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COZ165: A young mother in New South Wales skips meals so her daughter and pets can eat. She hasn’t paid her electricity bill in almost two years. Australia’s Catholic bishops open their 2026 social justice statement, The Cost of Our Living: Economic and Social Justice for the Common Good, with her story, and with a blunt claim: in a country this wealthy, so much hardship should be inconceivable.

Lindsay Sant, Caroline Knight and Lino Saubolle read the whole statement together, stopping at the key points. A few episodes ago they discussed the bishops’ second 2026 statement, on social division. This first one is the practical side of the Catholic social teaching Pope Leo XIV laid out in Magnifica Humanitas. Archbishop Timothy Costelloe‘s preface sets the tone: our response begins in prayer, but it has to lead to action.

The figures are hard to hear. More than one in three Australian households reported food insecurity in 2025. Over 1.2 million low-income households spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing. Food in remote communities costs more than double what it does in a capital city. Caroline brings it home: the grocery budget that keeps growing, the treats that have gone, the working families now living in their cars.

Then the bishops turn to the principles of Catholic social teaching: the dignity of every person, the common good, solidarity, subsidiarity, the universal destination of goods and the preferential option for the poor. Lindsay picks out one line, that every person deserves all they need “to flourish,” which asks far more than keeping people just above poverty. The panel works through the statement’s concrete steps, from noticing who is struggling to giving to Vinnies or Foodbank and pressing for affordable housing, and Lindsay calls on listeners to become prophets of hope, like Blessed Frédéric Ozanam, Venerable Mary Glowrey, St Mary MacKillop and St Carlo Acutis.

The episode opens with a farewell to two Star Trek actors, Walter Koenig and Patrick Stewart, and Caroline closes it with a conservation story from Norfolk Island. The Norfolk Island hairy snail, no bigger than a fingernail and covered in golden bristles, was feared extinct until the Australian Museum’s Dr Isabel Hyman found a living population on a small reserve beside a road. With Argentine ants closing in, 30 snails went to Taronga Zoo, where they are already giving birth to live young.

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Links for this episode:

• The Cost of Our Living: Economic and Social Justice for the Common Good (Australian Catholic Bishops, Social Justice Statement, February 2026)
• Researchers race to save Norfolk Island’s rare hairy snail (Australian Museum)
• Rare snails thought to be extinct settle into new home on Norfolk Island (ABC News)

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