Confessions of a Free Range Prolapsed Catholic

Oh dear! I have been away journeying through the highs and lows of bilateral knee replacement. Five and a bit weeks later I am slowly starting to emerge from what has been an experience that is beyond description really! Dear reader, I am typing this on my iPad at 1.05am, lying in bed beside my…

Going International In 1987 I took my first ever long service leave. I had managed to accrue ten weeks leave on full pay. I was proud of this achievement and thrilled that it coincided with a time in my life when I really needed it. “Oh she went to Rome, Paris, London, Monte Carlo” I…

I have been having a middle aged – oh blow it I’ll tell the truth from the beginning – late in life love affair with Melbourne for the last few years. On one trip, some years ago I purchased a book by a well known female author cashing in on the stereotypes of: being a woman (so…

I wrote this piece in February 2016. The place to which I refer has just been sold to the Diocese so that the school can be extended to include a senior section.  Many people have no idea of what the likes of the Josephite Sisters laid as the foundation of quality Catholic Education available to all…

I love the water! The picture above shows my favourite place to immerse myself. Its the Ocean Baths in Newcastle on a particularly stormy day. Actually on this day the baths were closed. I learned to swim there. My older siblings, already well able to swim, belonged to Newcastle swimming club and would compete each…

In 1994 I went to Ireland. I was 43 and I travelled alone. It was my first overseas trip. Prior to that, my only experience of plane flight had been in a 24 seater plane to Brisbane and a mystery flight to Adelaide. I had always proclaimed that nothing smaller and a Jumbo Jet or the…

I have been so overcome by the present in the last couple of days, that I have to distract myself from the obsession with the past and my attempt to make readers who did not live it, try to understand why so many catholics, free ranged, prolapsed and otherwise are so connected to their “formation”…

In my last post, I managed to get so completely immersed in the memories of trying to maintain my balance on a forward sloping organ stool while keeping the swells open with my knees and the bellows going like the clappers, that I overlooked the role of the bells and smells in Benediction! To be in…

Each of the 6 children in our family learned the piano and each of us, with differing degrees of success, spent some time as or in support of the Parish Organist. Prior to the Second Vatican Council ( mid 1960’s ) music at Mass was not the usual thing. It was only after changes to…

I can almost hear the exclamations and perhaps even outrage at the title of my offering today. However, remember, the purpose of my prose is to enlighten those of you who were not fortunate enough to be raised radical catholic in the era 1950 – 1959 in the hope that some light can be shed…