Do you remember your first attempts at writing by hand? Through the mists of time, I recall that I read before starting school but writing of any coherent sort came a little later. In the first years of school, we began an apprenticeship which began with chalk and blackboards, to the chunky pencils with those…
As the month of August comes around each year, I find myself returning to the witness, holiness and wisdom of Edith Stein, St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross OCD (1981-1942). Her rigorous mind and her keen social and psychological ethos are critically needed in our own times of unhinged emotive reaction, as much as in the face…
Above image: The Hon Joseph Santamaria KC, Fr Frank Brennan SJ and the Hon Justice Tim Ginnane (front) at an event hosted by the Melbourne Catholic Lawyers’ Association (MCLA). (Photo courtesy of MCLA.) Last week in the TMC newsletter, we published a short tribute to our eminent patron, the Hon. Joseph Gerard Santamaria, who died at…
In paragraph 114 of Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical Magnifica Humanitas (2026), the Pope includes an aside about the value of interpersonal practices which might restore the humane to our lives even as we stand like ants before the evitable tsunami of new digital technologies. I recently reviewed this encyclical in two parts in the June 27, 2026 and July…
In the Northern Hemisphere this week, the birth of the prophet and forerunner St John the Baptist (June 24) is celebrated with both a religious and cosmic sense. The Forerunner announces the true light of Jesus Christ and the passing on and over of the torch of light from the Old Covenant to the “New”.…
In the Catholic world, the month of May was specially dedicated to Mary the Mother of Christ. In recent years, or at least since the declaration of Pope Pius XII in 1955, the month of May opens with the Feast of St Joseph the Worker. St Joseph: Model of Lay Formation Since that time there has…
A recurring theme at all our Thomas More Centre events over our last three years has been about refining what Christian faith and the faithful have to offer our society and culture. What makes Christian anthropology, Christian humanism, Christian virtue, Christian community so distinctive, so perennial and so important in our times of disorientation, upheaval…
1. The strong presence of mothers The secular “festival” of Mother’s Day just celebrated can seem to be just another point in the cynical commercial annual calendar, designed to part sentimental consumers from their hard-earned money. Despite the creation of the day in post-Civil War America, there is a more solid core to Mother’s Day…
April 29 is the feast of St Catherine of Siena (1347-1380), the Tuscan spiritual powerhouse, mystic and laywoman whose life and teachings inspire much broader application to the work and mission of the Thomas More Centre today. In 1970, Pope Paul VI – who promoted “new evangelisation” but was grieved by the fractures in the Catholic Church…
When the great personalities behind the foundation of the Thomas More Centre were working on its vision in 1989, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger headed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Facing many of the theological issues within the Church, he also explained with masterly precision the root cause of many of the cultural challenges…