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Prayers at Auschwitz Praying in German, Benedict sends a message to his nation German-born pope visits Nazi death camps as ‘duty before God’
Sydney 2008 jobs drive launches
OSWIECIM, Poland (CNS) German-born Pope Benedict XVI stood in silence on the site of the Nazi’s Auschwitz death camp. He walked alone on May 28 under the entrance gate sign, “Work will make you free,” and joined three dozen survivors before the wall where firing squads shot thousands. Moving to the nearby Birkenau camp, he walked past the ruins of gas chambers where hundreds of thousands of people died from the fumes of Zyklon B gas and past the chimneys of the crematoriums where the bodies were reduced to ash. “To speak in this place of horror, in this place where unprecedented mass crimes were committed against God and man is almost
Decoders: Catholic Education Office of WA Director Ron Dullard, left, chats with Dr Kate Challis from Melbourne and Opus Dei spokesman Richard Vella at the special lecture organised by the University of Notre Dame Australia and The Record at UNDA’s Drill Hall last Thursday evening, May 25. An estimated 850 people turned out for the meeting. - SEE STORIES BELOW
A recruiting drive has begun to employ staff to join the World Youth Day organising machine, with a website offering regular updates on jobs as they become available. The Sydney-based organising committee announced last week that its recruitment campaign will start across Australia shortly. Organisers will have plenty to do. More than half a million pilgrims from abroad are expected to hit Sydney in 2008 for an event expected to attract more people than the Olympic Games held in the city in 2000. If WYD ’08 goes as the last several such events have, as many as 1.5 million young people will be present for the culmination of the once-every-three-years event. World Youth Day Sydney 2008 Chief Operating Officer Danny Casey said that over the coming
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Photo: Paul Bui
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■ By Cindy Wooden
Flip side to a litany of error Brown gets a deconstructing at UNDA Catholic author thanks Dan Brown in Melbourne talk ■ By Paul Gray, Melbourne
The director to the Australian Catholic Film Office, Fr Richard Leonard SJ, has said Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code should be viewed as a favour to Christianity, despite
the fictional story’s long litany of false conspiracy theories about the history of the Catholic Church. “I liked the book and think Dan Brown has done Christianity a favour for one reason,” Fr Leonard said in an academic lecture at the University of Melbourne’s Newman College last week. “While its theories could be easily and humorously disproved, The Da Vinci Code started people doing something I have never witnessed Continued on Vista 3
EXPERTS LOOK TO AUSTRALIA A new course for Catholic adults being offered in Sydney is drawing attention from experts in catechesis in the US and Canada. PAUL GRAY looks at what is new.
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man who found the idea of sexual intercourse repugnant was supposed to be the head of a secret organisation devoted to keeping alive the knowledge of a sexual liaison between Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene, an audience of 850 individuals interested in the Da Vinci Code phenomenon heard last Thursday evening. The interesting insight into Leonardo Da Vinci was one of many revealed by Melbourne-based renaissance art expert and art his-
torian Dr Kate Challis during her lecture on Da Vinci and the phenomenon which has become The Da Vinci Code. The lecture had been jointly organised between The Record and the University of Notre Dame Australia as a public service; the meeting was chaired by Catholic Education Office of WA Director Mr Ron Dullard. The little-known fact about Leonardo Da Vinci’s disquiet at the notion of sexual intercourse did not
INDEX Pell pastoral on Pentecost I say, I say The World Reviews Classifieds
really “sit well” with Dan Brown’s assertion that he was the head of the Priory of Sion, the organization featured in Brown’s book as devoted to keeping alive knowledge of the bloodline of Christ and Mary Magdalene, Dr Challis remarked. Dr Challis described how Da Vinci had worked at nights, with the permission of his local bishop, in the morgue in order to dissect bodies and arrive at the wonderful and highly-detailed depictions of Continued on Vista 2
WHO’S WORTH $686 MILLION? - Page 6 - Vista 4 - Pages 8-9 - Page 10
While people starve to death around the world or live trapped in an endless cycle of poverty, more and more eyebrows are being raised at sky-high executive salaries.
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