Parish with No Priest, A

On a damp summer day on a back road in Eastern Tasmania recently, someone died. It was the local Catholic priest. His parishioners not only lost a community leader and a friend, but there was no-one to replace him. Elsewhere, in the State's remote central regions another priest drives hundreds of kilometres every week to visit the many churches of the parish. These two stories epitomise the challenge for the Catholic Church in remote and regional Australia.