CARITAS Australia has sent $50,000 to assist a region in the Philippines that was thrashed by a tropical cyclone just before Christmas. Typhoon Tembin, also known in the Philippines as Typhoon Vinta, hit the Caraga municipality on the north-eastern section of the island of Mindanao on December 24, leaving at least 267 people dead. Staff and volunteers from Caritas’ international ... Read More »

A WEST Papuan independence leader has described handing an historic petition to the United Nations as representing “the blood and bones of his people”. More than 1.8 million West Papuans defied the Indonesian Government by signing a banned petition demanding a new vote for independence. An estimated 70 per cent of West Papuans signed the petition as it was smuggled ... Read More »

RELIGIOUS leaders across the world were praying for an end to “senseless violence” after 59 people were killed and more than 500 wounded by a gunman in Las Vegas, Nevada. The gunman was perched in a room on the 32nd floor of a hotel and unleashed a shower of bullets late on October 1 on an outdoor country music festival ... Read More »

POPE Francis arrived in Colombia for a Papal visit at a delicate time–  a 2016 peace treaty between the biggest leftist rebel group and the elected government is being implemented to put an end to a 52-year civil conflict. The deal disarms and demobilises the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (known as the FARC, from their Spanish initials), but there ... Read More »

AS Hurricane Irma carved a path of devastation through the Caribbean, one Brisbane priest was keeping a close vigil. Newly-appointed St Stephen’s Cathedral dean Fr Peter Brannelly, spent more than a decade – from 1995 until 2006- as pastor of the islands of Tortola, Virgin Gorda and the people of the British Virgin Islands. As Irma swept across the region, ... Read More »

THE title on his business card gives little away – Holy See Study Mission, Hong Kong. For the past seven-and-a-half years, Monsignor Ante Jozic, an astute Croatian who previously worked at the Holy See nunciature in Moscow, has held one of the Catholic Church’s most delicate and intriguing diplomatic positions anywhere in the world. Working under the innocuous “study mission” ... Read More »

BRITISH Prime Minister Theresa May has vowed that “hatred and evil” of the kind seen in a terror attack on London’s Finsbury Park mosque that left one man dead will never succeed. After the fourth terror attack in the United Kingdom in the past three months, Mrs May stood ashen faced yet resolute inside the mosque, flanked by police and ... Read More »

WORDS of love, despite intense pain and grief, are on the lips of Brisbane priest, Fr David Mahrous, after masked gunmen attacked a bus of Coptic Christians south of the Egyptian capital, killing 29 people and injuring dozens more. Speaking to Fr Mahrous, parish priest at the Virgin Mary Coptic Orthodox Church in Calamvale, is to be reminded of the ... Read More »

Overseas help: Caritas Australia chief executive officer Paul O’Callaghan visiting Kitui, Kenya, where he met communities and families impacted by drought. Photo: Caritas Australia. FAMINE in the Horn of Africa is shaping as the biggest humanitarian crisis since the Second World War, an Australian Catholic aid expert says. “It is unnerving when you see the scale of the disaster,” Caritas ... Read More »