Llandudno -
Our Lady Star of
the Sea
Parish
Priest: Fr Antony Jones STL - Telephone: 01492 860546 [Email]
Sunday July
2nd
2006
Dear Parishioner,
Feed my
Lambs. Where have your heard those words before? Were they
not spoken to Peter when Our Lord, after his Resurrection, restored him
to grace and recommisioned him to lead and feed his Church? And
those words to Peter echo and re-echo in the Church, throughout the
ages and in our times especially. Feed my lambs.
Children need feeding. They need spiritual food, perhaps most of
all, and we are grateful to our parents, our school, our catechists etc
for striving to provide our children with this essential commodity.
But obviously they need material food too, and the younger they are the
more important this nutrition is for them. Thank God, most
children in this country, though not all by any means, receive enough
food to enable them to grow strong and healthy.
In other countries, it is the other way round; it is the majority who
go in want, with the hungry and malnourished children almost the
norm.
FEED MY LAMBS. The words of our Lord to Peter are also addressed
to the Church - FOR WHERE PETER IS, THERE IS THE CHURCH – (these words
are emblazoned around the walls of the audience hall at Castelgandolfo,
the Pope’s summer retreat).
So, in your name and in the name of Christ and his Church, I have
adopted sixty human lambs, sixty babies under three, and committed
ourselves to feed them! Without our aid they will starve; with
our help they will flourish.
These babies are Sudanese and are in the care of the SVP there. It
costs just less than 70p to feed such a baby for a week. We have
taken responsibility for 60, which means that each week we will need to
raise about £40. We would like to raise the number of
children we help as time goes by.
The beauty of working with the SVP is that every penny you give goes
directly to the children. Not one penny goes on
administration. The administration of the SVP is catered for
quite independently, by the “Friends of the SVP”.
We already support Sr Jean, and I would hate us to rob Peter to pay
Paul. We must continue to contribute generously to Sr Jean’s
Clinic for Women and Children, as we have been doing now for some
years. Like our FEED MY LAMBS scheme, Sr Jean’s collection goes
via the SVP, which means that she gets every penny we collect.
But we are now looking to feeding 60 babies as well as supporting Sr
Jean, whose job in life is to keep those babies healthy and well.
At the end of each month, I will tell you how many babies we will be
able to feed in the course of the next month –July’s money will feed
the children during August, and so on
As from next week, a milk jug, or something, will stand in the middle
of the aisle before every Sunday Mass for your contributions.
Children will then bring it down to the altar along with the offertory
gifts, reminding us that our gift to these hungry children is one with
our gift to God.
We are deeply grateful to Ian Mawdsley who helped me work out this
scheme for the Parish. Lots of us feel that we should be doing
more for the poor in the Third World but are put off by the kind of
administrative costs and, frankly, waste of money we see in some major
charities. But here we have the ideal way of fulfilling our
Christian responsibilities without lining other people’s pockets or
wasting part of our hard earned cash. If you put your heart and
soul into helping Sr Jean and supporting our children, you can enjoy a
clear conscience with regard the Third World – no-one can support every
cause that presents itself before us.
Ian is a very safe pair of hands and we can trust him implicitly.
He has already raised literally millions of pounds for the poor in
Sudan and we are very lucky to have him in our parish. His reward
will be in eternal life.
God bless you,
Fr Antony Jones