ACPA and ARPA Awards

In the Best Feature Story section of the Australasian Catholic Press Association (ACPA) awards, Fr Brian O’Connell sm received a Highly Commended award for his article in August 2012, ‘Salesian Youth win historic Fautasi Race’.

Of this article, the judges said: “This engaging human interest feature included a brief narrative and an interview with a key actor in the story of a 42-young-men-strong boat crew from Western Samoa. Much of the work of the feature was done by an interview with a woman who played a crucial role in the story -- a role figured also in a wonderful picture. The story conveyed, incidentally almost, fascinating and countercultural ideas about leadership and the role of women in the Church, and gave an insight into the Church’s role in building community in Western Samoa, not to mention the challenges and opportunities in educating young men.”

Joanne Oliver receiving one of the ACPA awards on behalf of Fr O’Connell from Bishop Vincent Long of Melbourne

Fr O’Connell also won a Highly Commended award in the Best Editorial section, for ‘Love the Church with No Secrets’ in the April 2012 issue of the magazine. The judges said: “The driving idea was the individual Catholic’s relationship to a Church afflicted by seemingly ineradicable abuses, because of poor leadership by ‘Church officials’. It was written in the first person so it carried the force of testimony. At the same time, it enabled readers of various Church conditions to identify with the writer’s perspective -- and to claim the rights of ‘the baptised’. A drop out box explained the quote at the head of the editorial, a quote expressing the conflicted response of the writer, and by implication many of his readers, to a Church ‘compromised’, ‘false’, ‘pure’, ‘generous’ and ‘beautiful’.”

In the same section of the awards, Wel-Com’s editor Cecily McNeill won the Best Editorial award for her writing about the sorry plight of workers in New Zealand, ‘A living for the least’, published in February this year.

Tui Motu Interislands won the award for the Best Article on Catechesis for its articles on Vatican II. Tui Motu also won Highly Commended awards for Best Original Photograph and Best Front Cover.

The NZ Catholic won the Bishop Kennedy Memorial Prize for a Newspaper: “This is the best local newspaper”, the judges said.

In the Australasian Religious Press Association (ARPA) awards, Anne Kerrigan’s The Cross and the Recliner essay in the March 2012 Marist Messenger gained the Best Faith Reflection Silver Award. The judges said this was a “poignant account of an adult daughter’s pain and death and the questions that accompanied it. Watching her daughter die, Anne wonders whether Mary, mother of Jesus, felt as she does. She imagines Mary holding her Jesus’ dead body in her arms, completely spent, mentally and physically drained.

Joanne Oliver receiving the ARPA award on behalf of the Messenger from the ARPA President, Errol Pike

Did Mary ask ‘Why?’ As a reader from a different tradition and not a parent, Anne’s experience helps me imagine a little of how God as Father may have felt watching God as Son suffer and die. The Father unable to hold, to touch, to comfort his adult child as his body is wracked by pain, as he shifts weight from ankles to wrists, from wrists to ankles, struggles to breath … Until, with a last shuddering breath, Jesus asks, ‘My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?’ I feel it is often the Catholic writers who best glimpse the heart of God. But for me, it is often through the questions that we hear the voice and touch the heart of God. May God grant us the strength to ask and keep on asking ‘why’?”