Cutting through all the crap…

Dear friends,

Well we've heard the rumours for a few days that Bishop Geoffrey Robinson's new book, Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church, was going to be provocative. Linda Morris in today's Sydney Morning Herald calls it "explosive". Here's a couple of quotes from her article: "In an explosive critique of the church to be published tomorrow, [Bishop Geoffrey Robison] has directly criticised both Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI for Rome's reluctance to take stronger action to tackle sexual abuse. The Sydney bishop who helped write the Catholic Church's sex abuse policy in Australia has urged a fundamental reshaping of the church's power structures, warning papal authority has gone too far and calling for a review of compulsory celibacy for priests and the church's teachings on sex." Linda has both a news article and a feature article in the paper today (See links at the end of this paragraph.) What pleases me most particularly is that I have been arguing for a few years that in order to even get to the starting gates of restoring its credibility in Western society the Church has to go back to the drawing boards across the entire gamut of Sixth Commandment teaching. It would seem that here we have a bishop arguing a similar thing. <Read Linda Morris's news story in the Sydney Morning Herald> or <Read Linda Morris's feature article in the Sydney Morning Herald>

And still cutting through all the niceties and crap, in a provocative lead commentary today, Ian Elmer explores the difficult and topical issue of Primacy of Conscience but takes the discussion much further seeking to examine, based on Church teaching and thinking, how we, as individuals, go about the process of discerning what our conscience is saying to us in order to arrive at the particular moral truth for any particular moral dilemma we might be facing. <Read Ian's commentary>

Petition to the Australian Catholic Bishops Update...

The online petition stood at 943 signatures at 2.00pm today. <Click HERE to access the information page> and <Click HERE to sign the petition online>.

Email problem sorted but...

We have sorted the email problem I discussed in last Saturday's edition except today I goofed up and some of you will have received two copies of today's email. My apologies about that. It wasn't a system error by a very human error on my part. It hasn't happened before and hopefully it won't happen again.. To fix the system problem we were having in recent weeks I've had to split our database and on Saturday's we have three mail outs an hour apart. When I am late, as I am today, it means some people will not get the email until after 5.30 pm AEST. My apologies for this but I am varying the order each day. On weekday's we can handle it with two mailouts. By the way thanks for all the support, during the week we smashed through our all our previous records by which we evaluate the activity on our website and there were still nine days of this month still to count.

Best wishes for a great day wherever you happen to be ... in life, and in our world,

Brian Coyne
Editor and Publisher