This week the Thomas More Centre hosted the Melbourne book launch of Professor Tracey Rowland’s book, Remembering Cardinal George Pell: Recollections of a Great Man of the Church (Ignatius Press, 2025). Professor Rowland is the very distinguished Australian theological/cultural scholar who is renowned and in demand around the Catholic and wider theological world. She is currently the St…
This week’s Thomas More Centre newsletter resonates with the life and work of the great literary and spiritual figure of the 19th century, Doctor of the Church, cardinal and saint, John Henry Newman (1801-1890). In his Mass for the beatification of the cardinal in 2008, Pope Benedict XVI, who had a lifelong inspiration from Newman, declared: “His insights…
In many ways, the rhetoric and horror of recent weeks, particularly in the light of the appalling and fatal shooting of the 31-year-old American Christian influencer Charlie Kirk, has illustrated for many decent people around the world the lethal incoherence of what Pope Benedict XVI and others have warned was an impending civilisational collapse. This disintegration,…
1. Cardinal Pell: Educator and friend to the young There was the excitement of a “gala” event in the moments leading up to the Sydney book launch of Professor Tracey Rowland’s most recent book, Remembering George Cardinal Pell: Recollections of a Great Man of the Church, by San Francisco publishing house Ignatius Press. The launch was very…
In last week’s TMC newsletter, we recalled the voice of the philosopher Archbishop Eric D’Arcy and B.A. Santamaria in calling for an authentic “renaissance” in school-based Catholic education and particularly in religious education. We also acknowledged in that newsletter that the grounds for forming the Thomas More Centre in 1989 were in part a response to…
“True education aims to give people a formation which is directed towards their final end and the good of that society to which they belong and in which, as adults, they will have their share of duties to perform.” -Vatican Council II, Gravissimum Educationis (n. 1). A few weeks ago, Queensland Thomas More Centre organiser Mark Makowiecki…
It is with great sense of sad gratitude that many, especially those around the Thomas More Centre, received word that with a mysterious liturgical fittingness the retired Bishop Peter John Elliott died yesterday, August 6, on the Feast of the Transfiguration. He was 81 years old. The Transfiguration is the feast which celebrates the Christological mystery,…
“Books, you know, Charles, are like lobster-shells. We surround ourselves with ‘em, and then we grow out of ‘em and leave ‘em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development.” – Dorothy Sayers, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, Penguin Books, 1935 This week, 90 years ago in 1935, an imaginative English managing editor launched…
In the wake of the recent Home Conference hosted by the Dawson Society in Fremantle, Western Australia, many of those who attended the conference – like myself – have been provoked by the excellent presentations to continue discussing some of the issues addressed at the conference and to raise new ones with their friends and colleagues. There…
This 80th edition of the Thomas More Centre’s newsletter coincides with the Catholic feast day of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, a Marian patronage of the ancient order of hermits and contemplative women who were first founded in the 12th century in the Holy Land in the site of Mount Carmel. The hermits settled in the…