Kim Jong Un invites Pope Francis to meet in Pyongyang

Sydney, Australia, Dec 11, 2017 / 05:10 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- The Church in Australia kicked off Advent with a Catholic Youth Festival in Sydney last weekend, drawing some 20,000 attendees and including the country’s largest Mass since the World Youth Day in 2008.

The event was also the opening of a “Year of Youth” meant to “open new horizons for spreading joy joy for the young Church and our communities.”  

Archbishop Anthony Fisher of Sydney said that “our culture has messed up about life and love, justice and mercy,” at the festival’s Dec. 9 Mass, citing political challenges such as the recent legalization of voluntary euthanasia in Victoria.

“If ever we need new John the Baptists to call to people to repent and to believe, to offer some really good news amidst all the bad and to point people to Christ, it’s right now.”

The festival was held Dec. 7-9, shortly after Archbishop Denis Hart of Melbourne, president of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, invited the nation’s youth to participate in the 2018 Year of Youth, which will last until Nov. 25, 2018.

The festival mostly took place at the Sydney Olympic Park. There young people attended workshops, Mass, faith-filled discussions, and even interactive games, such as a Saint John Paul II video game.

However, the highlight of the weekend was a pilgrimage through Australia’s largest city followed by the closing event. Depending on the desired length, people could begin the pilgrimage at either the St Mary Mackillop Shrine, Harbour Bridge, or St Mary’s Cathedral, but the pilgrims all converged for a concert and closing Mass at the Domain in the Royal Botanical Gardens.

The nearly three hour praise and worship concert included Matt Maher and tributes to the country’s aboriginal groups. A Saturday anticipated Mass soon followed the event, celebrated by Archbishop Fisher, who cancelled all other anticipated Masses to encourage attendance at the youth Mass.

“Episode Eight is coming,” said the archbishop at the beginning of his homily, referring to the new Star Wars movie which will be released this month.

He explained that he had first seen Star Wars during his last year of school nearly 40 years ago, and how it is now a cultural staple which has earned billions of dollars and spawned cultural phrases such as “I am your father.”

Although the series has a bizarre religious perspective, he said, it is still based on the theme of a struggle between light and darkness, adding that the movies include champions who fought on behalf of goodness.

“One thing is still clear, we still look for heroes,” he said, pointing to John the Baptist, an unlikely hero who ate bugs, honey, and smelled like camels.

“All together, JB (John the Baptist) is not the kind of guy your parents would want you to bring home from ACYF as your new boyfriend or new best mate,” he joked.

However, he said this saint aimed to bring people the good news, namely Christ, and stood up against the evils of the times, even if it meant losing his head to Herod because he denounced the king’s illegitimate marriage.

Archbishop Fisher highlighted the evils of euthanasia, which was recently legalized in the state of Victoria, and warned that people can no longer rely on the Christian presence within the culture, but will have to choose for themselves to believe in the teachings of the Catholic Church.

“Things are sliding in our culture, and going forward Christians may not be as influential or even welcome as they used to be. Christian’s won’t be carried by the culture any more. They will have to decide for themselves.”

The culture needs Catholic youth to be heroes and to proclaim the good amid the darkness of the world, he said, noting the example of Mary, the mother of God.

“There were many challenges for [Mary] and not just at the beginning. Accompanying Christ to the cross tore her Immaculate Heart,” he said.

But instead of despairing over evil, he challenged Catholic youth to respond as Mary did at the resurrection.

“Being held by him after the resurrection must have been the greatest joy a human heart, even an immaculate one, could ever have contained. Indeed she couldn’t contain that joy. The next time we see her in the New Testament she is praying in the cenacle of the Church as she awaits her new children to be over shadowed by the power of the Holy Spirit.”

[…]

Rome Newsroom, Dec 7, 2020 / 09:30 am (CNA).- Australia is celebrating the 10th anniversary this year of the canonization of the country’s first and only saint, St. Mary MacKillop.

The pioneering religious sister founded the Josephite sisters who brought schools and orphanages to the Australian outback in the 19th century despite facing numerous challenges.

“What she stood for really encapsulates the values and spirit of Australia, and this is why her appeal goes much beyond just that of the Catholic community,” the Australian Ambassador to the Holy See Chiara Porro told EWTN News.

The Australian ambassador hosted a webinar to celebrate the life of St. Mary MacKillop on Dec. 4. She said that the Australian saint provides lessons in leadership for women leaders in the Church today.

“Mary MacKillop used to say: ‘Never see a need without doing something about it.’ And that was really what inspired her life. She went out of her way to work with those on the margins of society and set up schools for the poor, for the indigenous population who at the time were very desolate and had no hope,” Porro said.

“I think for me what it shows is the role of these women, religious women, in addressing some of the most important needs of society today and particularly during times of crisis where the poorest always suffer the most.”

MacKillop was the first of eight children born of Scottish immigrants in what is now Melbourne in 1842 at a time when the European settlement in Australia had been established for a little more than 50 years. Her father had studied for the priesthood in Rome for seven years before migrating to Australia where he met her mother who had arrived from Scotland less than two years earlier.

The family faced continuous economic difficulties and had to move frequently. The postulator of MacKillop’s cause for sainthood, Sr. Maria Casey, described the conditions at the time:

“Poverty was rife especially in country areas, religious discrimination was widespread, the plight of the aboriginal people was deplorable, unemployment was common-place and communication was difficult in the extreme. … The Church had few priests to serve its people who were scattered around rural areas and, as a rule, were experiencing poverty. Education was limited and virtually non-existent in rural areas,” Casey said at the webinar.

“From a young age, Saint Mary had increasingly felt the call to live as a religious sister but she still had the obligation to care for her family, a burden she undertook from when she was 16 to 25.”

Mary dreamed of the possibility of offering free education for Australia’s Catholic rural poor, and with the help of her spiritual director and mentor she developed a plan for a congregation of sisters to aid those in need in Australia’s vast rural areas.

She began the order’s work with a school in a stable in the small town of Penola, Australia in 1866. Taking the religious name St. Mary of the Cross, MacKillop founded what would go on to be the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph of the Sacred Heart.

Her sisters went on to establish many schools and orphanages across Australia, including in the “bush” areas where hardship was common.

“Travel over any distance was for the fearless and tough. Roads were merely tracks through the bush, travel by steamer was not for the faint-hearted and trains were rare. Mary used all means to visit her sisters,” Sr. Casey said.

As an innovator and as a woman in the 19th century, MacKillop encountered many challenges, including from inside the Church.

“Mary envisaged the sisters being governed centrally by one superior and being free to go wherever there was a need anywhere in the colonies. … The system of governance was contrary to that experienced in most European religious congregations of the time and was the cause of disputes with some of the bishops as the fledgling Institute expanded,” her postulator said.

“A complex set of circumstances led to the Bishop of Adelaide, who was once her friend and benefactor, excommunicating Mary in September 22, 1871 for supposed disobedience. This excommunication was invalid and unjustified in the light of later information. Mary accepted the excommunication and the dismissal of many of her sisters with serenity and peace. The Bishop revoked the sentence before his death less than six months later.”

By the time of MacKillop’s death in 1909 there were 650 sisters in her congregation ministering in all Australian states and in New Zealand.

Today, the “Josephites” have extended their ministry to Ireland, Peru, East Timor, Scotland and Brazil.

St. Mary Mackillop was remembered at an event in Rome co-hosted by the Australian and U.K. Embassies to the Holy See, which also honored another innovative female Catholic leader, Blessed Mary Ward, who founded the Congregation of Jesus and the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary in England in the early 17th century.

The undersecretary of Vatican Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, Sr. Carmen Ros Nortes, said at the webinar that both Catholic women founded religious institutes that were “born from an inspiration of the Spirit that seeks to renew the Church.”

“If we ask from where Mary MacKillop and Mary Ward received this vision of the future and the inner strength to realize it, we can only say that the Spirit blows where it wills, and that God has his time for everything,” Sr. Carmen said.

“There are men and women designated as instruments of Providence in times of great historical crisis.”

[…]

Melbourne, Australia, Apr 15, 2019 / 11:15 am (CNA).- More than twenty journalists in Australia faced court charges Monday over breach of a court gag order in the case of Cardinal George Pell. The state government of Victoria is bringing charges agains… […]