- Archives -

Dear Friends,

Here we are already in Mary’s month of May. Doesn’t the year fly? (I wrote this on the 1st and already May is almost over.)

Thank you for all your expressions of appreciation for our last NEWS, which was devoted to the talk – HUMANAE VITAE 35 YEARS ON - given by Dr Deirdre Little at our last retreat. We had more feedback (all positive) from this edition than any previous one. It is so good to get feedback – sometimes I wonder if there is anyone out there, but this issue must have hit the spot!

Come Away to Quiet Place and Rest a While We are looking forward to our 2nd Annual Weekend of Prayer, Learning and Sharing to be held Saturday 31st July - Sunday 1st August.

We will be very blessed to have Father John Stankowiecz with us this year. Fr John is a former Papua New Guinea Missionary, and is presently Chaplain of the Tyburn Nuns. We are thankful to God that we will have him with us to offer Mass, Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament, Confessions, pray with us and generally grace us with his priestly presence.

This year will not be quite as restful as last year, because we have a very full program on the Saturday. We have a wonderful speaker in Eamonn Keane on the Saturday, to share with us his wealth of knowledge. His topics will be: Love and Life: the Catholic Church’s Teaching on Sexuality and Marriage, The Eucharist and the Ordained Priesthood, and Catholic Education and the Culture of Life. Because Eamonn has limited time with us (he must fly up and back on the same day), and so that more people will be able to access his talks, we will be holding his sessions in Coffs Harbour at the Curran Centre. The rest of the time will be spent in prayer, reflection and sharing Eamonn’s input and our pro-life efforts. For full details see pages 3 and 4 and wrapper for application form.

Helpers of God’s Precious Infants - action required: From time to time I have written of the work of those brave souls who go to abortion clinics to witness, and to offer help to women who are feeling pressured and unsupported a chance to reconsider, at the 11th hour, the drastic action they are about to take, and to pray that those inside will convert, and so stop their horrendous acts of butchery on tiny preborn babies. I am sad to say that this presence has been suspended in Tweed Heads, where not one but two of these killing centres stand just one block apart.

So I am asking that every reader to help in a prayer campaign, that a way will be found to close down these “dens of iniquity”, through the conversion of those who operate them. I am enclosing a Spiritual Supporters’ Prayer for God’s Precious Infants, and ask you, please, to fervently pray this prayer every day until we succeed.

Letters to the Editor

Dear Angela,

I just received a copy of your newsletter through Fr Greg Jordan SJ. I live in Canberra, but my heritage draws me regularly to the North Coast as my great-grandparents were original settlers in the Bellinger Valley. Dr Little’s article is timely. At the moment in Canberra we have an ideologue group in power in our Legislative Assembly. They recently made two enactments:

• The Parentage Act; and

• The Sexuality Discrimination Act. Among other things, these two acts have:

• legalised adoption by same-sex couples;

• removed any reference to ‘mother and father’ from ACT legislation;

• removed any reference to ‘husband, wife and spouse’ from ACT legislation and replaced it with ‘domestic partner’;

• removed the penalty for persons of the opposite sex using toilets and dressing rooms in Public Baths in the ACT (in order to save transsexuals from embarrassment); and

• amended 70 other acts.

I have joined the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) which has become active in Canberra to try to increase the awareness of Christians regarding these issues in order to vote the ideologues out of office.

During this time I have met some non-Catholic Christians who seem to be coming to an awareness of the horror of abortion, so articles such as Dr Little’s are great resources to circulate among such people.

Keep up the good work Angela.

Your Sister In Christ

Carolyn Mongan

Campbell ACT

Come Away to a Quiet Place and Rest a While Mark 6:31

Apostles for Life

will be having a time for prayer, reflection and sharing for persons in the Lismore Diocese involved in the pro-life apostolate, or who would like to become involved, at

Mount Tabor Retreat House, 77 Northbank Rd,

Bellingen

Father John Stankowiecz will be with us for the weekend to offer the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass each day

*The weekend offers anyone who does a pro-life work to share with the rest of us so we can pray for and encourage each other.

YOU ARE WELCOME TO ATTEND THE WHOLE OR INDIVIDUAL SESSIONS

Mount Tabor Retreat House is situated on an 80-acre property overlooking spectacular views of mountain ranges. Accommodation is basic, with from 2 to 6-bed rooms and share bathroom, and is limited to thirteen persons. Depending on the number wishing to attend, we might consider the possibility of billets so if you live close by and can help, we would love to hear from you. The weekend will be fully catered, and we will share the kitchen chores. You may arrive for Friday dinner (6.00pm) if you have far to travel. What you need to bring: Bath-towel, and single-bed linen or sleeping bag (blankets provided).

Cost: Anonymous donation, commensurate with the cost of running the weekend. Enquiries: Coby Bleys 6655 0564 Angela Martello 6621 2348

***********

Apostles for Life

with Human Life International presents Eamonn Keane

Saturday July 31st July 2004 during our

2nd Annual Weekend of Reflection and Prayer

Friday 30th July – Sunday 1st August 2004 at Mt Tabor Retreat House, Bellingen (See page 3 for details)

 Eamonn Keane is a dynamic speaker, popular in Australia and internationally. He is married to Pat and is father of five children, a teacher at a Sydney Catholic High School, and author of several books including:

Population and Development;

The Ordained Priesthood – The Real Issues;

Humanae Vitae – Wisdom For All Ages;

Brave New World of Therapeutic Cloning;

A Generation Betrayed

In order to make the best use of Eamonn’s time here, and to make his talks more accessible, his sessions will be held at

The Curran Centre, St Augustine’s Church, Coffs Harbour

You are welcome to attend all, or part of, the weekend.

Angela Martello – Lismore - 66212348 Eileen Raman – Coffs Harbour – 66500532 Coby Bleys – Bellingen - 66552093 Jill Bishton - Kempsey – 65624502

Anzac Day Address 2004

Community leaders, and citizens of Lismore: I am honoured, as the Catholic Bishop of this city, to have the opportunity to speak at this commemoration of Anzac. All over the nation today, people like ourselves are gathering to celebrate once again this ‘one day of the year’ which is stamped so indelibly into our national life. We gather at early dawn at cenotaphs and shrines, in street parades and in churches; later in the day the morning solemnity will give way to the conviviality of reunions and social functions. The same pattern, year after year, of commemoration, of remembering, of celebration.

Anzac Day has its own unique effect on every Australian – its power to recall memories – from the returned service men and women for whom the grim reality of war is a lived experience, to the youngsters proudly wearing their father’s Vietnam medals. I was too young in December 1941 to remember the drama of my own family’s evacuation, at a few hours’ notice, from a Port Moresby under thread of invasion, but grew older to recall the censored letters from my father who stayed behind to fight on the Kokoda Track, and his occasional appearances on leave. Most vivid of all are the boyhood memories of the Bomana War Cemetery when all those headstones were fresh and new, and when we returned to live at Milne Bay and Goodenough Island, of living on the plantations surrounded by vast quantities of the relics and the debris of war. You have your memories reserved for this day as I have mine. What we have in common, and the more so in these days of fear created by the global appearance of new spectres of hatred and revenge, is the hope and the prayer that our country will be for ever free from the assault or war or terror.

We recall with undying gratitude on this day that so many have fought and so many have died to keep us secure from enemies who have, from the outside – as in the Second World War in the Pacific – threatened our nations with hostile arms. It must be reasonable to suppose that those men and women who were prepared to make that sort of sacrifice, even to the point of death, for their country, would be the first to be concerned that equal care and determined will should be devoted to defend our country from other sorts of enemies as well – those enemies of the spirit and of social order more dangerous than people with guns and bombs, who strike at a nation’s heart from within its shores. Great sacrifices have rendered us safe in the past from menacing infections from without.

What value do we attach today to all that heroism if we do not make every effort in our power to recognise and deal with forces of destruction which threaten us from within?

One of the most moving aspects of war is its obvious connection with family life. Bundles of letters from theatres of war, lovingly preserved as precious mementoes and even seeing the light of day in printed collections and memoirs, reveal what it was like for a marriage and a family to suffer the separation of war. The dearest wish was to be united again with wife and children, for life to continue in that intimate sanctuary of life and love which is the family. What must be in their minds as they look on a modern Australia at peace, two and three generations on, when there are more fatherless families than in the worst times of war?

We have seen astonishing changes in our national and social life since 1918; much more since 1945, and even more amazingly within the last 25 years. Through it all, if war reminds us of the things that go right to the heart, has Australia really become a better country to live in, a country worthy of every hardship endured in time of war, every drop of blood shed, every life laid down?

Did all those men and women die to bequeath us an Australia in which we could use that hard-won freedom simply to do what we like, to indulge our selfishness, to pamper our greed for more and better material things, to settle for the good-enough and the second-rate, to expect more and more for less and less cost to self?

Did they die to hand on to us an Australia we could use as a playground in which to indulge all the common human weaknesses which demean human life and human communities?

Those names remembered and inscribed in their thousands on memorials and cenotaphs the length and breadth of Australia: did they die to give us an Australia in which the number of their own deaths would one day look small against the numbers of the deaths of their own unborn and nameless great-grand-children? Did they die, these Australians we honour today, so that the laws and commandments, human and divine, which they in their generations respected, could be set aside in the name of a modern and liberated life-style?

This day recalls us to high and noble ideals, to heroism and sacrifice, to the claims of the truth. It calls to mind an Australia of the past when the house could be safely left unlocked, of strong family relationships which extended to veneration of grandparents and close bonds with uncles and aunts and cousins. An Australia in which our basic code of ethics and fundamental faith came from Mum and Dad and church and school, and across whatever social and denominational barriers gave us an extraordinary cohesion and unity and basic happiness and security. It bred new generations for which “Service above Self” became an unwritten motto.

Anzac Day challenges us to ask what we are to do in an Australia where the consumer society, like a new god in the pantheon, demands our frenzied devotion to the bigger, the better and the latest. Can it be surprising that our children should see nothing wrong with a “Me-first” way of thinking, and adopt that as a new motto for life?

Anzac Day each year is an encouragement to every one who today continues to be inspired by the ideal of “Service above Self”, and who works in that spirit in all the ways that bring benefit to many lives in our community. It is of course a deeply Christian ideal. Our destiny as a nation must continue to be shaped by it. The Cross on our flag is indeed a cross of stars, of stars high in the glory of the heavens, but it still remains a Cross, and the Cross is the ultimate sign of the gift of self for others.

Yes, I wish to attend “Come Away to a Quiet Place” Pro-life Retreat on the weekend of July 31st – August 1st

My special interest/work is………………………………………….. (Attach a separate sheet if necessary)

Name………………………………………………………………………….

Address……………………………………………………………………..

Phone ………………………E-mail……………………………………….

For catering purposes, please answer the following questions:

I will be attending both days………….…..YES / NO

I am only able to attend Saturday/Sunday (please specify)

I will need Friday dinner and accommodation..….YES / NO

I will not need accommodation

To ensure your place, please send cheque for $20 payable to Angela Martello, 17 College Road, East Lismore 2480 Enquiries: Angela: 662 12348 or Mrs. Coby Bleys: 6655 0564 Mt. Tabor Retreat House: 6655 2093

I am unable to attend but would like to support the work with a donation.

Enclosed please find…………