Tag: Easter

This is the edited text of the homily by Archbishop Anthony Fisher OP for the Vigil Mass of ANZAC Day Easter Thursday, St Mary's Cathedral, Sydney 24 April 2025.

How often have we heard that Christians are called to be ‘Easter people’? At David’s Place, our space for prayer and fellowship for marginalised people and their friends, we have truly learnt what this means, writes Sue Buckingham in her reflection for the third week of Easter.

Homily for Mass of Easter Tuesday and for the late Pope Francis St Mary’s Basilica, Sydney, 22 April 2025. 

We fence God in with the smallness of our faith and imagination, and our attempts to “change” which are really just attempts to keep things exactly the same. So what I would like you to do this Easter is: Give God room. Lots of room.

As the lights of St Peter's Basilica were extinguished and silence settled through the sprawling interior, a single flame—the paschal candle—pierced through the gloom, representing the light of the risen Christ which "quietly shines forth, even though we are in darkness," Pope Francis said.

We are people of the Resurrection, and our hymn is “Christ is risen. Truly He is risen!”

Hope, founded on faith and expressed in acts of love, even when hoping is hard: that’s Easter hope, writes Archbishop Anthony Fisher OP for his Easter message this year.

From the silent era through the mid-1960s, Bible-based films constituted a reliable staple of Hollywood's output. Directors both famous and obscure mined the Scriptures for stories they could bring to the big screen, with results that ranged from the reverential to the exploitative.

George Weigel writes of two “contemporary Catholic martyr-confessors”, Major-Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, patriarch of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, and activist Jimmy Lai.

This year, I am particularly excited about Easter because both Catholics and Orthodox Christians are celebrating it on the same day. This means I won’t have to wait for my friends' Easter to indulge in their delicious Greek Easter biscuits and bread.

Does Easter belong to Jesus Christ, or to a calendar? For Pope Francis, the answer is clear: "Easter belongs to Christ!" the pontiff declared in September 2024, when he met with representatives of the Pasqua Together 2025 Initiative, an assemblage of various lay associations and movements of several Christian confessions.

The Vatican released a partial schedule of Pope Francis' liturgical celebrations in March and early April, including a group Lenten retreat for the pope and top members of the Curia for the first time in five years.