Bishop Robinson asks if we need greater participatory government in the Church?

Dear Friends,

The end of the year is now racing towards us. It's been a fabulous year for us here at Catholica — and also a successful final month. Even despite a fairly dramatic but expected fall-off in visitors over the last few days around Christmas this month will establish a new monthly benchmark for the total number of visitors to Catholica. If the averages of the last week are maintained we should also break-through the 8,000 mark for the first time. Over recent months we've been fairly consistently increasing the total number of individual visitors by about 500 each month. This means we are now about bang on target for the growth targets we envisaged when we commenced Catholica 18 months ago.

It's a short meditation from Bishop Robinson today but one that fits like a glove with the series of commentaries we've been running from Professor Len Swidler on Mondays. Bishop Robinson asks if the greater involvement of all the people in the governance of the Church would make recent scandals like the recent crisis caused by sexual abuse less likely?

I desperately need a break from the daily commitment to publishing the lead commentaries or I'm going to suffer burn-out so I'll be taking most of January off. However we still have one meditation to run from Bishop Robinson and I propose to run that on New Year's Day — and it is a fabulous meditation on the meaning of Jesus to use to kick off our New Year. I would also like to complete Len Swidler's series on Democracy so I'll do that in the days immediately following New Years Day. Tom McMahon has also kindly, and unexpectedly sent through some holiday reflections so I intend to publish one bulletin each week with Tom's holiday reflections through January. Amanda is going to be busy in the studio through most of January but hopefully we'll be able to fit in a couple of trips to visit a few friends in various parts of NSW and also spend some time with friends up here. At the end of January we'll be spending ten days in Perth to celebrate my youngest son, Julian's wedding to Adele Nardizzi. I will continue to be stirring the possum in the Catholica forums in amongst all of this. <Read Bishop Robinson's meditation for today>

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

Brian Coyne
Editor and Publisher