech notes up, but you can get a flavour of his speech from this op-ed in [...]

I do not like thee, Cardinal Pell The reason why, you know full well. And please believe the words I tell: If there were one, you’d rot in hell. Snap, snap! Time for all those leaders of the church, of all denominations, to call for the removal of this odious man. Haven’t we all heard [...]

Here’s another reason I could never be a Roman Catholic. A press release from the World Youth Day Sydney, the religious extravaganza being staged by the Catholic Church in July this year, alerted me to the fact that Blessed Pier Georgio Frassati would be attending. The charismatic Blessed Pier Giorgio is revered for his social [...]

Like many Aussies, I have struggled to balance my revulsion for extreme Islam’s repression of women with an open-minded acceptance of different values. That balance tilts over when I fear for my own life style, given that in this country, women driving, voting and wearing short sleeved shirts is still legal. Hilaly’s comments crossed that [...]

Pope Benedict’s error wasn’t to criticise Islam, it was in not being prepared to back-up his criticism. His speech is a difficult one, and I wouldn’t pretend to understand it anywhere near completely. But I understand it enough to know a few things. It is disingenuous to suggest that he was making a minor point [...]

The fact that this story surfaced 11 days ago and has yet to make the mainstream media says all you need to know about the balance of outrage in the Mohammed Cartoon controversy. In March this year a 21 year old accounts clerk in Singapore was called in for questioning under that country’s sedition laws [...]