Australian Confraternity of Catholic Clergy

A reader recently directed me to the website of the Australian Confraternity of Catholic Clergy. The Aims of the ACCC are to
  • give glory and honour to the Most Blessed Trinity
  • assist the eternal salvation and holiness of members
  • foster unity among Catholic priests and deacons with the bishops in loyalty to the Supreme Magisterium
  • encourage faithfulness to priestly life and ministry
  • assist bishops, priests, and deacons in the fulfilment of their ministry of teaching, sanctifying, and ruling.
The flavour of these aims gave me the impression that this group isn't going to spend much time sitting in small groups sharing their pain at the institutional church.

They produce a magazine called "The Priest" which is available (up to May 2007) from the website. The May edition has a follow-up to a previous article entitled "A church that looks and feels like a Church". It tells the story of the Immaculate Heart of Mary parish in Thurgoona in the diocese of Wagga Wagga. Here is part of the story:
With a small band of dedicated volunteer workers we set out designing our “orthodox” church. We were very excited with what we had come up with. Monsignor Elliott wrote to us congratulating us on the beautiful design, and much to our surprise Professor Duncan Stroik from Notre Dame University USA, also gave us encouragement. However, this was quickly hit on the head by those in charge. We were forced to abandon the idea of the design of a church the people were so excited about. We were being directed to go with a style that no one really liked: a modern style building that was acceptable to certain authorities, and yet, was unacceptable to the sense of the faithful.

As a result, instead of a church, it was decided to seek approval for a hall to be built: this is the beautiful church we have today.
The Church is the one pictured above.

Skimming through the rest of the 40 page magazine, I found some excellent articles on celibacy, eastward-facing, vocations, tabernacles, and the theology of Pope Benedict.

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