Dear Parishioner,

Congratulations to the young people who received their First Holy Communion last Sunday and to those who were confirmed on Wednesday.  Both services were very happy occasions and I thank all those who contributed in any way to their preparation and celebration.  I thank especially Mrs Elaine Dingsdale who diligently prepared the children for their First Holy Communion and Mrs Margaret Hunt and Mrs Dorothy Oaks our High School catechists, for their tireless efforts.

Our Altar Server numbers have been considerably increased, and I am delighted that these children will remain in very close proximity to the Mass by taking on this service to the Lord.

It was good to welcome the Bishop to the parish for the Confirmation just weeks before he celebrates his Golden Jubilee of Priesthood.  We look forward to that occasion and keep him in our prayers with warm gratitude to him for his consistently kind care of us all. 

We are now in possession of 18 tickets for his celebratory Mass at Wrexham on Sunday afternoon, 5 July.  Those who have signed up to go may collect their tickets from the Sacristy.  There are four over; first come first served for these.  It will surely be a memorable do.  <>Let me tell you now of what we are going to call our “Come and See Days”.  The name comes from the Gospel.  St John tells the story of how Andrew becomes a disciple of Jesus and asks him where he lives.  The Lord replies “Come and See”.  This invitation goes out from the Lord to all of us all the time; it is up to us to try to respond to it ourselves and to help others to answer to it too.  Andrew responded to it and promptly took his brother to meet Jesus.  The result was the discipleship of Peter, the one on whom the Lord would eventually build his Church.  We can never tell what good we do when we introduce others to the Lord.

Now you can do this yourself by bringing someone to the Catechumenate.  To help people get to know something about the Catechumenate before they turn up, our Parish Evangelisation Team will be meeting in Stella Maris at 730pm on Thursday 11 June (not 13th of June, as I originally said) to tell anyone who would like to know more about it, how the Catechumenate works and what it involves.  Please give some serious thought to this and maybe you could be an Andrew by introducing someone, just as really as he did, to the Lord and his Catholic Church, built on Peter. 

The normal programme of our Catechumenate is from Pentecost to Easter.  But this is not fixed in stone.  We must be sufficiently flexible to accommodate late-comers.  So if the Come and See day works for you, just come along. 

Looking forward to whatever other initiatives our Evangelisation Team may come up with in the future, we thank them for their enthusiasm and wish them well. 

Fr Mulligan’s Chalice is now on display in the Lady Chapel.  You will remember in a recent Newsletter I told you that I had recently discovered it, bruised and looking every bit its age.  Well, it has now been re-gilded and looking as good as it did on the day it was presented to its owner, that wonderful Irish priest who built our big and beautiful church when he had but twelve Catholic families living in the parish at the time.  What a man of faith he was!  What an incentive he gives to all of us to remember that we are in the Lord’s hands and that the Lord will provide.  Remember, the Catholic Church herself is most certainly in the Lord’s hands and will prosper, no matter how lean the times may be that she has to go through. 

We are grateful indeed to Neil Barlow who fitted and provided the protective glass over the niche where the Chalice is displayed.  He has done a fine job, and in doing so provides us with a permanent reminder of this wonderful priest.  For every priest his chalice is his most treasured possession and it is wonderful for us to have installed here in the Lady Chapel the chalice of the priest who built the church and the parish itself from scratch.  Like him, we must all be earnest in this primary task of building up the family of God in this town.  Pray for his soul and may he pray for us.


God bless,    Fr Antony Jones