Today’s Catholic must-reads: 19/09/12

At this morning’s general audience Benedict XVI expressed his gratitude to the Muslim community in Lebanon for helping to make his three-day visit to the country a success (video).

A relic of Jesuit missionary St Francis Xavier has arrived in Sydney at the start of a three-month tour of Australia.

The Vatican has made an “intense” commitment to financial reform in the past two years, the Holy See’s new “transparency guru” René Brülhart has told Vatican Radio.

Pope Benedict is “asking us to tear down the cathedral we build to ourselves“, Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia said at a prayer breakfast in Los Angeles yesterday.

Jimmy Akin is unperturbed by claims that a newly discovered papyrus fragment proves that Jesus had a wife.

George Weigel says the US bishops “will, if necessary, close the Catholic medical facilities for which they are responsible” in their fight for religious freedom.

And Grant Gallicho hails the discovery of an unpublished manuscript by Claude McKay, the Jamaican-American novelist, poet and Catholic convert.

Follow me on Twitter @lukecoppen for updates throughout the day