Pope Leo a careful canon lawyer
Thomas Reese SJ (From Flashes of Light 7th October 2025)
When Pope Leo XIV was elected, many people
asked me about him. My response was that we
would have to wait six months to a year before we
really understand who he is. Four months after his
election, in an interview with Elise Ann Allen of
Crux, Leo began to reveal himself. He came across
as a smart but careful canon lawyer who is not going to reject the reforms of Pope
Francis, but neither is he going to quickly move beyond them.
Careful lawyer, cautious voice
Leo revealed himself as much by what he did not say as by what he
did. No memorable quote is in the interview as there was in
Francis’ first interview, when he said, “I am not going to obsess
over abortion.” Nor is there any response like “Who am I to
judge?” which Francis said at a 2013 press conference answering a
question about gay priests.

Pope Leo praises ‘healthy secularism’
CathNews New Zealand, October 3rd, 2025
Pope Leo XIV has expressed support for a “healthy
secularism” which affirms the value of religion while
preserving its distinction from the political sphere.
Source: Crux. The Pope made this point during a
September 29 meeting with a “Working Group on
Intercultural and Interreligious Dialogue” sponsored
by the European Parliament. “European institutions need people who know how to
live a healthy secularism, that is, a style of thinking and acting that affirms the value
of religion while preserving the distinction – not separation or confusion – from the
political sphere,” Pope Leo told the group.
Vatican commentator John L. Allen said the reference to “healthy secularism”
echoed the key theme of a sana laicità, first laid out by Benedict XVI in an address
to Italian jurists in December 2006, and further developed thereafter. “The core of
the idea is that a ‘healthy’ secularism is one in
which Church and state are separate, but in which
religious institutions and believers are encouraged
to play important roles in public life, bringing their
values to bear on political choices. That’s as
opposed to an ‘unhealthy’ secularism, in which
religion is regarded as a threat to peaceful coexistence and religious institutions and
leaders are pressured to limit their activities to strictly spiritual and liturgical
matters,”

Br Laurence CP:
Br Laurence’s brief reflection is on the “Antiqua et Nova” Church Document.
As indicated in the previous Newsletter and as Fr Mike noted during Mass on
Sunday, Laurence -often referred to as Larry, is on a visiting trip at Holy Cross until
October 6th. It has been wonderful to have him around especially that Chris and
Brian are away. Here is a bit more about him, in addition to what Brian wrote last
week. Thank you Laurence for kindly accepting my request to share your wisdom
with us.
Born in Sault Ste Marie, Canada, in 1948 and professed as a
Passionist in 1968, Laurence studied at the University of
Kentucky, Jefferson C.C., obtaining the R.N. License in nursing
in 1972, followed by the B.A. degree in Theology in 1975 from
Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky. Since 1975, he
has served as a missionary in South Korea, where he has held
many administrative positions. He spent seven years in Rome
from 1989 until 1995, where he served as the personal
secretary of the Passionist Superior General.

Pattern machines…..not AI
Edited article by Nathan Beacom
Chatbots are computer programmes designed to simulate human
conversations. We ask chatbots for help in making decisions, for
advice, for counsel. Companies are making a great deal of money by
replacing therapeutic relationships with ‘therapy chatbots” and are
proposing to offer AI companions to the elderly, so that their faraway
children need not visit so often! Are you lonely? Talk to a machine.
Corporations are happy to endow these programs with human names, like Abbi,
Claude, and Alexa.
This is a disaster. In uncritically letting these machines shape our lives, we become
prey to all kinds of manipulation, we lose sight of reality, and we are induced, in an
important way, to take a reductive view of actual people. Chatbots offer us a form
of relationship without friction, without burden and responsibility. This illusory
kind of relationship hampers our ability to engage in the difficult challenge of real
bonds, which are the only things that can give value to human life. The more we
personify AI, the more we slouch toward lives of isolation and deception.

The need for creeds—reimagining Nicaea
From ‘Flashes of Insight’
September 2, 2025 Thomas OLoughlin (UK priest and theologian)
·
The Council of Nicaea was convened in 325 by the Emperor
Constantine. It remains most famous for producing much of
the creed used in the liturgy, but the need for new statements
of the creed is ever present. If we do not reformulate
expressions of faith, the formulae become empty—if solemn
sounding—words.
One such reformulation was produced by Pope Francis just a
few months after he was elected Bishop of Rome in 2013. It is short and to the
point, and deserves to be better known as a memorial to him.
To believe in the Father who loves all men and women with an infinite love means
realizing that “he thereby confers upon them an infinite dignity.” To believe that
the Son of God assumed our human flesh means that each human person has been
taken up into the very heart of God. To believe that Jesus shed his blood for us
removes any doubt about the boundless love which ennobles each human being.

Nurturing the relationships we have: PFGM in 2025
There are people in Terrey Hills parish, Sydney
who have lived Passionist Family Group life for 50
years. Some of those members were young
parents at the beginning, and many are now in
their 80’s. Life has changed so much in that time,
and so have PFG’s. Back thirty or forty years ago,
nearly every group included our ideal ‘grandparent
to baby’ dynamic. That is no longer the case.
Let’s go back a little further. 74,000 years ago the Mt Toba eruption in Indonesia,
resulted in as few as 3,000-10,000 humans surviving across the entire planet. The
human family had to slowly re-establish and some estimates are that 40,000 years
ago there were between one and six million humans. We know too that 42,000
years ago, there was a reversal and weakening of Earth’s magnetic poles.
5

Author: Anonymous
(Happiness Tips from the Viber app)
“When we think of happiness, we often think of it as a single mental state. This
perspective is confusing because happiness is a term we use to combine entirely
different chemical processes in our bodies. Each process has a different role and
purpose.
To increase long-term happiness, we have to understand the difference between
short-term, medium-term, and long-term happiness chemicals. It’s ok to look for a
short-term happiness boost like ice cream, but we need to consciously realize that
it'll go away quickly and that those dopamine activities
(e.g., social media, junk food, TV shows) are usually
taking up too much time and starve out medium and
long-term happiness chemicals. A medium-term
happiness chemical is serotonin, which we get after
accomplishing a task or being creative. The long-term
happiness chemical is oxytocin which comes from safe
relationships. We should spend most of our time making
sure we have the right skills to be in a safe relationship
and building those relationships”
.

Using our gifts: Pope Leo 14th…….10th August, 2025 (Zenit news)
In Luke’s Gospel Jesus invites us to consider how we will invest the treasure that is
our life (cf. Lk 12:32-48). He says: “Sell your possessions and give alms” (v. 33). He
exhorts us not to keep to ourselves the gifts that God has given us, but use them
generously for the good of others, especially those most in need of our help.
It is not simply a matter of sharing the material goods
we have, but putting our skills, time, love, presence and
compassion at the service of others. In short, everything
in God’s plan that makes each of us a priceless and
unrepeatable good, a living and breathing asset, must be
cultivated and invested in order to grow. Otherwise,
these gifts dry up and diminish in value, or they end up being taken away by those,
who like thieves, snatch them up as something simply to be consumed.

How old are you?
This question is not easily answered by our Vietnamese
brothers. Traditionally, Vietnamese babies were
considered one year old at birth and their age increased
each year at TET (Lunar New Year). Only in June this
year, did Vietnam scrap it’s ‘two child’ per family policy,
first established in North Vietnam 1963.It is generally
accepted that the policy was more strictly enforced for government officials. After
the reunification of North and South Vietnam in 1975, the policy was extended
throughout the country and after 1983, families were requited to limit their
children to two children. Financial penalties were imposed but it was not strictly
enforced. A significant cost of the one and two child policy is that the abortion rate
in Vietnam is among the highest in the world at 2.5 per woman!

What are people actually seeking from religion?
A response to American sociologist Christian Smith’s book reflecting on the demise of
traditional religion in America. (Kaya Oakes June 2nd 2025)
Religion is fading away, but faith and belief, somehow, are not. The
problem is that how people define faith and belief is just as
individualistic as the culture we live in. And the root cause of this
drift remains debatable.
Christian Smith brings a sociologist’s expertise to the topic. Key to his
thesis is the notion in the book’s subtitle—what’s dying out are
“traditional” ideas about religion, not necessarily the idea that God or a higher
power exists. In exploring the idea of “religious obsolescence” and pinning its
beginnings to the post-Boomer generations—
with a particular focus on Millennials—Smith
finds that not only are people drifting away
from religion, but that religion has given them
plenty of reasons to do so: “Something
becomes obsolete when most people feel it is
no longer useful or needed because something
else has superseded it in function, efficiency,
value, or interest.” Religion’s obsolescence wasn’t planned, but is instead the
inevitable result of social and cultural structures that have changed over time.