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29th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 19 October 2025
There can be many times in our lives when we know the temptation to lose heart. Sometimes life’s events simply take away our strength to keep hoping. And we are inclined to despair. It is difficult for us not to lose heart. Yet this Sunday we are told a story by Jesus about never losing heart. It seems that we are to be like the importune woman, while God is presented like the judge who eventually gives in to our persistence. But perhaps there is another way of looking at the story Jesus tells us. I recall a writer, Megan McKenna putting it this way: she was in Mexico sitting…
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28th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 12 October 2025
In his book, “Beyond Belief,” Hugh McKay, the Australian social researcher outlined the deep vein of ambivalence about religion that runs through Australian society: on the one hand many Australians do not actively worship, yet they still like to see local churches operating, and we still turn to churches to baptise our children and to educate them.[1] Around two thirds of Australians say we believe in God or some ‘higher power’, but fewer than one in ten of us attend church weekly. So those of us gathered here for Mass are an extraordinary minority no matter how mainstream we might consider ourselves to be. And all of his means 90% of the population…
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27th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 5 October 2025
We have explored before something of the nature of parables in the Gospel and the techniques the parables use to communicate their meaning. One of these techniques is hyperbole: something is overstated to make a point. It was an excellent technique in an oral culture, used to the art of storytelling. The hyperbole itself is not to be taken literally. It is the point of the hyperbole that demands our attention. The use of juxtaposition is another technique: two statements are put aside each other, one informing and opening the meaning of the other. However, the use of juxtaposition in the texts of Scripture indicates to us the importance of…
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26th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 28 September 2025
Here we are at the weekend of football Grand Finals! Whether we are AFL supporters or Rugby League followers, the country is abuzz with the excitement of challenge over this weekend and next But this weekend spare a thought for another football league which I came to know when I lived in Melbourne many years ago. In that Aussie Rules league in Melbourne there were six teams each from a different welfare agency. One year, in the A Grade competition, the Melbourne Street Demons beat the Salvation Army by 42 points. They had started the season sleeping in squats, on park benches and in doorways. Their coach remembers gathering the…
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High School Graduation Homily 2025
I was recently doing what we all do at the end of the day, but what we all should do less of – mindlessly scrolling through social media. It can be mindless, but it can also be quite fascinating. And one of the things that fascinated me just the other day was alighting upon a TikTok clip of a speech by Pope Leo XIV, in fact not just one but a number of them given that the algorithms had already begun to engage my interests. The clips had the pope give a rather edifying speech about something quite constructive. The content was in fact quite spiritual. The only problem was,…
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25th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 21 September 2025
For a long time, it has been the social rule in Australia that the topics of religion and politics are not to be raised in polite conversation. For a great deal of our history, we have also had the adage that politics and religion don’t mix, and that they, therefore, should be kept quite separate. And so, in Australia, particularly, when religious leaders have started talking about political or economic matters many of us start feeling uneasy, if not even embarrassed. In our own time, however, we have a strange reversal of this history for now it is not uncommon for political leaders to appeal to religious principles to stir the population to…
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22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time – 31 August 2025
In the annals of Christian legend there is a famous story about one of the early Roman martyrs, St Lawrence. Lawrence lived in a time of persecution, and as a deacon was responsible for his community’s administration. The prefect of Rome had already taken the Bishop of Rome into custody and was about to do the same to Lawrence. However, realizing that Lawrence had the keys to the community store, and thinking that this might contain much gold and silver, he first demanded that Lawrence show him the location of the store. Being a wily administrator and not losing his cool, Lawrence said, “Give me three days and I will make an…
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20th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 17 August 2025
The philosopher, Rosa Luxemburg once wrote: “The most revolutionary thing one can do is always to proclaim loudly what is happening.”[1] Luxemburg is a Marxist thinker, but I think this declaration is to be something quite true. The most revolutionary thing one can do is always to proclaim loudly what is happening. It reminded me of a wonderful sentence in one of Pope Francis’ exhortation to young people when he declared, “I ask you to be revolutionaries, I ask you to swim against the tide; yes, I am asking you to rebel against this culture that sees everything as temporary and that ultimately believes you are incapable of responsibility, incapable of true…
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Solemnity of Assumption – 15 August 2025
In the last weeks we may have noticed something new. The days have already become that little bit longer, the mornings are a little less cold. The trees are starting to put out new buds. The wattles are all blooming along the highways. There is every sense that we are entering a new season. We commonly refer to this new season as Spring – even if it be quite different from the season of the same name in the northern hemisphere. Whatever we may call it, though, it is a season of new life. The cold and dampness of winter give way to warmth, colour, and energy. Everything seems to stir…
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19th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 10 August 2025
We might recall the film, “Dead Poets Society” starring the late Robyn Williams as a slightly eccentric schoolteacher. At his school, he mentored a group of students into realising their potential. The catchcry of the film, Carpe Diem, “Seize the Day”, became somewhat famous in itself and got to be widely used. The film was very much a portrayal of the philosophy of Henry Thoreau. Thoreau was a well-known American humanist philosopher of the 19th century. His famous work was called, Walden, and was an account of him leaving the city and retiring to the side of Walden Pond in the north-east of the United States at which he sought…
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