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…
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…
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…
“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…
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.…
“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…
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…
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…
Through this month of July, almost every second day the Church has memorials for those who have suffered and been killed witnessing to their faith in Jesus Christ – not only our great English martyrs, Saints Thomas More and John Fisher, but for those committed…
Over this last month, we at the Thomas More Centre have been exploring the symbol, reality and importance of “the home”. In part it is because the home is so central to the organic notion of human formation for good and sometimes ill. Our new…