 'The Bishop: Off To Holy Wins' ~ Vincent Cavanagh © 2025 A brief explainer on what is Holy Wins/Holywins can be found in this Catholic News Agency article here and, yes, the Bishop now has a live-in/pet(?) dinosaur called Hotspur.  Months, more months, and Saints! (Photo: by Author) And in other news—after having the thought of it gnawing at the back of my brain for what felt like half the year—I finally began preparing Month–pages for a 2026 Calendar on Sunday, 26 October 2025. Hooray!
Photographs for each month are currently still in the selection phase. Yes, photographs. This upcoming calendar will be a collection of images of the different places that I visited in 2025. And because of all the effort that I poured into trying to pull together Jubilee Year 2025 grassroots–young adult pilgrimages to the Shrines of Hope in my diocese left me both mentally, physically and emotionally drained, such that I have had no impetus to do anything artistic whatsoever for the majority of 2025. Save for the painting of St Clare of Assisi back in July, of course. Which is why the comic at the top of this blog post, for me, is a significant win. I will endeavour to keep you all informed about further 2026 Calendar developments when they are worthy of promulgation. A happy and holy Hallowtide to you all folks! Vincent Cavanagh 31 October 2025 Okay, so, apart from posts to mark the death of Pope Francis and the election of Pope Leo XIV, I haven’t posted anything to this blog since the start of January 2025.  My first Broken Bay Pilgrim Stamp to be collected in the 'Jubilee Pilgrim Passport', featuring St John Vianney. This is mostly down to the year, for me, starting with a “sort of” setback which left me in a disoriented state for the first quarter of the year, or so, and not well disposed to doing anything particularly creative in the direction of new artwork. Nor did I feel it worthwhile to post anything about my father and I visiting the Sydney Bus Museum in Leichhardt for one of their open days, or our second visit to Hunter Valley Steamfest in Maitland either, or attending the 2025 Hunter Valley Airshow.  Inspecting the Riley Brothers Bus at the Sydney Bus Museum, Leichhardt, NSW. What has been occupying my attention, after a brainstorming session of possibilities with my mother, has been planning, mapping, testing, organizing, promoting, and leading Young Adult (18–35) Pilgrimages to the four Jubilee Shrines of Hope in the Diocese of Broken Bay for the 2025 Jubilee Year of Hope:
 Viewing the relic of St John Vianney at St Mary Immaculate Church in Manly, NSW. The whole effort was started, for the most part, because I didn’t expect anyone else to try and do something Young Adult-focused at a Diocesan–wide level for the Year of Jubilee, and because the Diocese itself had a reshuffle of ministry appointments and parish placements such that the former monthly Young Adult gatherings of previous years were dropped from the calendar without ceremony. For all appearances curial priorities had changed and if anything was going to happen Young Adult-wise it would have to be a self-initiated, grassroots affair, which I threw myself into with far more effort and emotion than strictly necessary. These pilgrimages are meant to give my fellow peers an opportunity for pilgrimage during this Year of Jubilee who aren’t able due to financial or familial circumstances to go overseas on pilgrimage to Rome like many others are doing. The four pilgrimages are spaced out to be once every second month to aid in giving a sense of the Jubilee truly being a year-long event and not just a blink-and-you-miss-it four-weekend marathon done-and-dusted, don’t-need-to-think-about-it-again situation.
It is a moot point as to whether a four-weekend marathon mightn’t have been a better draw card for the intended audience, given that there have been only a handful of pilgrims turn up for both the first pilgrimage to Manly in March for the relic of St John Vianney and the second to Chatswood in May to visit the relic of Blessed Carlo Acutis. It’s depressing when spur-of-the-moment picnics and such get higher turnout from young adults than the thing that’s had so much blood, tears, and effort poured into it to give them an opportunity to gain the Year of Jubilee Indulgence and a reduction of a chunk of our time in Purgatory currently accrued to each of us individually — and that is worthwhile! ¹ I have to regularly remind myself that these pilgrimages aren’t a “me”–thing, they are from and for God — He’s the one who sparked the whole idea of organizing these walks — for purposes that only He knows the end result of, I’m just here to organise them. If even only one person shows up, that pilgrimage was successful. If you or anyone you know would like to join along for next two pilgrimages, the dates are as follows:
 — Draft promotionals -- These walks are open to all pilgrims from surround Dioceses and not just the Diocese of Broken Bay, and starting with the St John Paul II Pilgrimage they will be opened up to all interested pilgrims from 18 years old to retirement. Keep on the lookout for further details and Facebook Event pages about each walk from myself on Facebook or here on the blog. I hope to see you there. Vincent Cavanagh 9 June 2025 ¹ The Jubilee Indulgence is explained in an accessible and down-to-earth way to all by Bishop of Wilcannia-Forbes Columba Macbeth-Green in the video linked below: And in other news: I have turned OFF comments on all my blog posts, apart from those made by verifiable human beings, due to an influx of spam e-mail / robot comments over the past year. Moving forward I will be keeping the comments on this blog CLOSED until further notice. Thank you.  Pope Leo XIV appears on the balcony of St. Peter's Basilica — Vatican Media © 2025 POPE LEO XIV(Formerly Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost.) He is the 267th successor of St. Peter, the Apostle. Elected Pontifex on 8 May 2025, Vatican City, Rome. The Americas Pope: North and South; both Peru and the United States. Pope Leo XIV is the first Pope from the Order of St. Augustine (OSA), but the seventh from religious orders that follow the Rule of St. Augustine of Hippo. Vatican News biography article linked here. *Orders are now Closed*
 Vincent Cavanagh © 2024 * 2025 Calendar Flip-Through GIF added — 6 December 2024.
Yes, I’m back and this may or may not be a newsletter under a different guise.
You can do it like I have 💀 by staring off into the sea of empty calorific YouTube video suggestions wondering what that last thought was that you didn’t want to forget. Or reading through multiple inter-referenced substack pages and church journalism and a touch too much European politics “news” – which I still don’t have my head around; and should probably be grateful for that fact. Or not-quite-compulsively checking either the weather application or if there are any updates on Facebook Messenger to previous text messages (or trying to reverse engineer which comment someone liked due to the latest update, grrr!) Speaking of substack pages, one that I’ve been gravitating back to of late—and isn’t as overly swimming in bar graphs or generally depressing as others—is the School of the Unconformed by Ruth Gaskovski. For about the past year(?) or so she has been doing shared essays with her husband Peco that they cross-post between each other’s substack page (Peco’s is Pilgrims in the Machine). The general theme of their essays is regaining man’s [1] humanity from both the jaws and bowels of the inhuman Machine world we now find ourselves living in. Of which this quote by Ruth from their recent article, ‘Building People with Three-Dimensional Memory’, is an example: The incessant distraction of interfacing with devices leaves us feeling as if our brain and our body are forever in a different place. It almost seems as if we are in a race to upload our life into the virtual universe. Our desire to capture and share the present is numbing our ability to form natural memories of the moments we want to actually treasure. By excessively documenting our lives artificially Marshall McLuhan might say we are “autoamputating” our memory. And Peco continues in his section of the piece by exemplifying how technology is artificially engendering the tell-tale symptoms of Alzheimer’s into all of us glued to our digital devices: Some segments of the culture might experience a carefree insouciance as they become largely forgetful of what has come before—the wisdom, knowledge, and traditions of history—and more gripped by the here-and-now stimulation of their screens. I would highly encourage anyone else interested to read the whole article here. As well as Ruth’s interview with Erin Loechner (don’t worry, I’d never heard of her either), ‘Turning the Algorithm Upside Down: The Opt-Out Family’, where Erin answers Ruth’s daughter’s question of whether there even is a “healthy” way to be on social media: I know the more palatable answer here is to speak of digital well-being and balance and how to successfully navigate the algorithm in a way that we can consume the good without the bad. But we can’t. Just like any mind-altering drug we might ingest, social media makes it so we are not in control of the experience we’ll have immediately after. And I can no longer see any potential reward in delivering our God-given brains to a [tattooed] group of tech bros in Silicon Valley.” [Note: At the time of writing, this post by the Gaskovski’s was open to non-subscribers (June 2024), future readers of this blog post may find these articles behind Subscription/Pay Walls. Their substack posts tend to be open for a few months before going behind the Subscription Wall, depending on whether an article is important enough that it remain open for the greatest number of people to read and gain use from it.] Keepin’ Up wit’ Gen ZNow on to lighter fare. Amongst my varying sojourns through internet-life I have compiled a list of all the various different Internet Grammar and Acronyms that I’ve come across over the past month or so: LLAP ‘Live Long and Prosper’ 🖖 rekt Internet form of ‘Wrecked’. 🗿 Moai (Easter Island Head) emoji. Used to communicate a deadpan or shocked/embarrassed-into-speechlessness expression. Or alternatively—if in Japan—used to arrange meeting up with people at the Moyai statue near Shibuya Station in Tokyo. IYKYK ‘If You Know, You Know’ Vietnamese “teencodes”: Hixx or Hixxxxx – written version of 😢 (crying face emoji). Huhu – written version of 😭 (loudly crying face – or as I know it, ‘waterfall tears’). TIL ‘Today I Learned.’ ily / ILY ‘I Love You.’ Not to be confused with illy, the Italian Espresso company. bby / BBY Internet alternative form of ‘Baby’. (ex. ‘Woohoo BBY!’) More often used when using ‘baby’ as a term of endearment. RTFM ‘Read The … Manual!’ Often used within the Linux user community forums. Jubilee 2025For those of us not on TikTok (or whichever platform it was announced on), the Reverend Samuel French (@frsamfrench) will be leading a pilgrimage in the footsteps of St Paul through Greece and Turkey with Harvest Journeys exclusively for Young Adults aged 18 to 35 for the Holy Year of Jubilee in 2025: ‘Pilgrims of Hope’. More information about the pilgrimage can be found here. AS I WROTE at the beginning of this blog, this post may effectively be a newsletter in all but name. Yes, there are already plenty of other blog posts on this website that have been tagged with “newsletter”, but I specifically chose to name this RANDOM Things #001 because I’d prefer to make a clean break of the prior hodgepodge of blog posts and because the perfectionist in me wouldn’t let up unless I went through and counted every-single-blog-post with either tag or semblance of “newsletter” both on this website and its predecessor. Which is not an option that I look upon with any enthusiasm, hence why RANDOM Things #001. I do—and I ask that you reading this likewise—not expect this to in any way be a regular or (dear God save me) quarterly affair. It is my estimation that RANDOM Things be more of an ‘every now and then’ or just ‘I haven’t painted anything, but here’s what’s been kicking around in my head recently’ type of blog post. So until the next one of these not-newsletters eventuates; Peace and Happy Feast of St Peter and St Paul. Vincent Cavanagh 29 June 2024 Footnotes [1] As in the genus man (mankind) of which both men and woman, male and female, make up the whole category (ex., “earth men” and “Men of Earth”) – for the peculiarly post-Age of Aquarius pedants out there. Not the website, but myself. I'm currently laid low with change–of–season flu, which I've been stuck with for the better part of a week and counting. I'm hoping that it will be breaking sooner rather than latter. Vincent Cavanagh 27 May 2024 Happy Feast of St Joseph. Painted 14 March 2024  ‘St Joseph and Jesus (2024)’, Vincent Cavanagh, 2024 This painting may have only taken a day to paint, but it was a whole year—and two months—in the making. The product of a deadline that I didn’t think that I was even supposed to be working towards and God’s Timing. Aack! Leaving the histrionics aside, the photograph that this picture of St Joseph and the child Jesus is based upon was taken at a local church just before mass. A father was sitting with his family in a pew, about three rows over, holding his sleeping youngest son over his shoulder. One of those “take a photo or regret it”–moments from God. In the end, very little actually changed from the photograph—well, apart from changing clothes to robes, adding head coverings, and including hair on the back of St Joseph’s head, of course.
This whole hectic schedule of events was due to a conflicting parish event after the youth night and the lateness of the St Joseph’s Day Eve party at Joseph House being on at a prohibitively late time for me to attend. In the end the picture was printed (Thank God!) and present to the housemates, and it should now be hanging somewhere inside Joseph House. Vincent Cavanagh 19 Mar 2024 Now, as for an update on my previous update about working on writing down my experiences of WYD Lisbon, that’s no longer moving forward. I’m not joking when I write that it was a commandment from on high. And given how much I was reliving certain emotions to an unhealthy amount, I’m more than alright with just letting it drop and focusing on what God actually wants me to be focused on instead. Ask God before you leap into things whether you should be leaping into them at all. P.S. Also, the writing was the reason that I only had a single day left to paint Joseph and Jesus. (Face palm) Oi vey! A brief update as to what I’m up to at the moment.
*midst | as in: ‘in the midst of him’; not a synonym for ‘middle’. 19 Mar 2024 For any update about the writing, you'll find it at the bottom of the next blog post. A day out on Sydney rails.  42105 'Chumsayer' waiting to depart with the Goods Road Tour on Platform 3, Central | Vincent Cavanagh ©2024 On 28 January 2024, my father and I partook in the East Coast Heritage Rail: Goods Road* Tour from Sydney Central Station. We were on the second of the two tours for the day: 11am and 1pm AEDT, respectively. The tour departed and arrived on Central Station Platform 3. It was a heritage consist of various Department of Railways New South Wales railway carriages and hauled for the day by a 421 Class diesel locomotive, 42105 ‘Chumsayer’, owned and operated by private owner Chumrail. We were booked in an N type carriage at the front of the train next to 42105.  Interior of the N type carriage at the start of boarding the train | Vincent Cavanagh ©2024 Our train departed Central at 1pm on its balloon loop route encompassing the Inner West and Canterbury Bankstown regions. We headed out on the Western Line (T1) towards Lidcombe where we turned south briefly onto the Bankstown Line (T3) before turning back eastwards, just after Regents Park Station, onto the Sefton Goods Line. We passed through Chullora Rail Yard on the southern boundary of Rookwood Cemetery and then turned south once more heading through Enfield Marshalling Yards, one of the more major and visible reminders of the original extent of Enfield suburb before boundary redistributions by government.  Sydney Electric Train Society 8649 in State Rail Authority 'Candy' livery in Enfield Marshalling Yard | Vincent Cavanagh ©2024 After Enfield we re-joined the Bankstown Line proper at Campsie, passing through Dulwich Hill and having a gander** at the unopened Sydney Metro conversions of half of the Bankstown Line at Sydenham as part of the Metro South rail project.  Passing Dulwich Hill Tram line terminus | Vincent Cavanagh ©2024  Fleet of Sydney Metro 'Metropolis' rolling stock standing in Sydenham Yard | Vincent Cavanagh ©2024 We returned to Central Station an approximate hour-and-twenty-minutes after our departure. All in all, it was a good day out on the rails, but I think it’s only helped crystalize my preference for journeys that have set destinations more so than just “wandering about”, but that’s just me. Vincent Cavanagh 21 Feb 2024 * An unfortunate Americanization of railway terminology in the past few decades in NSW. Railways in NSW (at least from their inception) used the British railway vernacular (railway, lines, carriages). Whereas South Australia has actively used the United States vernacular (railroad, roads, cars) ever since the appointment of American William Webb as Chief Commissioner in 1922.
** Gander : to have/take a quick look. Reviewing my 12-Month Social Media Exodus.  Heading towards the Marquês de Pombal Monument, Lisbon. Vincent Cavanagh ©2023 Well, it’s been 12 months since I started my Social Media Exodus and now it’s time to review the year that was. Okay, so starting off, 2023 was World Youth Day year for me. You may have seen some posts here and there on the blog and archived on the website, and possibly also on Facebook (sarcasm). Speaking of the aforementioned social media platform, I think it’s safe to say that (apart from WYD) I haven’t been signed into it any more than strictly necessary. Nowadays it functions, for me personally, as more of an alert-slash-events manager and reference tool for finding people and past events. Since WYD I have been using Messenger far more than I thought I ever would in my whole life. It’s certainly been a change of pace having a social life.  A day out on Sydney Harbour. Vincent Cavanagh ©2023 Twitter is all but officially mothballed, waiting for a reason (if any) to actively post on it again. Even though most Catholic parish Youth Ministries appear to have highly active profiles, I still don’t ever see myself returning to Instagram. Certainly not under my own name in any case. As for YouTube… oh, dear. Apart from proactively uploading two videos from WYD Lisbon featuring the lead vocals of Fr Samuel French I’ve been passively over-consuming other people’s YouTube videos. My anxieties over travel, packing, and WYD preparations absolutely did not help cut down on my ‘Watch time’ as I had hoped to rein in 12 months earlier. Being stuck in a maelstrom of choice-paralysis over what small new camera to buy to take over with me to Europe for the pilgrimage didn’t cut down wasted hours either. And in any case, I ended up taking more photos with my smartphone than I did with the camera I bought to stop me over-using said same smartphone. Live and learn, eh? I have bought a Peak Design camera strap that should help aid in using the camera more in future. And speaking of the future, I am all too aware of my current (ahem!) “habit” of bookmarking videos and website articles about various different foods, religious sites, and locations of interest across both East and Southeast Asia in the possibility of preparation(!) for 2027 World Youth Day. People are not kidding when they talk about the WYD/Travel "bug". As an aside, I still don’t think that I’d ever be able to learn, let alone read, Hangul / Hangeul, the Korean alphabet. I’ve accepted that A) I don’t have to know everything and B) that I’m going to be especially reliant on those who can and have persevered to learn Korean. Returning to YouTube specifically, I did come across the DF Tube Chrome Extension that has been of some great help in cutting down more video-related rabbit holes than I would have without it. Its main attraction (for me) was the ability to turn off the righthand video suggestion box whilst watching a YouTube video. Admittedly it makes things lopsided visually, but it does mean that I have fewer distractions from the video in front of me. Sadly, DF Tube can’t do anything about my procrastination. That’s all on me. So, to sum up. I have been relatively withdrawn from my social media profiles – discounting blogging about the WYD pilgrimage. I have gained a social life that is aided by messaging applications which come with their own problems – the applications, not the social life. My personal struggles with self-discipline and YouTube over-consumption remain. In part I know that some of this is due to a lack of projects and regular routine. Pray for me. Putting my focus on posting blogs and standardizing parts of this website has helped me feel less pressured than I would have been if I was still only posting on Facebook or Twitter. As well as not having as much comparison-itis with the edited and project lives of other people on social media. This doesn’t mean that I still don’t struggle with comparison, it’s just not as severe as it has been in the past. In closing I think that I will continue as I have done so these past 12 months and with God’s help get a better grip over my YouTube-surfing and other self-defeating habits. Until next time. Vincent Cavanagh 25 Jan 2024 |
News and Other StuffAbout recent artwork, inspirations and other things I find interesting. Archives
November 2025
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed
All artwork and images on this website (unless stated otherwise) are the property of Vincent Cavanagh and cannot be used without his permission.
|
Social Links
|
Powered by Weebly
|