AT the age of 23, Carlton Sinn has taken the big step of becoming a Catholic and this will be his first Christmas receiving Holy Communion. When he sits down to talk about his decision he jokes that “Sinn” is “an ironic surname for a Christian fella, but it’s two n’s – an important distinction, I think”. And there’s a ... Read More »
SR Elisabeth Keane loved life as a teacher and mentor of young women, and then she discovered the joys of parish ministry, but now she’s really at home in prison. Every week for the past 18 years, she’s been visiting women at Numinbah prison in the Gold Coast hinterland. And, at a time when she’s celebrating 60 years as a ... Read More »
HE has celebrated Mass on top of Mount Kilimanjaro, sat around the campfire with the Aboriginal people of the Pilbara in Western Australia and now this priest from Tanzania is finding his feet in the heart of Brisbane. Holy Spirit Father Tom Kessy says it’s a struggle for him to adapt to his new life as parish priest at Dorrington, ... Read More »
A HITCH-hiker meets a missionary in the middle of a tropical island –and that’s the beginning of a beautiful love story. That love story was celebrated as one to last forever when the hitch-hiker from Finland and the missionary, whose Portuguese family hailed from Mozambique, were married at a little country church on the outskirts of Brisbane recently. The odds ... Read More »
AS Australia moves on from the hype of another royal visit – that of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle – a Queensland couple can share a laugh about the day their family pet stopped the prince’s dad in his tracks. Bill and Marge Hilleard, who for many years raised their family of five opposite the entrance to one of Brisbane’s ... Read More »
CAMPAIGNING for action on climate change is a matter of survival for Anote Tong and his people. Mr Tong, president of Kiribati from 2003 to 2016, was in Australia earlier this month reminding political leaders, the Church community and anyone who would listen that the islands that made up his Pacific nation could be submerged within decades if global warming ... Read More »
LEANNE Menyweather has had to set her neighbours straight – they had the wrong idea about her life. “Bruce (her husband) and I bought a unit on the waterfront ten years ago, and my neighbours, most of them are retired, and they go, ‘Oh, you poor thing, going to work …’,” the parish secretary at Redcliffe City, on Brisbane’s northern ... Read More »
BRISBANE priest Fr Gerry Hefferan has visited some of the towns devastated by ISIS in the Nineveh Plains of northern Iraq and been struck by the “incredible resilience” of families rebuilding their lives there. “I remember the courage and perseverance of returning families and their hospitality,” Fr Hefferan told parishioners at the Parish of St Joseph and St Anthony, Bracken ... Read More »
“JUST awful” was the way Fr Chukwudi Chinaka described the scene as he drove around his country parish inspecting the damage left by wild storms on October 11. Super-cell thunderstorms ripped through the South Burnett on that Thursday afternoon leaving a path of destruction as they moved through towards the coast. Fr Chinaka, administrator of the Kingaroy and Nanango parishes, ... Read More »
The Catholic Leader Keeping Faith with You
