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ReeCOTICI Students on 'cloud nine Conference during a flight of fancy struggles to battle poverty
Perth: November 28, 1996
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By Peter Rosengren Not only is it a scandal that poverty continues to exist in the technologically-advanced twentieth century it is also scandalous that it can continue to exist when it is within the means of the world to eliminate it. This message on world poverty from the Vatican's justice and peace chief was delivered last weekend in Sydney at what was billed as the biggest conference in the Australian Catholic Church on poverty in recent times. The vice-president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Archbishop Francis Xavier Van Thuan, delivered Cardinal Roger Etchegaray's message at the People First conference. Cardinal Etchegaray was forced to cancel his planned visit to Australia and remain in Rome on doctor's orders. "The scandal is that today we can repeat and repeat, in analysis after analysis, that extreme poverty still exists when we have the means to eliminate it," the cardinal said. "The scandal is that we can enthuse about the progress of globalisation, while this primaeval form of the failure of true human cohabitation continues to exist, and in some areas to grow." He said that the parable of Dives and Lazarus gave witness to "the existence, side by side, of persons who flaunt their wealth and those who can only dream of surviving from the crumbs of such opulence." the cardinal said in his speech. However, while Cardinal Etchegaray and other speakers urged participants to work towards strategies for the solution of poverty, the conference itself failed to meet its own deadline. Billed by its organisers as one of the biggest events of its kind in the contemporary Catholic Church for years and planned to deliver an ambitious draft plan of action designed to provide strategies for tackling
poverty at individual, Church. non-government and government levels, the People First conference failed to produce a strategy for tackling poverty in Australia. Conference sources told The Record the meeting of 500 Catholic Church representatives around Australia had failed to get through all the items up for discussion on the agenda and that recommendations on how to fight poverty would have to be considered by participants over the next few months. One of the main logistic problems to be solved now by conference organisers will be achieving what could not be done during the three days of the conference - the preparation of a draft action plan on paverThis will mean assembling all the recommendations made by the conference's 17 separate discussion groups into a manageable form and sending them back to participants for further discussion and comment and then presenting them to the Australian Catholic Bishops' April 1997 meeting. One conference source said the meeting's progress had been substantially slowed down due to the large number of participants, the complexity of the issues, the existence of a number of competing agendas and views, and the number of recommendations presented for discussion. As a result, the draft plan of action to eradicate poverty could not issued. Among the issues to dominate discussions from the floor of the conference were recommendations on Aboriginal people, East Timor and women's issues. However unemployment, which surfaced as a key issue of concern in an earlier conference dialogue, was not among the recommendations finalised by the time the conference wound up on Sunday. By the time the conference ended organisers had received approximately 90 or so refined suggestions for action on poverty with an additional 250 suggestions still needing to be worked on. Continued on Page 2
Mother Teresa takes treatment - Page 12
St Jerome's Primary School, Munster, last week made it onto the Channel Nine news when the Channel Nine helicopter landed on the school oval as part of the Awesome Arts Festival, a national schools festival encouraging creativity in young people. St Jerome's chose the theme of "flight." Matthew Gibson, right, came up to the photographer and asked: "Can you make me famous?". So, what better way to "be famous" than with a photograph in The Record sitting at the controls of the Channel Nine helicopter? Envious Year 7 students, led by Josephine Alvaro, crowd into the cockpit. Photo Brian Coyne of the Catholic Education Office
L'Osservatore Romano error The editor of the English-language edition of the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, last week admitted the paper mistranslated a statement by Pope John Paul II on evolution, a mistake that has caused much confusion among English speaking Catholics. On 31 October, The Record's lead story using a report from the Catholic News Service in Washington, reported the Pope as saying that the theory of evolution was "more than a hypothesis."
Bishop Healy's Advent meditation
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The following week The Record published the full text, supplied by CNS, of the English-language L'Osservatore Romano translation that said scientific advances had "led to the recognition of more than one hypothesis in the theory of evolution. Father Robert Dempsey, editor of the English-language L'Osservatore has now confirmed that the first translation supplied by CNS was the appropriate one. Full report - Page 12.
As the WA election approaches, The Record will next week publish analyses of election issues from t wo Christian perspectives. See Page II this week for Catechism teaching on crucial social issues.