Canberra, Australia, Mar 18, 2019 / 05:01 pm (CNA).- The Catholic Church in Australia is calling for an increase to the minimum wage in the country, saying that it will help lift families out of poverty.
Megan Kavanagh, a member of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference Employment Relations Reference Group, said in a March 17 statement that Australian tradition going back to what is known as the Harvester Case of 1907 dictates that full-time employees with dependents should be able to support themselves without falling into poverty.
“The current level of the minimum wage falls far short of the objective identified and set by Harvester in a much less prosperous Australia 112 years ago,” Kavanagh said.
The Church is calling on the Fair Work Commission to step up, arguing that it has not done enough to support hundreds of thousands of families who are suffering from low wages, as well as children who are living in poverty.
Current minimum wage in Australia is $18.93 per hour. The Austrlaian Catholic Bishops Conference is calling in its submission to the Fair Work Commission for the wage to be raised to $20 per hour.
Kavanagh said this would be an important first step in resolving economic problems facing working families.
She noted that the value of the minimum wage in Australia has declined relative to national wages in the last 20 years.
“The Fair Work Commission last year found that the minimum wage provided a reasonable income for a single adult without family responsibilities,” she said. “In other words, what was an inadequate wage for a family two decades ago has become a reasonable wage for a single adult without family responsibilities. That is simply unacceptable.”
The government should address the poor living standards of people in low-wage jobs, either by increasing minimum wage or offering more government assistance, stressed Joe Zabar, director of economic policy at Catholic Social Services Australia.
He warned that policy moves such as freezing or reducing Family Tax Benefits in recent years have only served to prevent families from achieving living wages.
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A reconstruction of an ancient church recently discovered in Armenia. The newly discovered church measures about 100 feet across and is shaped like an octagon with “cruciform annexes oriented east-west and north-south,” according to Achim Lictenberger, who noted the discovery of a similar structure from a slightly later period found in Abchazia (Sebastopol). / Credit: AGAP
Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Oct 24, 2024 / 08:00 am (CNA).
A team of German and Armenian researchers made a groundbreaking discovery last week of an ancient church in Armenia dating back to the fourth century, making it the oldest documented church in Armenia, which is considered the first Christian nation in the world.
In an email correspondence with CNA, co-directors of the project Achim Lichtenberger and Torben Schreiber of the University of Münster and Hayk Gyulamiryan of the Armenian Academy of Sciences explained the significance of the discovery made by the team at the site of the ancient city of Artaxata. The project’s fourth co-director, Mkrtich H. Zardaryan, could not be reached for comment by the time of publication.
Historic roots of Christianity in Armenia
“Being the first country which adopted Christianity at the state level, and where the apostles Thaddeus and Bartholomew preached Christianity in the early first century, this discovery is a very important fact for Armenians,” Gyulamiryan told CNA, further stating that “the findings are among the most important in Armenia in recent decades.”
Lichtenberger also emphasized the site’s particular importance, as the church was discovered near the monastery of Khor Virap, where Gregory the Illuminator had been kept in prison before he converted the Armenian king Tiradates III to Christianity in the fourth century.
The monastery of Khor Virap and Ararat in Armenia. Credit: AGAP
As Gyulamiryan stated, although the roots of Christianity may be traced back to the time of the apostles in Armenia, it was not until 301 that Christianity was proclaimed the official religion of Armenia.
According to tradition, Armenia’s conversion is attributed to St. Gregory the Illuminator, a Christian evangelist and convert from Zoroastrianism who miraculously cured the nation’s pagan king of a peculiar “illness” after no other pagan priest was able to do so.
The widely-adopted story of how Armenia became Christian draws from a mythical history promulgated by the fifth-century author Agathangelos, the Armenian researcher explained.
As the legend goes, the pagan king of Armenia had become fascinated by the beauty of St. Hripsime, a nun who had fled with her abbess and community from persecution in Rome. The king offered to marry and make her queen, but Hripsime refused and was able to ward off the king’s advances through miraculous strength.
After the king ultimately had Hripsime and her community killed, historians claim he was “turned into a wild boar who tore at his own flesh” and could not be cured by any priests of pagan or Zoroastrian temples who attempted the feat.
Eventually, the king’s sister persuaded him to appeal to St. Gregory, whom the king had imprisoned for the past 15 years. Once St. Gregory was released, he cured the king of his “disease” and converted him and the entire royal family to the Christian faith.
Artaxata, where these events are believed to have taken place, is “a major place related to early Christianity in Armenia,” Lichtenberger told CNA.
St. Gregory is revered both in the Orthodox Armenian Apostolic Church and in the Catholic Church traditions. In 2005, Pope John Paul II erected a 19-foot statue of St. Gregory in the north courtyard of St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City.
The excavation area of the archeological site where the remains of an ancient church were found in Armenia. Credit: AGAP
The discovery
The newly-discovered church measures about 100 feet across and is shaped like an octagon with “cruciform annexes oriented east-west and north-south,” according to Lichtenberger, who noted the discovery of a similar structure from a slightly later period found in Abchazia (Sebastopol).
Although the Araxata site was previously discovered, Lichtenberger told CNA that the church had been buried underground and gone undiscovered until the team carried out its magnetic prospections and excavations this past spring.
The researchers confirmed in September the age of the church to be from about 350 A.D. using radiocarbon dating techniques on a series of samples taken from a wooden platform belonging to the original construction of the building.
Ahead of the autumn excavations this year, Gyulamiryan told CNA he remembered thinking that the team “should confidently dig up the next chapter of the history of Armenia.”
The massive mortar wall of the recently discovered ancient church believed to be the oldest in Armenia. Credit: AGAP
According to Lichtenberger, the radiocarbon date from the wooden samples corresponded with pottery shards that were also discovered inside the church and with “the overall construction technique of the building using substantial amounts of mortar.”
“In the center of the church we encountered significant amounts of marble decoration that suggest that this part was prominently adorned,” he said. Interestingly, the German researcher noted that the state of the building upon discovery indicated that it had perhaps met a hostile end.
“The building was heavily destroyed (maybe intentionally),” he wrote, “the marble construction smashed, parts of the floor tiles removed, the roof set on fire, and all was buried in a huge collapse of roof tiles and burnt roof beams.”
However, according to Lichtenberger, there are no primary literary sources that correspond to the church, as “literary sources only relate to a seventh-century A.D. church in Artaxata.”
By contrast, while the Armenian literary tradition attests that the oldest church in the country is the Etchmiadzin Cathedral, Lichtenberger noted, “archeological evidence from this place does not date back to the mid-fourth century A.D.”
“This does not mean that Etchmiadzin is younger than the Artaxata church, it only means that the Artaxata church provides earlier archaeological evidence,” he added. “Therefore we assume that the Artaxata church is the oldest archaeologicallyattested church in Armenia.”
The Etchmiadzin Cathedral, which Armenian literary tradition attests is the oldest church in the country. But Achim Lichtenberger says this “does not mean that Etchmiadzin is younger than the Artaxata church, it only means that the Artaxata church provides earlier archaeological evidence. Therefore we assume that the Artaxata church is the oldest archaeologically attested church in Armenia.” Credit: Madalaine Elhabbal
Future of the project
Schreiber shared with CNA in another email chain that analysis of data collected from the site will play a significant role in future archeological measures.
“The interaction of the excavation results, the geophysical survey, and the scientific investigations (natural sciences) will keep us busy in the coming year,” Schreiber said. “However, we are certain that these measures will provide us with a very comprehensive picture of this extraordinary and important find.”
Excavations in the ancient ruins of a church recently discovered in Armenia, the oldest Christian nation in the world. Credit: AGAP
The research team from the University of Münster and the Armenian Academy of Sciences have been at the Artaxata site since 2018 and have also made other noteworthy discoveries, including an unfinished Roman aqueduct, a Hellenistic sanctuary, and the remains of an Urartian settlement, according to Lichhtenberger.
The team of researchers also includes 10 students from the German university along with various internal and external specialists who consulted with the team on different groups of materials at the site, including animal and human bones, plants, or “archaeobotanical” matter, marble, plaster, pottery, and roof tiles — “of which we found a lot,” Lichtenberger said.
“We will continue the work of the Armenian-German Artaxata Project in the future,” he told CNA.
Melbourne, Australia, Aug 14, 2019 / 02:10 pm (CNA).- The Archbishop of Melbourne has said he is prepared to defy a proposed new law that would force priests in the Australian state of Victoria to violate the seal of confession.
Chinese flags on barbed wired wall in Kashgar (Kashi), Xinjiang, China. / Credit: Jonathan Densford/Shutterstock
Rome Newsroom, Sep 15, 2023 / 18:50 pm (CNA).
A Catholic priest in China was convicted of “fraud” and “impersonating religious pers… […]
1 Comment
A minimum wage set by the State is a bad idea to begin with and the fact that the Australian Bishops are calling for an increase seems to be a sign of their misplaced priorities, which ought to be on evangelization in such a secularized country. When I lived in Australia in the late nineties, I never met any poor people nor did I find any tenement housing or other signs of poverty. Of course, since then the price of housing has skyrocketed. This problem arises from housing bubbles, and fractional reserve banking so that people have to enslave themselves to the banks in order to get a place to live in and continue such enslavement for some 40 years. Governments are part of this problem as the higher the price of housing the more they get in tax income. Once can hardly believe that there is insufficient land for building in Australia, in the U.S. and many other countries.
The minimum wage tends to increase the percentage of youth unemployment as those who may be able to hire unskilled workers don’t due to such a minimum wage and other taxes on employment. Maybe the bishops could support some form of apprenticeships, something that traditionally existed by means of the guilds. Instead of more State involvement, what is needed, among other things, is to get the dictatorial Nanny State out of many areas which it controls and makes a mess of. Why should there be so much tax on the creation of jobs? Mainly to finance the Welfare State, which in my opinion should be dismantled and people should be taught to be responsible, to save and freely look after themselves, the State, having only a subsidiary role as the Church’s Social Teaching rightly holds. For that of course, people ought to be able to save and receive a decent interest on their savings. When I was in Australia, one could get 6% p.a. interest on a term deposit guaranteed. These days, one would be luck to get 0.25% which is what one gets in the European Union.
A minimum wage set by the State is a bad idea to begin with and the fact that the Australian Bishops are calling for an increase seems to be a sign of their misplaced priorities, which ought to be on evangelization in such a secularized country. When I lived in Australia in the late nineties, I never met any poor people nor did I find any tenement housing or other signs of poverty. Of course, since then the price of housing has skyrocketed. This problem arises from housing bubbles, and fractional reserve banking so that people have to enslave themselves to the banks in order to get a place to live in and continue such enslavement for some 40 years. Governments are part of this problem as the higher the price of housing the more they get in tax income. Once can hardly believe that there is insufficient land for building in Australia, in the U.S. and many other countries.
The minimum wage tends to increase the percentage of youth unemployment as those who may be able to hire unskilled workers don’t due to such a minimum wage and other taxes on employment. Maybe the bishops could support some form of apprenticeships, something that traditionally existed by means of the guilds. Instead of more State involvement, what is needed, among other things, is to get the dictatorial Nanny State out of many areas which it controls and makes a mess of. Why should there be so much tax on the creation of jobs? Mainly to finance the Welfare State, which in my opinion should be dismantled and people should be taught to be responsible, to save and freely look after themselves, the State, having only a subsidiary role as the Church’s Social Teaching rightly holds. For that of course, people ought to be able to save and receive a decent interest on their savings. When I was in Australia, one could get 6% p.a. interest on a term deposit guaranteed. These days, one would be luck to get 0.25% which is what one gets in the European Union.