Today we celebrate the wonderful, awe inspiring and incredible Solemnity of Corpus Christ! This is the feast day where we liturgically celebrate and focus on the mystery of the Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.  In honour of today, I have been reading through the not very well known Encyclical Mysterium Fidei of Pope St Paul VI. He wrote this in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council when people were trying to distort the  liturgical reforms as an excuse to promote error and heresy regarding the Church’s fundamental belief of the Real Presence of Christ in the Euch ..read more

Out of the depths I cry to you Lord (Psalm 130:1)  From the depth of sin  From the depth of darkness  From the pit of despair  From the depth of loneliness  From the depth of my exile from you From the depth of my being …  I cry to you oh Lord,  I know you hear me even when I run from you  You are always with me..  Calling me back to you,  If only I listen to your voice  Hear my prayer Lord and teach me to listen to you  Teach me to hear your voice  Teach me to seek after and yearn for you Teach me your ways and teach me your ..read more

Blessing our enemies is non negotiable.  Many of you I am sure have seen the horrible news about knife attack against Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel in Sydney Australia. One of his priests was also injured, as well as some of the congregation. But Praise God no one was killed.  It is normal and natural to have experienced anger and/or outrage over what happened. No one should ever have to fear being able to attend a place of worship, wondering if they’ll be attacked or killed. What happened was evil and inexcusable. Full stop. It does most matter what religion or denomination they belo ..read more

You have inviolable dignity. You are loved and worthy of love, you were made for love. Jesus restores our dignity to us no matter how often we trample upon it and misuse it. Jesus always offers his hand out to us in love to free us from the dominion and slavery of sin that tries to disfigure and destroy us.  Many of you may be currently inundated with news articles, stories, and online stories regarding the new document from the Dicastry for the Doctrine of Faith on human dignity. As always, people will try to cherry pick only one or two points out of context and misinterpret or misrep ..read more

Wishing you all a very blessed Divine Mercy Sunday! ?  I wanted to share with you all a recent experience of mine with the amazing mercy and love of God. I forgot how it is connected to the promises of the Divine Mercy devotion, and so thought it appropriate today to share it with you.  On Christmas Day 2023 my uncle passed away from cancer. He had been baptised Catholic and had his First Holy Communion as a boy, but was not practicing and more or less an atheist. He had been the driver of a car in an accident when he was younger that killed his sister - and so all his life he blam ..read more

This is one of the truest and simplest statements I have seen. It completely sums up my approach to the faith. We can spend hours and hours online debating with atheists, debating apologetics and theological nuances - but majority of the time it is a waste of a lifetime. Usually these are fuelled by pride and turn into frustrating when we depersonalise our ideological “opponent” and we become uncharitable.  When we truly live our faith, when people see us living out the Beatitudes, when people see the transformation in us that the love of Christ continuously does to us everyday - that is ..read more

In the Office of Readings for today the 1st Sunday of Lent, we have a wonderful reminder from St Augustine that opens up the Gospel reading for us today (Mk 1:12-15). Our union with Christ in baptism has configured us to Christ and joined us to him, so then through him we participate in his life. He allowed himself to be tempted in the desert so as to give us an example of spiritual warefar and show us how to share in his victory over the dominion of sin and the devil.  This is the mystery that we are led into each year through the Holy Season of Lent. We enter into the desert, into the ..read more

As we enter into the Holy season of Lent, I wanted to remind you all as I also remind myself - anything we do during Lent (prayer, fasting, almsgiving) need to be in love. Without love it is all empty and we risk becoming the hypocrites that Jesus specifically warms us not to be in the Gospel for Ash Wednesday (Mt 6:1-6, 16-18).  We fast so that we can learn self control. We do extra prayers or penances so that we can grow closer to God and remember He is always with us, whilst we so often get caught up in the distractions and responsibilities of life that stress us out. We give alms, pe ..read more

Today is the First Sunday of Advent. As we enter into the Liturgical Season of Advent, we can easily lose sight of what the Church teaches us during this time - because it is so overshadowed by the celebration of commercialism in the world as well as other Christians celebrating Christmas early.  But what is Advent and why do we even have it? The Liturgical year is based on the premise that each year we are formed liturgically to live and experience the Paschal Mystery. Each of us is called to live the Life of Christ in our own life as we conform ourselves to Him. So the two hinges of th ..read more

Recently I have been getting my directees to read one psalm each day, to meditate on it and use it for their mental prayer. This is because the psalms beautifully teach us how to fully pray with all our emotions and to have an intimate boldness with God in prayer that we often forget He wants with us. This is why Jesus himself gives us the parable of the persistent widow in Luke 18:1 - 8, and we see his own intimacy with the Father in prayer in Luke 22:39 - 46 & John 17:1 - 25.  My directee emailed me to share some new insights on prayer and this was my response to him. __________ ..read more