Australian medical students are carrying out intrusive procedures on unconscious and anaesthetised patients without gaining the patient’s consent.

The unauthorised examinations include genital, rectal and breast exams, and raise serious questions about the ethics of up-and-coming doctors, Madison reports.

The research, soon to be published in international medical journal, Medical Education, describes – among others – a student with “no qualms” about performing an anal examination on a female patient because she didn’t think the woman’s consent was relevant.

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I got a chance to see the second half of the match–he played really well. Read it all–KSH.

The path to Rome detours by the Gold Coast for those disaffected Australian Anglicans planning to take up Pope Benedict’s offer to join the Catholic Church.

Up to 50 clergy and laity will gather for the first time nationally at St Stephen’s College at Coomera for three days from Tuesday to discuss the Australian Anglican ordinariate – the local framework which will allow them to keep their married clergy, liturgy and church structures within Catholicism.

The prominent Sydney barrister John McCarthy, QC, has been briefed to advise the main dissident group of conservatives, the breakaway Traditional Anglican Communion, on constitutional and legal issues arising from the historic move.

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Once considered a standard religious rite, the practice of christening a child has steadily declined over the past 50 years to make way for naming ceremonies.But in the past two years there has been a resurgence in the number of babies being baptised.

St John’s Anglican Church at Cooks Hill, Newcastle’s oldest church building, reported a record two years of baptisms.

Last year the church had 86 baptisms, three more than in 2009. They were the best figures recorded by the church since the 1950s.

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Like Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, the Australian floods come as a salutary reminder that, for all the technological advances of our time and for all the sophistication of modern urban life, there are many ways in which our civilisation is vulnerable and some elements we are still powerless to control.

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Brisbane is facing its worst flooding in more than 100 years, with officials warning almost 20,000 homes in the city will be flooded by early tomorrow morning.

The Queensland capital and the nearby city of Ipswich are bracing for once-in-a-generation flooding which has already claimed the lives of 10 people.

The number of people missing after flash flooding in Toowoomba and the Lockyer Valley continues to rise, with more than 90 people unaccounted for this morning.

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The authorities are urging people to leave parts of Australia’s third largest city, Brisbane, which is facing its worst flooding in decades.

The city’s mayor has warned that 6,500 homes and businesses are set to flood.

Flash floods have left nine dead and at least 70 missing nearby.

The waters are rising fast; one local official said he saw the river level go up by 1.5m (4ft 10in) in just an hour. Some 200,000 people have been affected across the state by the floods.

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Lapsed Catholics will be wooed as never before later this year when the church in Australia launches Catholics Come Home, a media campaign credited with lifting mass attendances in the US by up to 17 per cent.

Archbishop of Sydney George Pell is sending a team to Chicago to study and replicate the program, which tells non-practising Catholics: “There is a big family that loves you and misses you. It’s a wonderful adventure – you have nothing to lose and everything to gain – and we say welcome home.”

The television advertisements, Facebook entries and tweets also discuss the church’s role in schools, universities, health care and charitable works. “Progress has been good in turning around mass attendances so I’m sending over a small team to see what it might do for the church in Australia,” Pell says.

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…I have a somewhat jaundiced view of the competing battles to proselytise the young. The propaganda can be self-defeating. Adults have an endless moral panic about the young. We have some justifiable fears that they will kill themselves sticking junk up their arms or drink down their gullets. But we take those justifiable (although sometimes exaggerated) fears and extend them to other areas such as their cultural ignorance and moral turpitude. I lament the fact that my kids don’t know the King James Bible and are religiously illiterate. But there is nothing I can do about it. And I think there is not much that the educational bovver boys of faith and the supine politicians they have snared can do either. I reckon the Chaplaincy Program is pouring an immoral amount of money down the educational toilet. There is nothing more boring and alienating than RE teachers. They are the unwittingly the assault pioneers of unbelief.

So let us think more realistically about the epistemological inspirations of the young. Let us put aside our moral panic. Let us be open-minded about letting both the godless and the godly have their spaces. Remember the mullahs of Iran. They have lost the battle for the hearts and minds of the young. I suspect that the Christian mullahs of Australia will share the same fate as they try to shove God down the unwilling or bored throats of the young. For kids are not anti-God. They just have so many other things to think about.

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Australia’s senior Catholic cleric has denounced politicians of that faith who defy church teachings.

With debates over euthanasia and gay marriage looming in 2011, Cardinal George Pell yesterday rebuked MPs who “fly under the Christian or Captain Catholic flag” but “blithely disregard Christian perspectives” when they vote in Parliament on moral issues such as same sex adoptions.

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With a parish base of about 45 families, St Paul’s holds a Holy Communion service at 10am on Sundays, a midweek Holy Communion service at 10am on Wednesdays, and small “intimate” services at 8am and 7pm on Sundays.

“One of the things we did not anticipate is the number of people who come to St Paul’s in times of transition,” Mr Nicolson says.

“Sometimes they are new migrants, or people in times of emotional or personal crisis.

“The ministry of this place is significant to people in transition, and we have a range of cultures that worship.”

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About 1000 Australians are expected to join a new Anglican wing of the Catholic Church by next June, the leader of the main group of dissident Anglicans said yesterday.

A committee was set up last week to oversee the process. For the first time, Anglicans planning to switch to Rome believe they will be able to take their church properties too, which has been a stumbling block.

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Priests in Australia’s new Anglican Ordinariate will celebrate mass facing east, away from their congregations, using 500-year old liturgies.

Archbishop John Hepworth, Primate of the Traditional Anglican Communion, said the traditional sacred liturgies — more in the language of Shakespeare than modern vernacular — would be held in parishes in all capital cities, the Gold and Sunshine coasts, Rockhampton and Torres Strait.

The process took a major step forward yesterday when Archbishop Hepworth and Catholic Bishop Peter Elliott announced the establishment of an Australian Ordinariate implementation committee comprising senior Catholic, Anglican and TAC clergy.

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Mr Anderson said people often sought someone commonly referred to as “a new messiah” and expressed sympathy for US President Barack Obama because of the expectations put on him. He said all the great leaders with whom he had worked closely ”“ John Howard, Peter Costello and even his political opponent, former Labor leader Kim Beazley ”“ “all of them know their history, all of them read voraciously, all of them reflected on our society in order to give them a reference point”. But there was no leader providing a vision in the West.

Economists had identified trends similar to those that had led to the Great Depression of the 1930s ”“ protectionism and the beginnings of a trade war.

“At the very least, we are undoubtedly [witnessing] the absolute and relative decline of the West and particularly of the English-speaking world,” Mr Anderson said.

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Rachael Kohn: It’s good to have you back on again. You’ve been researching Australia’s religious profile for more than two decades now with a special focus on Christianity. Where would you put Australia compared to other historically Christian societies in the West?

Philip Hughes: Certainly I think that the Christian significance and Christian part of Australia’s identity has been in decline for the last 40 years. Now approximately half of all Australians identify themselves as being Christian. I think there are certainly a lot of Christian faiths still very much influencing our education, influencing our social welfare, influencing our values, but it’s become less explicit.

Rachael Kohn: Tom Frame has famously said that Australia is not a Christian country. Do you agree with his terminology or is it your observation more that Australians don’t champion a strong national story that is Christian?

Philip Hughes: I certainly think that the national Australian identity is not explicitly Christian. On the other hand, the Christian faith is still a choice being made by large numbers of Australians.

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The Auckland service will be led by Anglican Church and Catholic Church leaders and will feature representatives from other faiths and the wider Auckland community.

“At times like this, it is important for the community to come together to remember those who have been lost and support those left behind,” says Anglican Bishop of Auckland, the Right Reverend Ross Bay.

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The first personal ordinariate for former Anglicans is expected to be established in Australia by next Easter, according to Bishop Peter Elliott, the Australian Catholic Bishops’ delegate for assisting lay Anglicans join the Church.

The first such ordinariate is to be established in England and Wales in early January.

Bishop Elliott says “we’re hoping to follow a similar timeline”, but it “may be a few months later”.

“We’re yet to work out with the Vatican what would be the best procedure, but it ought to focus around Easter and Pentecost,” said Bishop Elliott, auxiliary Bishop of Melbourne.

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The spirit of Socrates will be evoked tonight in the IQ2 debate at City Recital Hall, where speakers will argue over the teaching of ethics in NSW primary schools.

Parents who believed their children would benefit from the state government’s ethics program at the expense of attending Special Religious Education were the victims of a populist and uninformed debate, the Anglican Bishop of North Sydney, Glenn Davies, told the Herald yesterday. He will speak in the negative to the proposal that special ethics education should be allowed for children not attending scripture classes.
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Simon Longstaff, the executive director of the St James Ethics Centre that devised the now completed pilot program, will step down from his usual position as IQ2 chairman of the debate to argue for the affirmative.

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The calls for changes in the law led to a public statement by Melbourne’s archbishop, Denis Hart, dated Oct. 7. The renewed push in Victoria and other parts of Australia to allow assisted suicide is misplaced compassion, he explained.

“Euthanasia and assisted suicide are the opposite of care and represent the abandonment of older and dying persons,” he stated.

As medical technology advances, and we have greater numbers of elderly people, they should not be looked upon as a problem for society, Archbishop Hart insisted. Instead we should see our care of the elderly: “as repayment of a debt of gratitude, as a part of a culture of love and care.”

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The Australian Parliament had been scheduled yesterday to debate a resolution calling on China to free the Nobel peace prize winner Liu Xiaobo.

Liu, 54, was sentenced in December to 11 years in jail. His crime? To co-write Charter 08, a manifesto calling on the Chinese government to give real force to China’s constitution. This would separate the ruling party from the state, allow a truly independent judiciary and create a real parliamentary democracy.

The peaceful pursuit of these rights – rights enjoyed by the citizens of every other big power and grandly proclaimed in the constitution – was judged by China’s courts to be an “incitement to subvert state power”.

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Students in…[New South Wales] will be offered ethics classes as an alternative to scripture classes by next year, under a proposal the government is expected to adopt.

The Minister for Education, Verity Firth, will release today the findings of an independent report on a trial of ethics classes held in 10 schools over 10 weeks this year.
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The 102-page report, by Sue Knight and three colleagues at the University of South Australia, recommends the government adopts the ethics classes model used in the trial if it decides to establish the classes.

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The Pope’s homily, partially delivered in all the languages of the newly beatified saints, asked the faithful to remember the importance of prayer.

On Mary MacKillop he said: “Remember who your teachers were. From these you can learn the wisdom that leads to salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. For many years, countless young people throughout Australia have been blessed with teachers who were inspired by the courageous and saintly example of zeal, perseverance and prayer of Mother Mary MacKillop,” he said.

“She dedicated herself as a young woman to the education of the poor in the difficult and demanding terrain of rural Australia, inspiring other women to join her in the first women’s community of religious sisters of the country. She attended the needs of each young person entrusted to her, without regard to station or wealth, providing both intellectual and spiritual formation,” he said.

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Here is the introductory blurb–

Caroline Cox was made a peer by Margaret Thatcher back in the 1980s, and since then she has been using her seat in Britain’s House of Lords to speak out against injustices around the world on issues ranging from slavery in Sudan to the persecution of Christian minorities around the world. When she isn’t sitting in the Lords, the ‘battling Baroness’ is traveling the world on behalf of HART – The Humanitarian Aid Relief Trust, an organsiation she founded several years ago.

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How do we treat the dying?

We do well. But this is becoming a society which values individual rights above all else and exalts in human wisdom. As a result, once again euthanasia is being demanded. This is a debate about who we are as humans. My fundamental problem with it is that we are sinners and we do not have the moral capacity to administer it. It is the myth of so-called voluntary euthanasia. At a moment in time of adversity and suffering we ask people to make up their minds about termination of a life. We cannot – we can never – know what is going through the mind of the sufferer or of those whose lives will be changed by the death of the patient. No doubt there will be grief; but there can also be relief that I am no longer responsible; there can be pleasure in the knowledge that I stand to inherit; there can be the stress of needing the hospital bed. When the patient is very vulnerable, they are being asked whether
they wish to die early and the ones to whom they look for advice may have reasons for saying yes which are undetectable even to themselves. No system of prior decision making can get around this; nor are we to think that euthanasia will be confined to the elderly or the cancer stricken. We will also have it demanded as a right for the young and the mentally ill. After abortion on demand, this is the next stage in the unjust harvesting of innocent human life, the next and dreadful stage in a culture of expedient death.

The philosophical point in favour [of euthanasia] could not have been expressed more clearly than by the ethicist Dr Leslie Cannold writing in the Sun-Herald. ”˜Opponents of dying with dignity will tell you that the core moral principle in a civilized society is respect for life. This is outdated tosh. The central moral value in a modern multicultural society is autonomy, the right of individuals to determine the course of their own lives and deaths according to their own needs and values.’ This chilling statement has so much tendentious about it that it is hard to know where to begin dissecting it. But note this. Its basic expression, that the central moral value in a modern multicultural society is autonomy, is a boldly sectarian and secularist assertion. It is based on the denial of original sin and it leads to a denial of the full humanity of others, since it asks us to be self-centred.

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Memorable holiness comes in many forms. No Christian need ever be short of a role model!

We have early church martyrs like the noblewoman Perpetua, and modern martyrs like Archbishop Janani Luwum of Uganda. We have missionaries like Patrick, mystics like Julian of Norwich and social reformers like Elizabeth Fry and Martin Luther King Jr. We have royal luminaries like Margaret of Scotland and pioneers like Mary Sumner who founded the Mothers’ Union.

We also have some some special Australian Anglican “friends above,” like the Western Australian woman, Georgiana Molloy, and the first Aboriginal Anglican to be ordained, James Noble. Sometimes we commemorate Roman Catholics even when their own church has not officially canonised them. One example in the Australian calendar is Pope John XXIII, who famously called for the winds of change to blow through the Catholic Church in the renewal processes of the second Vatican Council in the early 1960s.

Such is the company of heavenly friends in which Australian Anglicans will count Mary MacKillop….

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This includes an example of some of what has occurred to church structures–watch it all.

The independent state MP Clover Moore has moved to shore up support for her same-sex adoption bill by giving church adoption agencies the right to refuse services to gay and lesbian couples without breaching anti-discrimination laws.

Ms Moore wrote to MPs on Friday announcing she would amend the bill and reintroduce it to Parliament on Thursday.

She told the Herald she was amending the bill “in line with requests” from church adoption agencies to help ensure its passage through Parliament.

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