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COZ149: This episode brings together Lindsay Sant, Caroline Knight, and their Uncle Fr. Alex Busuttil — a missionary priest of the Missionary Society of St. Paul who has spent 40 years serving in Pakistan, Libya, and Peru. The conversation opens with a simple but profound reframe: our relationship with God is not a duty. It’s a need. And once you understand it as a need, everything changes.

Fr. Alex walks through the theology of vocation with unusual clarity. Marriage isn’t just a natural life cycle — it’s a calling, a yes to God’s will, as profound as Mary’s fiat at the Annunciation. He unpacks the three questions asked at every Catholic wedding and what they really mean. Then he explains how to discern your vocation: not by waiting for a divine letter, but through closeness to God via the daily Gospel, the Eucharist, and spiritual direction. The Eucharist, he explains, is not just receiving a message from someone you love — it’s meeting them in person.

He shares his own vocation story: parents with only a primary school education who shaped everything. His mother’s unquestioning trust in God. His father’s passionate concern for human justice and the famine in Africa. And a moment, lying in bed with a fever as a teenager, when something clicked — not just doing social work, but giving God to the people you serve. That seed, planted without anyone intending it, eventually became 40 years of mission.

The conversation turns to what mission actually looks like on the ground. MSSP doesn’t arrive with a product or agenda — it arrives with openness and responds to what the community actually needs. That’s how a few hours of basic medical care a week grew, room by room over 23 years, into a clinic with 45,000 individual patient records — and an adoration chapel at the entrance. The numbers never added up on paper. The formula isn’t 1+1=2. It’s faith plus hard work equals no limits.

The discussion deepens around Matthew 25 and the challenge at its heart: the people who served the poor in that parable didn’t know they were serving Christ. Fr. Alex argues that compassion is available to anyone — believer or not. Those moved by it are being led by the Spirit of God, whether or not they know it.

Then Caroline takes over for the science segment. A new discovery published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology (November 2025) describes the oldest crocodilian eggshell ever found in Australia — 55 million years old, from the Eocene-era Tingamara site in southeastern Queensland. The eggshell belongs to mycosukine crocodilians, an extinct family that filled ecological niches now occupied by large lizards and mammalian predators. Some were semi-arboreal — possibly climbing trees and dropping on prey. Scientists have nicknamed them Drop Crocs. The new species: Wakaulithus godelpi.

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Links for this episode:

• 55-million-year-old fossils reveal bizarre crocs that dropped from trees | ScienceDaily
• Australia’s oldest crocodylian eggshell: insights into the reproductive paleoecology of mekosuchines

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Thank you to Moon Shadow Studios
This episode of The Catholics of Oz was edited by Patrick McCaffrey of Moon Shadow Studios. To have your own audio professionally edited by Moon Shadow Studios visit them at their web site MoonShadowStudios.biz.