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Father Noel Connolly, Columban Regional Director Australia and New Zealand, announced on November 12 that Fr Michael Sinnott (pictured) had been released after 32 days of captivity and thanked people for their support and prayers.   On November 20, Father Sinnott said thank-you.

read more on Father Michael Sinnott       thanks

   

The Director of the Australian Catholic Bishops' Office for the Participation of Women (OPW), Ms Kim Davis, recently returned from a multi-faith study tour to Turkey organised by Sydney's Affinity Intercultural Foundation and supported by PASIAD (Asia-Pacific Social & Economic Solidarity Foundation).

Accounts of the trip have been published in Women Matter, the OPW ejournal.  They have been written by Ms Davis and Wilma Viswanathan, an executive member of the Uniting Church Assembly's Relations With Other Faiths group.  She worked for the National Council of Churches for many years and is a member of the NSW Women's Interfaith Network.  

The worldwide celebrations marking the 400th anniversary of the beginning of the work of Mary Ward, the foundress of the Loreto congregation and the Companions of Jesus, continued with an estimated 2000 international Loreto friends and colleagues on pilgrimage in Rome.

Australian Loreto leader Chris Burke IBVM writes on the Loreto website:  " ... we joined thousands of pilgrims who descended on Piazza del Popolo at 4pm. Each lot gathered around their flag ... so many flags to show where Mary Ward's influence has been planted. We're a mixed bunch: women in habits, women in everyday clothes, men who are partners, teachers, co-workers. Lay and religious, all part of this family, all claiming some deep and growing connection with a woman from 400 years ago".

The celebrations in Rome included welcoming walking pilgrims from Liege, concerts in the Churches of S. Ignazio and S. Eustachio, a Papal audience in St Peter's Square, a Symposium on Mary Ward with Gemma Simmonds CJ, visits to places associated with Mary Ward.

From 2009 to 2011 the two worldwide congregations, the Loreto Sisters and Congregation of Jesus, are celebrating the life and legacy of Mary Ward (1585-1645).

The increasing ethnic and cultural diversity of the Catholic population called for a rethinking of some key assumptions about the identity of the Catholic Church in Australia, Archbishop Philip Wilson has told a national conference on the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Refugees.

Archbishop Wilson, President of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, told more than 100 participants of the Sydney-based conference that the response of the Catholic Church in Australia to immigration could certainly be improved, and that often pragmatic considerations prevented people from opening their hearts fully to people from other cultures and backgrounds.

He proposed ways in which the Church could improve in its mission to 'welcome the stranger' and quoted from the document Graced by Migration which was written by members of the previous Migrant and Refugee conference.

The Archbishop acknowledged that within migrant Catholic communities, Bible and Tradition must make up their basic framework, but that the local Churches were free to maintain their "distinct subcultures" as long as they fitted in with the overall practice of the Catholic faith.

The bishops of America's most populous state, California, have passed a statement of support on behalf of U.S. women religious who are facing a Vatican investigation.

Adopted on October 29 during the semi-annual meeting of the California Catholic Conference, and conveyed in a November 2 letter written by Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony, the statement acknowledged "with profound gratitude the contributions of these women of the Gospel who have lived and served in the Catholic dioceses and archdioceses of California".  He ended his letter reassuring women religious "of my continuing prayers and support.

The Vatican announced its investigation, officially called an apostolic visitation, of U.S. women religious last January, saying the intention is to find out why the numbers of women religious have decreased during the past 40 years, and to look at "the quality of life" in the communities.  The visitation is being carried out by Cardinal Franc Rode, prefect of the Vatican's Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life and is expected to take up to three years to complete.