A bishop of Maltese origin, Mgr Joseph Grech of Sandhurst, Australia, who is the Australian Catholic Bishops’ Conference delegate for migrants and refugees, praised a ruling of the country’s High Court that guarantees asylum seekers the same protection offered by the country’s legal system to everyone else.
“(It is) a matter of great concern that people who are tasked with reviews that can be life-or-death matters are not required to consider the basic rules of Australian law,” Mgr Grech said on the day of the ruling.
The court said the company contracted by the Department of Immigration and Citizenship to assess migrants’ claims for refugee status “failed to observe the requirements of procedural fairness” under provisions of the 1958 Migration Act and ignored binding decisions of Australian courts in earlier cases.
Vatican TV goes HD
The Vatican television centre has a brand new outside broadcasting unit thanks to a discount from Sony and a contribution from the Knights of Columbus. This multimillion-dollar high-definition mobile television studio consists of a13.7m-long, 18-wheel truck with 16 work stations.
Vatican spokesman Fr Federico Lombardi said he knows people may think the project was too extravagant or too expensive, but with television broadcasters around the world moving to high definition, “the image of the Pope would gradually disappear from the world of television over the coming years” unless the Vatican television centre provides HD images to broadcasters and filmmakers around the world.
Vatican inquiry into Irish Church begins
The first stage of the apostolic visitation or inquiry into the Catholic Church in Ireland should be concluded by Easter 2011, according to a Vatican statement. It explained that the process “is intended to assist the local Church on her path to renewal”.
In the first stage of the visitation, the Pope’s appointed representatives will “make themselves available to meet those who have been deeply wounded by abuse and who wish to be met and heard, beginning with the victims themselves and their families”.
The statement encourages victims to contact the prelates conducting the investigation.
Pope encourages reasoned approach to Scripture
In his recently published apostolic exhortation, Verbum Domini (The Word of the Lord), the Pope encouraged Catholics to discover and value each of the ways God tries to speak to humanity.
He said God speaks through creation and even through silence, but mainly in the Church through the Bible and through His son Jesus Christ.
He stressed the need to improve Catholics’ familiarity with the Bible and to read and understand it in harmony with the Church.
Corruption brings poverty, bishop says
“In some of the African countries endowed with gold, uranium and diamonds, people were hard hit by poverty, while school and health facilities continued to lack,” Archbishop Anselme Sanon of Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso, said at a conference in Nairobi, Kenya.
The Archbishop pointed to corruption and mismanagement as the cause of this poverty.
(Compiled by Fr Joe Borg)