Next year, the Roman Catholic Church will be holding World Youth Day in Sydney. The Pope will be coming, and up to 500,000 people will attend an open air mass to celebrate the event. But here there is a problem.
The plan is to hold it at Royal Randwick, Sydney's premier race track. But the Australian Jockey Club, the lessors, have problems with this. I have been conscious of the dispute between the Church and Club, but I now see from an article in the Sydney Morning Herald that the problem is getting worse.
In Australia racing is a religion. It appears that the leaders of the racing religion and the Catholic prelates are on a serious collision course. In the meantime, the Sydney (aka NSW) Government appears to be sitting on the fence hoping that the problem will go away.
I have no idea of the rights and wrongs of all this. But it is a rather nice story that deserves wider coverage!
2 comments:
I'm sure I heard of a racecourse in Ireland which had a hill nearby called "Priest's Hill". It was called this because all the priests would gather on it to see the results of the racing, although they wouldn't go into the racecourse itself.
What a nice story, LE!
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