One of most striking points that Australian author and journalist Greg Sheridan makes in his recent book How Christians Can Succeed Today: Reclaiming the Genius of the Early Church (Allen & Unwin, 2025), which we featured in last week’s newsletter and discussed with him in recent weeks, is that the early Christians spearheaded the first revolution of the…
It has been widely acknowledged across an array of disciplines and political perspectives that a complex web of cracks has been widening across the fabric of what was once understood as Western liberal culture. It now doesn’t take an academic or a media pundit to observe this. Common sense bumps into this unravelling every day,…
There was a sense of festival and gratitude amongst the tables of over 140 people who came together to honour the “healing” evangelist St Luke on his vigil, and to celebrate the legacy of the revered bioethicist and public philosopher Nicholas Tonti-Filippini (1956-2014). It is impossible to imagine the debate about medical ethics and the life issues…
It is an eye-opening exercise to compare the overlap of time between the death of our great titular patron, St Thomas More (1478-1535) and the magnificent personality of Santa Madre Teresa or St Teresa of Ávila (1515-1582), who was born Teresa Sánchez de Cepeda Dávila y Ahumada, one of three sisters and nine brothers. Both of these…
It was very refreshing to witness the considerable growth in numbers at the recent classical/liberal schools conference held in Adelaide last week. This was the fourth such conference and with over 90 attendees, it included board members, principals, parents and teachers from these new independent schools. The fact that these schools are beginning to flower around…
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…