The Senior Australian of the Year for 2017 is Catholic nun Sister Anne Gardiner from the Tiwi Islands.

A Catholic nun who has spent half a century helping the Northern Territory's Tiwi people has been named Senior Australian of the Year.

Sister Anne Gardiner was bestowed the honour on 25 January at a ceremony in Parliament House's Great Hall.

Good afternoon to each of you – family and friends of our Jubilarians, the Religious of the Sacred Heart, our MSC brothers, our Sisters and, in a special way our Jubilarians, Sheila and Mona.

You will readily agree that this is a wonderful occasion as we mark seventy years of religious profession as Daughters of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart of Sisters Sheila and Mona. In essence, we are celebrating God’s limitless love of our Sisters and their faith-filled, generous response.

The Catholic Bishops of Australia invite Catholics across the country to join in celebrating a Year of Youth from the beginning of Advent 2017 to the end of 2018.

The Year of Youth celebrates ten years since World Youth Day was hosted in Sydney during 2008. It will focus on the theme, ‘Open New Horizons for Spreading Joy: Young People, Faith and Vocational Discernment’. The emphasis is on local discussion and dialogue in parishes, schools, youth groups and dioceses.

As we prepare to celebrate the 30th Anniversary of St John Paul II’s iconic words to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Alice Springs on 29 November 1986, we are strengthened and emboldened by a message of hope and a blessing received directly from the Holy Father, Pope Francis.

In recent weeks, NATSICC, with the assistance of the Bishops Conference used a video message to request a blessing from the Holy Father. Recorded in Alice Springs, the video features people that were present at Blatherskite Park in 1986. These people experienced firsthand the impact that St John Paul II’s words made.

The annual Graduation ceremony for the Heart of Life Centre, for the SILOAM, the Spiritual Direction program, was held in the chapel of St Paschal's, Box Hill, November 21st.

The ceremony was hosted by the director, Paul Beirne, along with the staff.

Eighty-five-year-old Catholic nun, Sister Anne Gardiner, who has lived on Bathurst Island among the Tiwi people since she was 22 was named the NT Senior Australian of the Year.

Territorians who are preventing suicide in their community, feeding the homeless, providing training and employment for the disadvantaged, educating young people and contributing to the community’s rich artistic landscape are among the finalists in the 2017 Northern Territory Australian of the Year Awards. As a 22-year-old member of the Daughters of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart, Sister Anne Gardiner was asked to move to Bathurst Island to live among the Tiwi people. In the 62 years since, Sr Anne has devoted her life to enriching community, enhancing opportunity and supporting the Tiwi culture. An advocate of peace, love and the traditional Tiwi way of life, Sr Anne has worked tirelessly to document and preserve the Tiwi language for future generations.

When Sister Anne Gardiner arrived on the Tiwi Islands, she met the women who, as young girls, had been brought out of the bush nearly 40 years earlier to the Sisters of the Sacred Heart's then new convent.

The convent is still there. So too is Sister Anne, 85, who arrived on Bathurst Island in 1953 and has seen the community changed almost beyond recognition.

In an historic moment for the Catholic Church in Papua New Guinea, Pope Francis has named the Archbishop of Port Moresby as the nation's first locally-born cardinal and the first cardinal from the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart.

The Most Reverend Archbishop John Ribat MSC was one of 17 new cardinals named by Pope Francis this month, which also included archbishops from Bangladesh, the Central African Republic and Mauritius.

The Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy, which the Church is celebrating, casts a distinct light on World Mission Sunday 2016: it invites us to consider the missio ad gentes as a great, immense work of mercy, both spiritual and material. On this World Mission Sunday, all of us are invited to "go out" as missionary disciples, each generously offering their talents, creativity, wisdom and experience in order to bring the message of God’s tenderness and compassion to the entire human family. By virtue of the missionary mandate, the Church cares for those who do not know the Gospel, because she wants everyone to be saved and to experience the Lord’s love. She “is commissioned to announce the mercy of God, the beating heart of the Gospel” (Misericordiae Vultus, 12) and to proclaim mercy in every corner of the world, reaching every person, young or old.