Scroll Down for earlier Newsletters
(To increase size of print, hold down Control Key -CTRL- whilest turning mouse wheel)
Dear Parishioner,
2 October 2011
Our Baptism Team, which plays such an important part in the ongoing life of our Parish, has undergone considerable change of late. Antonello and Suzanne Mosca have had to withdraw on account of their family and work commitments — with three young boys in tow it was a difficult responsibility to handle. We are extremely grateful to them for the unstinting efforts they have put into this work over the last years. Also Marie Dixon has had to retire from the group on health grounds. To herself, too, we are most grateful for work well done. The only member of the team still remaining is Bernadette Davies (nee Lemon) whose personality and enthusiasm for the Faith makes her just perfect for the job. Thank Heavens she is still able to continue.
But, Heaven be thanked again, we have found two new volunteers, a husband and wife team, to fill the breach. Foud and Vian Basa, both qualified medical doctors specialising in psychiatry, will be joining Bernadette in this task of preparing parents for the celebration of Baptism. Though obviously highly skilled, Foud and Vian’s greatest qualification is their strong and ardent Catholic Faith. We are delighted that they are willing to join the team, despite their obvious heavy workload.
The Baptism Team meets the parents of children being baptised a couple of times before the celebration of the Sacrament. They explain to them the meaning and importance of Baptism and the seriousness in the eyes of God of the vows they take. They build up a friendship with these parents which can prove an ongoing support to them in their crucial task of helping their children “grow in wisdom and knowledge” as we are told Our Lord did. They share in the Lord’s teaching commission.
And finally, the Parish Council, scheduled for last Thursday, was postponed due to many members being unable to attend on that evening. It will be held in a fortnight’s time.
God bless you, Fr Antony
************************
Dear Parishioner,
25 September
On its appropriate page, we have our next contribution to the ongoing series Catechesis on the Mass. I just want to remind you that these articles are meant not only to help us understand the recent textual changes in the Mass but, more importantly, to help us deepen our whole understanding of this Sacrament which should be the foundation of our Christian lives. Please read them carefully; you can get the whole series by going to the Parish Website.
*** Every day at Mass we remember and pray for the sick and housebound of our parish, with particular emphasis on those who are in hospital. The new rules of privacy mean that the hospitals will not tell us who are Catholic. The Guardian Angel Society who try to visit every patient in our local hospital every week tell me of the Catholics they know. But, of course, this doesn’t apply to the other hospitals, Ysbyty Gwynedd and Ysbyty Glan Clwyd.
It is therefore imperative that, if one of your relatives or friends is in any of the three hospitals, you let us know. It is amazing how often the most practising of Catholics can be in hospital for weeks without the family telling us.
Since the series on the Mass pushed the weekly financial report out of the newsletter the collection has dropped! Understandably. But I feel that it is even more important that we deepen our understanding of the Faith than that the finances of the Parish be kept before your eyes. You can access this information on the website if you really want to know. But, please, just remember that the Parish needs about £1100 a week just to keep going with a little to put by for those inevitable rainy days; and just keep being generous, as you always are.
*** Now for something a little more mundane– the church lavatory! This is located, as you surely know, in the lean-to at the side of Stella Maris. There is evidence that this toilet is being used by the general public on a daily basis. So, we have changed the door and the lock and have arranged that it will be open only during the times of services.
***Tuesday is the feast of St Vincent de Paul. We wish Toni Fossi, President of our local Conference, and all his team, a very happy day. The time has come again, Toni tells me, for a recruitment drive to boost numbers. The SVP visit regularly all those on our Sick List who also receive Holy Communion weekly from our Special Ministers. So, after every Mass this weekend, one of the members of the SVP will be in the Chapel of Reconciliation. If you are interested in joining, go and see.
***And finally, the Stella Maris Crafters have laid the foundation stone for the Rio Fund to send young parishioners to meet the Pope in Rio in 2113. They have generously given £50 out of the proceeds of their labours. And if you have never heard of the Stella Maris Crafters, let me introduce them to you. They are a band of ladies (men would be welcome) who produce extraordinarily fine artefacts which they sell for Parish funds. Their goods are for sale in Stella Maris after the Sunday morning Mass.
God bless you, Fr Antony
Dear Parishioner,
28 August 2011
The five young people who went to the World Youth Day in Madrid have returned home safe and full of the experience. Owen tells me he can’t wait to go the next time. Thank you so much for your financial help which made it possible for them. An experience of a life-time, for sure.
Next Sunday we shall begin using the new texts of the Mass. Printed copies of the new responses will be available. The text is a huge improvement on the former one and although it will be a bit tricky trying to get used to a new text so similar to the old, the effort will be well worth while.
I think it would be wise for us to get used to the spoken text before we try singing it. So, while I invite the choir to continue practising, we will not introduce the new music just yet.
On Saturday, 24 September, from 10am to 330pm, there will be a tutorial run by the Diocese on the new texts, with particular emphasis on the singing. Special ministers and choir members are encouraged to attend.
I shall be away for my summer break from this Sunday until, probably, 12 September. Nowhere exciting; just Pwllheli! Fr Gordon will take good care of you.
God bless, Fr Antony
****************************
Dear Parishioner,
21 August 2011
We take a break today from our ongoing series, Catechesis on the Mass, and return to where we left off discussing Some Definite Purpose.
We last printed a section of this document on 11 May, and I hope you did find time to discuss it around your table at home, with the young people of the family especially included. I ask you to do the same again. It is, you will remember, a part of the booklet of the same name, issued by the Bishops of England and Wales after the Visit of His Holiness Pope Benedict to Britain. Their intention is to get us all reflecting on how we carry on the momentum he started. There will be opportunity for us to discuss it together on 6 October at 230pm at Stella Maris. It would be wonderful if many of you turned up, but more important by far is your discussing it within the family. Please do.
Alice Handrick, a parishioner many of you will remember with deepest affection, has left the Parish a bequest of £5000. She loved Our Lady’s and attended it for as long as she possibly could, rallying repeatedly after sickness and returning to her usual place in church. She was very faithful indeed, and very gentle.
This legacy is a gift to all of us, and I hope you will remember to pray for her soul as an expression of your gratitude.
This unexpected gift will enable us to upgrade the lighting in the sanctuary. It is desperately in need of modernisation, and the wherewithal to do the job has come just in the nick of time, for the bulbs are of such antiquated type that they are now no longer available—and we have just one or two spares! It won’t be a major job, but it will have a major effect and will serve not only to enhance further the beauty of our church, but also as a lasting memorial to Alice.
In leaving a legacy to the Church, Alice is something of an exception. It is quite seldom that parishioners do this, even parishioners whose whole life has virtually centred on the Church. I suppose in many minds the belief still lingers that Llandudno is a rich parish. It is not; it is struggling financially and I would encourage you to think of the Church when you do come to make your will. This lovely church of ours must be passed in tact to our children and our children’s children. It is already theirs, their inheritance from us. We must hand it over to them in as beautiful a state as it was when we ourselves inherited it.
Last weekend was a particularly wonderful one. First there was the celebration of our Mass for the Walking Wounded. This biannual Mass always sends people out from church with a smile from ear to ear. The presence of the Holy Spirit is almost tangible.
Then there was the sending off of the five young people to Madrid to meet the Holy Father. They have been in my mind all week and I hope and pray they return home safe and sound, having had an experience of a lifetime. What great young people they are! A photo of them, just before leaving, is on the website.
Then at the 930am Mass six children were presented to the Parish for Baptism. I asked the dads to hold them up. What a photo that would have made! A line of young parents right across the sanctuary with this row of babies midway between heaven and earth!
God bless,
Fr Antony
*****************************
Dear Parishioner,
14 August 2011
Look out for more young people on the streets. Many, many more, hundreds of thousands more than you have yet seen on your television screens. Look out for the World Youth Day in Madrid, when hoards of young people will gather to greet the Holy Father.
Among these many thousands will be five from our Parish: Amy Thomas-Owen, Loren Watson, Owen Williams, Varum Isaacs and Tomek Michalski. We will send them forth from this Saturday’s evening Mass.
A question arises in my head. Can I imagine any one of these young people running amok down Mostyn Street? Loren smashing her way into Goldsmiths and emerging with a hoard of Rolexes? Or Amy setting fire to Marks and Spencer, Tomek to the library? Owen hurling paving stones at the police and mouthing all sorts of obscenities? Varum driving his car over the pavement deliberately to maim innocent pedestrians? No, indeed, I can’t. I would go so far as to say that such actions would be impossible for them.
Then what differentiates our young people from those young people in London, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham and many other places who did such actions and delighted in them? Are our young people better educated? Have they better home backgrounds? Is the standard of their social living conditions higher? Do they have more to occupy their leisure time, more opportunities? Do they have more money at their disposal? The answer to all these questions is No.
So where lies the difference?
“Mindless” and “opportunistic” have been the most common adjectives used on television, radio and in the press to describe the violence. Social workers have come up with their own explanations but the common opinion seems to be that these young people (and many not so young) have behaved in this way for the sheer pleasure of it. This led the Prime Minister to pronounce, “There are pockets of our society which are not just broken but, frankly, sick”. Frankly, sick. Yes, indeed, but what is this sickness?
****
Let’s take the long view.
The well known English poet Shelley was himself a revolutionary. A bit of a lad was Percy Bysshe Shelley (how he must have raged at his parents for giving him that name!) He was against just about everything, the Church, the State, the Establishment. A right yobbo, except for the fact that he was a fine poet. He regarded Christ as a fellow revolutionary, though he denied his divinity; indeed, Shelley was an out and out atheist.
In his time, Britain’s teeth were on edge. It was the age of the Napoleonic Wars and although the Battle of Waterloo had given us the victory, the country was impoverished after the fighting and tempers were frayed. Shelley was on the Continent, fleeing his creditors. While he was there (1819) the Massacre of Peterloo occurred, where a peaceful crowd of many thousands had gathered in St Peter’s Field, Manchester, for a political rally. The edgy authorities, seeing the crowd growing by the minute, sent in the army to arrest one of the principal speakers and in the ensuing struggle eleven people died and more than 500 were wounded. It thrust Shelley onto his favourite hobby horse and he wrote the poem, The Mask of Anarchy, which soon became a battle cry for like minded revolutionaries who learnt it by heart and chanted it (yobs are yobs, be they nineteenth century yobs or twenty-first century yobs). This chanted poem gives us a bit of an insight into the mind of a rioter, and can help us understand why so many of our fellow citizens of twenty-first century Britain took to the streets in so barbaric a manner. Here is a verse or two from the poem:
Last came Anarchy; he rode
On a white horse, splashed with blood:
He was pale even to the lips
Like Death in the Apocalypse.
And he wore a kingly crown
And in his grasp a sceptre shone;
On his brow this mark I saw –
“I AM GOD AND KING, AND LAW”.
And these words shall then become
Like Oppression’s thundered doom
Ringing through each heart and brain,
Heard again – again – again –
“Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number –
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you –
Ye are many - they are few”.
These are famous lines and the words in capitals are Shelley’s capitals, not mine. The poem is set as a kind or vision and copies the famous vision of St John in the Book of Apocalypse. St John sees four horsemen; Shelley sees a different one whose name is Anarchy and whose identity is written on his forehead: “I AM GOD AND KING AND LAW”.
1. The anarchist deposes God, the Establishment and the Law.
2. He sets himself up in place of God, the Establishment and the Law.
3. Then he blames God, the Establishment and the Law for the anarchy which follows.
1. Isn’t this precisely what is happening in our day? We have deposed God, (witness the level of church-going and our treatment of Sunday); have little or no respect for the established order (witness the disrespect for all forms of authority), and care not a hoot for the law (witness the lady in London trying on her looted trainers in full view of police and cameras!)
2. Modern Britain has deposed God and got anarchy instead. I am sure law and order will return (after a fashion) and indeed prevail (hopefully), but this last week has given us an insight into the kind of mentality many of our British young people have, and while that mentality predominates there can be no long-term security. Modern Britain has no sense of God (or very little) and therefore very little, if any, sense of right and wrong, of moral values, or of the spiritual dimension which alone differentiates us from the animals. Did you hear a single commentator speaking of spiritual or moral values? I didn’t. Probably because the commentators themselves couldn’t tell the difference between a moral value and a cottage pie! The rioting is an expression of the fact that we have become a grossly materialistic nation.
The only spiritual comment I heard was from that father whose son was deliberately mowed down by a car and killed. He called for peace, stating that we are all members of the same community, no matter our colour or creed. He was a Moslem. When we see the violence and murder perpetrated by Moslem extremists, and when we are tempted to tar all members of that religion with the same brush, let the riots of last week remind us that we too have a murderous element in our own society, equally capable of equally horrendous evil.
Write ANARCHIST on your forehead and you will come home with a fistful of Rolex watches, but your own inner centre will be torched, destroyed, ugly and unprofitable, and in this centre you will have no other choice but to live. As another poet (Francis Thompson) says in God’s name: “All things betray thee who betrayest Me”.
3. The poem quoted speaks of society’s attitudes “ringing through each heart and brain, heard again – again – again”. Isn’t that how our society, with its godless values, is rinsing our brains? At every turn our minds and hearts and appetites (especially of our young people) are being bombarded by consumerism, liberalism, licence and sheer godlessness.
The image of the Lion in the last part of the quoted text is very powerful, as a lion is powerful. Rising after sleep, the lion is fresh and ready to go. The Lion is the people, the many. Those who strive to adhere to the Christian roots of our European civilization are the few. “Ye are many – they are few”. Beware! We are massively outnumbered. Except, of course, that Christ is on our side!
I have been banging on over the years about the constant onslaught on Christianity, and especially on Catholicism, in this county. They are the many (including much of the media) – we are the few. We have to recognise this, and be on our guard. The truth and values of God, of Christ, of the Church are at stake, and it is ours to defend against the roaring lion (St Peter’s phrase) of atheistic materialism.
“I have come to cast fire on the earth”, Our Lord said. (Percy was right—Christ is a Revolutionary). We must strive to join him in setting the world on fire, by bringing God back into society. May our five young people return from Madrid on fire with zeal for Christ. And may they share that enthusiasm with us and with their peers, and, with Christ, help heal the sickness of our society.
God bless you, Fr Antony
***************************
Dear Parishioner,
31 July 2011
This week is our turn for Quarante Ore, the ancient practice in the Church of exposing the Blessed Sacrament for forty consecutive hours with parishioners praying before it in relays.
Each parish in the Diocese takes its turn, the intention being to pray for vocations to the Priesthood. Each Parish conducts the devotions differently. Here we have the Blessed Sacrament exposed after every weekday Mass as we do on a Friday, and follow the same timetable, with Benediction at 4pm but no holy hour. Please give the Lord some of your time this week.
Today is this year’s Day for Life, the day in the Church’s year dedicated to celebrating the dignity of life from conception to natural death – this year focussing on what it means to live a full and happy life. It takes as its starting point the words of Pope Benedict during his recent visit to Britain, when he said: ‘Happiness is something we all want, but one of the great tragedies in this world is that so many people never find it, because they look for it in the wrong places. The key to it is very simple – true happiness is to be found in God. We need to have the courage to place our deepest hopes in God alone, not in money, a career, worldly success, or in our relationships with others, but in God. Only he can satisfy the deepest needs of our hearts’.
The Anscombe Bioethics Centre (formerly the Linacre Centre for Healthcare Ethics) and other life-related activities supported by the Church will benefit from today’s Second Collection which is being taken up in parishes across the country. If you want further information, please visit www.dayforlife.org.
The date for 2011 Confirmation has finally been settled. Bishop Regan will not be retiring now until next year. He has agreed to confirm our children on 6 November at the 930am Mass.
The four sessions with me, which are an absolute requirement for those being confirmed, will be at Stella Maris at 730pm on the following dates: 13 October; 20 October; 27 October; 3 November. In addition, there will be a special Penitential Service at 10 am on Saturday 29 October. Parents and Sponsors are invited to attend these sessions as well.
God bless you, Fr Antony
************************
Dear Parishioner,
24 July 2011
Most of today’s newsletter is given over to the latest instalment of Catechesis on the Mass, dealing with the Psalms. I really want to help you as best I can to understand the Mass more deeply and thereby derive greater spiritual benefit from it’s celebration. The whole series is available on the Catechesis on the Mass page, and I would be delighted if you would study it rather than just giving it a cursory reading.
God bless you,
Fr Antony
*********************
Dear Parishioner,
17 July 2011
Our heartiest congratulations today to Joe and Glenna Evans who will be celebrating their Golden Jubilee of Marriage on Friday. We wish them a very happy day and many more anniversaries to come. God bless them.
Our equally hearty congratulations go also to Elaine Dingsdale who retires from the Headship of our Parish School, Blessed William Davies, on Tuesday. Elaine has spent all her teaching life at our school and she will find it quite a wrench to leave it. But she leaves with gratitude and good wishes from all sides. Thanks from the Governors who recognise the hard work and dedication she has put into the School, the standards to which she has raised it and the material improvements that have been achieved during her watch. Thanks from the teaching staff who appreciate the help, support and vision her kindly leadership has given to each and every one of them. Thanks from the children, all of whom love her and are sad at heart at her going. Her love and personal care of each child individually has been, to my mind, the distinguishing mark of her headship. So many children have been personally helped on the first stage of their journey through life by the loving and watchful care of Mrs Dingsdale. Thanks from the Parish for all she has done for the children of our Parish Family and, from me personally, for her ever readiness to co-operate and he lp, especially with the preparation of the children in out-of-school time for their First Holy Communion. We are all deeply grateful to her and wish her every joy and success in the years that lie ahead.
The School breaks up on Tuesday, Elaine’s final day there. It will begin with a special end-of term Mass to which you are cordially invited to attend.
After the three Masses next weekend, our new Parish Child Safeguarding Representative, Mr Keith Mottram, would like to see at Stella Maris all members of GAS, all Special Ministers and all Catechists. This is VERY important; please just go over to SM after whatever Mass you attend.
God bless you, Fr Antony
***********************
Dear Parishioner,
10 July 2011
It’s very gratifying to be a step ahead of the Bishop!
The Parishes have all received for consultation a new set of propositions covering the preparation of parents for the Baptism of their children. The gratifying thing is that most of the recommendations we already implement. But I shouldn’t crow, for I take little credit. That goes to the wonderful Catechism Team we have who meet the parents twice before the celebration of the Sacrament to prepare them for what should be a major spiritual occasion in the life of the family.
Antonello and Suzy Moska, Bernadette Davies and Marie Dixon are the four members of our team. On the two Sundays leading up to the Baptism they instruct the parents at Stella Maris after the 930am Mass. I, or Fr Gordon, will have already been to the family home to talk with the parents and explain what is going to happen.
On the last Sunday of the month the baptism takes place at 12 noon and is followed within the next week or so by a second visit by the priest to the family home to deliver the certificate and to bless the house and family, leaving behind a beautiful memento of the occasion in the form of a framed Crucifix and Prayer of Blessing.
What we must now implement, according to the recommendations, is a stricter attitude to the godparents. Godparents must now be Catholics to qualify for the responsibility they are taking on and be prepared to sign a form indicating that they are practising their faith. Members of other faiths may be witnesses only.
Two Sundays before the Baptism the child is presented to the Parish Family. This is like the showing of a new born child to its natural family. On that occasion, as you know, we all make the Sign of the Cross on the child’s head indicating that together with the Parents we are all involved in the business of bringing the child up in the Catholic Faith. Let us take this very seriously, trying to support our Catholic children in every way we possibly can. By their Baptism they “find the pearl of great price”. Let us all be determined they do not lose it.
God bless you,
Fr Antony
*********************
Dear Parishioner,
26 June 2011
We wish the boys and girls making their First Holy Communion today a very happy day with their families. But we hope more eagerly that their parents will help them over the years to come to appreciate just what God gives them in this Sacrment and to support them in their attendace at Mass throughout their childhood and teenage years. How utterly blest we are – without always realising it!
As there has been no appointment as yet of the new bishop to replace Bishop Edwin, who is retiring, we have not been able to fix the date of the Sacrament of Confirmation for present Year 8. And as the young people are keen to get a date so that they can invite their relatives, some from foreign countries, I and the Catechists have decided that we will postpone Confirmation until the latter half of October. As soon as the bishop is appointed, I shall make a definite arrangement with him for this time. The four sessions with me, which are an essential requirement for receiving the Sacrament, will begin in the middle of September.
Mrs Margaret Hunt and Mrs Fleur Williams, the Catechists who have conducted the two year series of lessons in preparation for Confirmation, tell me that they have now completed their syllabus for this year. This means that the lessons can finish earlier than usual, and this Tuesday will be the last of them for 2010-2011. I cannot express adequately how grateful I am to these two dedicated parishioners for the work they do.
The Catechumenate has started on a good note, a very relaxed yet enthusiastic group indeed. Thesday will be its third session. If you are thinking of joining, please feel free to turn up on a Tuesday at 730pm at Stella Maris. But please don’t leave it too late. The members of this Catechumenate will be received in the Church next Easter, but are totally free to opt out at any moment or to complete the course without being received into the Church at the end of it; the decision is entirely theirs. I thank the sponsors who are supporting them and I ask you, Parisioners, to give these Catechumens all the help and good example you can possibly muster.
God bless you,
Fr Antony
*********************************
Dear Parishioner,
19 June 2011
Yesterday I attended the funeral of Fr Harry Clarke, the Parish Priest of Pwllheli who took over from me. There were, as you would expect, lots of priests there from the Diocese, quite a lot of them young. And quite a lot of them old! The young ones were mainly from India and Africa, priests who have left their beloved homeland to help us out in the shortage of priests we are experiencing these days in our materialistic West. Our need for young priests from Wales is very great.
Fr Clarke held a weekly Welsh Mass, just as we do. He has been replaced by a Nigerian, a wonderful young man whom the Parish of Pwllheli has already taken to its heart, but he will not be able to say a Welsh Mass—not for a bit, at any rate! That leaves our Welsh Mass here in Llandudno as the only regular weekly Welsh Mass in the Diocese. How sad that is! We must pray for priests, for priests from Wales, for priests who can speak the native language of our country; and we must give thanks to God for the generosity of those who have to come to our aid.
We hold a Holy Hour before the Blessed Sacrament every Wednesday evening from 8pm to pray for priests. Only a handful attend. The Lord would surely reward an effort on your part. And mentioning adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, the attendance at the Friday afternoon exposition is also very thin. How can we expect the children making their First Holy Communion next week to have a fervent devotion to this Sacrament if they not get a good positive lead from the rest of us?
Next Sunday, there will be an extra Mass at 11am for the celebration of First Holy Communion. It will be followed by the usual party at Stella Maris.
On the Catechesis on the Mass page, you will find the current instalment. I ask you please to give these pieces your careful attention. It is so important that we understand the Mass well. This series will help us to understand our Faith better too, for the Mass is the well-spring of it. The whole series can, of course, be found on the website.
God bless, Fr Antony
*********************
Dear Parishioner,
11 June 2011
Today, we celebrate the great Feast of Pentecost. Was Pentecost the Birthday of the Church, or the Baptism of the Church, or the Confirmation of the Church? Or was it all three rolled into one? Whatever it was, it was a moment of supreme importance in the history of mankind, a moment to be celebrated until Christ comes again in glory, a moment that has become a living reality in the Church, as the Risen Christ continually pours out his Holy Spirit upon you and me and the whole Church, the children of God.
We celebrate something of what the Spirit does (who can possibly tell all that he does?) in our International Mass. Here we remind ourselves of our membership of the Church, the Mystical Body of Christ, whose very soul is the Holy Spirit. The Spirit of Christ has become the Spirit of you and me, binding us in unity with all who live by the same Spirit, no matter the external differences of culture, race or language. The Spirit has created from all the nations of earth one family to the glory of God, and that family is the Church.
In the midst of the joy of this day, there is sadness. I report to you the death of Fr Harry Clarke of Pwllheli. He replaced me there when I came here in 1998 . He was a very happy and sociable person, loved by both the clergy and his parishioners. He lived a very healthy life, suffering no major set-backs in his 83 years. His body will be received into Towyn church (by Abergele) on Tuesday evening at 7pm, followed by Mass. On Wednesday, his Requiem will take place at 11am at Pwllheli. For this reason, there will be no Mass here on that day.
The other sorrow I have to report is the death of Paul Campbell, the (relatively) young man who sustained severe first degree burns at his flat six weeks ago and who had been in an induced coma since then. When our colour-printer comes back from the repair shop, I shall produce for you a photo of Paul at the Maundy Thursday service having his feet washed. He was very moved indeed by this ceremony. May he, and Fr Clarke, rest in peace.
I am happy to tell you that Keith Mottram has kindly agreed to become the Person Responsible for Child Safety in the Parish. Hopefully, he will have nothing to do. But his position is very important. It is his responsibility in particular (a responsibility which each one of us must share) to keep a close eye on the children of the Parish to see that none of them are in any kind of danger. The Catholic Church is now one of the most careful organisations in the world when it comes to the safety of children. It is Keith’s duty to know the legal procedure should abuse of any kind take place within the Parish and to take immediate action. As a very regular attendee of the Church, Keith is very well placed to do this most important job. We thank him most heartily for accepting it.
God bless you, Fr Antony
*********************************
Dear Parishioner,
5 June 2011
This weekend we celebrate the Ascension of our Lord. I hope you are getting used to it by now, that the Holy Days celebrating major events in our Lord’s life are celebrated on Sundays. There’s a lot to be said for keeping the holydays on weekdays, as this reminds us that our religion is not just a Sunday affair. But, overall, the Bishops feel that by celebrating these major feasts on the nearest Sunday gives them the solemnity they deserve and ensures that more of the faithful attend.
When a holyday is of Our Lady, or one of the Saints, it remains on its date. So, the feast of Sts Peter and Paul on the 29 June, falling this year on a Wednesday, will be celebrated on the Wednesday. On these occasions there is a Vigil Mass at 630pm and a noon Mass on the feast day itself, as has hitherto been our practice.
Next Sunday we celebrate our International Mass at 930am. We will do so because next Sunday is Pentecost Sunday, the day the Holy Spirit came down on the Apostles giving them the power to speak in the languages of every nation under the sun and revealing that the Church would be truly Catholic by continuing to speak to men and women of every race and culture, bringing them, with all their differing traditions and cultures, into the unity of God’s family.
Our International Mass is for us also an occasion to celebrate the enrichment that has happened to our Parish Family with the coming of peoples from all parts of the globe, with their lively faith and varied traditions.
Please try to attend the 930am Mass next Sunday, if you possibly can. It will be a very joyful and interesting Mass, followed at Stella Maris by sweetmeat refreshments representing the cuisine of many parts of the world.
Talking about refreshments over at Stella Maris reminds me of the growing need we have over there for helpers. The teas and coffees after Sunday Mass, so important socially as an occasion for parishioners and visitors to meet and chat, have had to be cancelled on occasion recently because of lack of helpers. Collectively these helpers are known as the Friends of Stella Maris, and their numbers have been depleted over time by sickness and aging. We desperately need some more volunteers. Many activities go on at Stella Maris which need someone there just to open up, provide a cup of tea and be generally friendly. Without these Helpers, the Centre could not operate as it does, and, among other things, we would lose a lot of the revenue that keeps Stella Maris going and which provides us and the Diocese with an excellent Centre free of charge. A Helper is approached by John or Sarah Dennison and asked whether they would be free and willing to help at a particular do. Yes or No—as simple as that; there is no long term commitment. If you would like to help the Parish and the Diocese in this way, please contact Sarah or John on 877088.
God bless you,
Fr Antony
***************************************************************8
Dear Parishioner,
29 May 2011
Last Thursday, the Governors of our Parish School appointed Mrs Colette Hughes as the new Head Teacher. You will surely have heard that Mrs Elaine Dingsdale has decided to retire from headship of the school where she has served since she was first appointed teacher. We have so much to thank her for. She has given her all for the well-being of the School, and her love and care for the individual children has been truly inspiring. She leaves the School in a very healthy state and the buildings looking like a new school after the recent refurbishment there, with new windows throughout and a new roof. She has much to feel satisfied with; and we have much to be thankful to her for. We wish her every success and blessing in her future career. She will, of course, be in charge of the School until the end of this term.
We welcome Colette. She has been Head Teacher at Our Lady’s, Bangor, for several years and has gained a reputation for being a powerful and inventive leader and a teacher with acute foresight and imagination. (Of course she would, she also comes from Holywell!). We are sure she will be very happy with us and we look forward to her arrival. Whether she will be here for the beginning of the Christmas term will depend on the Governors of Our Lady’s. Otherwise it will be midterm.
Appointing a Head Teacher is a complex and lengthy process, and I would like to thank the Governors of the School for the work they have done in this respect and indeed for all theY do for the School. We are really most grateful to them. But most of all, I would like to pay tribute to Mr Graham Gibbons who has been our Chair of Governors for many years, an unpaid job that carries much responsibility and demands considerable time. He has carried out this work with unruffled patience, inspiring generosity and sensitive wisdom. It is not only I who am grateful to Graham and the Governors, but the whole of the Parish should be too.
We take a break this week from our Catechesis on the Mass to continue our series of reflections on the recent visit of His Holiness Pope Benedict to this country and how we should follow it up.
The discussions on the second section of “Some Definite Purpose” took place while I was on holiday. I believe the debate was very lively, enjoyable and profitable, though only a few took part. I ask you again to try to get the family together to reflect on this current section “Witnessing to our Faith.”, making a special effort, please, to get the young members of the family involved. The parish meetings to disuss it will take place at Stella Maris on 14 July at 230pm and 730pm. The two previous sections of the Bishop’s Booklet “Some Definite Purpose” together now with this one are on the website.
Talking of Bishops, you have probably heard that they have decided that the old practice of abstaining from meat on Fridays should be reintroduced. Here is the official statement they put out:
“Every Friday is set aside by the Church as a special day of penance, for it is the day of the death of our Lord. The law of the Church requires Catholics to abstain from meat on Fridays, or some other form of food, or to observe some other form of penance laid down by the Bishops’ Conference.
“The Bishops wish to re-establish the practice of Friday penance in the lives of the faithful as a clear and distinctive mark of their own Catholic identity. They recognise that the best habits are those which are acquired as part of a common resolve and common witness. It is important that all the faithful be united in a common celebration of Friday penance.
“Respectful of this, and in accordance with the mind of the whole Church, the Bishops’ Conference wishes to remind all Catholics in England and Wales of the obligation of Friday Penance. The Bishops have decided to re-establish the practice that this should be fulfilled by abstaining from meat. Those who cannot or choose not to eat meat as part of their normal diet should abstain from some other food of which they regularly partake. This is to come into effect from Friday 16 September 2011 when we will mark the anniversary of the Pope’s visit” .
God bless you,
Fr Antony
*****************************************************************
Dear Parishioner,
22 May 2011
It’s good to be back with you after my usual May break. As I return, I find everything in apple-pie order; so thanks to Fr Gordon for doing a great job.
While I was away, Fr John Toole moved into one of the Priests’ Flats at Seren y Mor, Caroline Road. We welcome him most heartily to the Parish; it is really good to have him with us. Fr Toole has just celebrated fifty years of priesthood here in this Diocese, fifty years of faithful service to the People of God, and we hope and pray that his retirement will happy and fulfilling.
We continue today with our Catechesis on the Mass, which you can read in the page by that name, here on the website. This ongoing series is our way of preparing for the introduction in the autumn of the revised text of the Mass; but I suspect our series will take longer than the autumn to complete. I hope it will develop into a resource for all of us to benefit from; that is why I ask you to keep a copy of each section. It is also on our website, where the publication of the individual pieces may sometimes precede their publication in the Newsletter. On the website, of course, you will find the whole series so far. I am trying to go fairly deeply into things, so the series would reward a certain amount of reflection, rather than just a quick flick through. To gain a deep understanding of the Mass would be of huge benefit , for the Mass is not only the centre of our Faith but also the very expression of it. Our who belief system is somehow encapsulated in the Mass. If you understand the Mass, you understand the Catholic Faith.
Just a few weeks now before we begin again with the Catechumenate: the Tuesday after Pentecost, 14 June. Each year I remind you at this time that you have a vital part to play in this effort of bringing others into the Church Christ founded.
Let’s make no mistake about it, no-one can become a Catholic without the prior grace of God in their lives. It is He who inspires them and leads them here. But God works his mysterious ways through the world as it is and the people who live in it. Look at the way He saved us. It was by becoming one of us and through his rejection by some and his acceptance by others that the whole saga of our salvation worked itself out. In the same way, when he comes to apply that salvation to individual souls, he works through the people in the here and now.
God works mysteriously through each and every one of us for the benefit and eternal salvation of others. So, ask yourself who it is the Lord is inviting you to lead to him. Please give some serious thought to this; it could be one of the more important things you do in your life.
God bless you,
Fr Antony
1 May 2011
Today, as promised, I begin the series “Catechesis on the Mass” which you will find in the middle of this page. I would ask you to save them as they come out, so that you may be able to refer to them in the future, should you wish to. They will also be reproduced on the Website, where you will be able to get all the “back numbers”, should you wish to.
This is the beginning of our parish preparation for the introduction, this autumn, of a revised translation of the Mass texts. We are taking the opportunity over these coming months to focus our attention more precisely on the Mass in an effort to help us understand more exactly this treasure Christ has left us with.
Now that Easter (not Eastertide) is over, let me, on behalf of myself, Fr Gordon and Sister Jennifer, thank you all most warmly, for all your cards, kind greetings and gifts to us. We appreciate greatly these expressions of your love.
An update now on my health. The consultant, whom I saw last week, didn’t give me a clean bill of health; the cancer is still there, but it seems to be, for the moment, under complete control. My energies seem to be reviving after the radio-therapy, and I was well enough to enjoy Easter thoroughly. So, “Father, all powerful and ever-living God, we do well always and everywhere to give you thanks, through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
And what does that remind me of? The wall. The famous car-park wall which our blessed nun (and she is blessed, a really lovely person) knocked down by backing her car into it, the wall that had to be rebuilt through all that snow and ice of last winter.
I was talking about my health and I said it reminded me of this wall. Why? Have you seen the wall recently? It looks yellow, its face all blotched, and bits and pieces of it are crumbling and falling off; just as we ourselves look and feel sometimes! (Or should I just speak for myself?) And there is something else about this wall that reminds me of ourselves, but I will come back to that in a moment.
Although you wouldn’t think so to look at it, the wall was extremely well built.
It was so well built that, without a doubt, it will last as long as the church will, not only is it built on firm foundations and expertly crafted, but is thoroughly nun-proof into the bargain. It was built by Rob Williams.
Now Rob is one of the most trusted and reliable builders and joiners in the town. If you have any building or wood work to attend to, I would thoroughly recommend him to you, as I have done before, (07981190167), though he is in such great demand you would be very lucky to get him.
But, I hear you say, if he is really so good, why is the wall he built in such a dismal state of disrepair after so short a time? For the simple reason that he did not do the rendering himself; when he had completed the construction of the wall, another firm took over the plastering and rendering. And it is this work, not Rob’s, that has proved so shoddy.
And me, being me, cannot let this go without drawing a sermon out of it. Here goes: What has our car-park wall and Easter got in common?
We may be falling apart on the face of it, yellow, blotchy and disintegrating, but the inner man (to use St Paul’s phrase) has been completely renewed by Christ’s death and resurrection. Just as behind that crumbling plaster of our wall there stands a superb structure based on sure foundations and destined to stand indefinitely, so also behind all our aches and pains, our yellowing skin and our increasing years (I’m now in my 70th!) there stands the New Man, firm on the foundations of the Church, redeemed and sanctified by Christ’s Precious Blood, and destined to live for ever. Just as our holy nun had to knock the old wall down so that the new one could be built, so did Christ have to destroy our old self, the old Adam, as St Paul says, so that the New Man, Christ, may be born in us. This is what Easter is all about. So ends the sermon.
I shall be away on holiday for the first two weeks of May. So will Sister Jennifer. I’ll be back on Monday 16 May. Till then…
…God bless you,
Fr Antony
***************************************************************************
17 April 2011
I t usually brightens up the readings on the Wednesday of the 5th Week of Lent.– the reader’s anguished attempt to get their tongue around the names of the three young men in the fiery furnace and the king who put them there: Nebuchadnezzar, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. I remember once when the reader got into hysterical giggling as she tried over and over again to get them right. The whole congregation followed suit, and Lent was briefly brightened. Sadly, there were no laughs this last Wednesday, for Margaret Hunt, with her usual expected accuracy, pronounced them easily and correctly!
The story is told in the third chapter of the prophet Daniel. And when I say “story” I mean story, for the event didn’t actually happen. But it is a story told us by God, just as we tell our children stories and enjoy them ourselves as we watch films. Every good story should have its moral, and it is in the moral where the truth of the story lies, not in the details or the plot. Now if God tells us a story, we listen!
The story, in a nutshell, is that these three young Jewish lads are threatened with the “burning fiery furnace” if they refuse to worship an idol. Of course they refuse, and of course they are thrown into the burning fiery furnace. To spice up the story, we are told that the king stokes up the furnace to seven times its usual heat, a temperature sufficient to reduce the youngsters to cinders within seconds. But when he looks, he sees that they are not burnt, in fact they are wandering around in the white hot heat of the furnace, chatting to a fourth person. And to the king, as the story puts it, this fourth person “looked like a son of the gods”. A son of the gods; a Son of God; Jesus Christ. Here precisely is the moral and the truth of this story.
We all find ourselves, at some time in our lives, in the “burning, fiery furnace”. Sometimes it seems to have been stoked up seven times its usual temperature and just for us. We ask ourselves, “Why has the King done this to me, why has He put me in this situation?” And the answer is not easy. When we are in the heat of that burning fiery furnace, we do not usually have the inclination to think things out coolly, logically and theologically.
But what we must remember is that the Son of God always comes into that burning fiery furnace with us; He never stands outside watching. He is there with us in everything we do. He has so united us to Himself by Baptism that whatever we do He does(except sin); we help him carry his Cross and He helps us carry ours.
And this brings us to today. Our Liturgy gives us the long story of Jesus’ betrayal, his carrying his Cross up Calvary and his dying on it after a three hour agony. Try to imagine Jesus as he made his way up Calvary. What were his thoughts? Were they theological, reflecting on the massive redemptive task he was performing? Or were they dominated by the pain in his head with the thorns, the pain in his shoulders with the cross, the pain in his back with the scourging? He was thinking of you and me. He wasn’t formally saying his prayers: He was making his way up Calvary with a Cross on his back. But every painful step of the way was a prayer of infinite value in the Father’s eyes.
And this brings us back to our Lenten Reflection on Prayer.
In this last of the series, I want to reflect on the fact that prayer is more than just words, it is living out our whole lives with Christ. I have been focussing so far on the fact that every prayer that gets to the Father is prayed in Christ, through Christ and with Christ. And so it is with this broader dimension of prayer which we can rightly call Living in Christ.
God loves us; he proved it in Christ. He is concerned about everything that concerns us. He has filled us with his Holy Spirit. He has united us with his Beloved Son. We are precious in his eyes. He listens not only to our every uttered prayer, but to our every sigh and laugh, our every failure and success, every single step we take in life’s journey. As it was with Christ, so it is with us; we ourselves become a living prayer in God’s sight; our work is prayer; our rest is prayer; our recreation is prayer, our pain is prayer, even our sleep is prayer—provided that we keep united to Christ. That’s why it doesn’t matter too much if we get distracted or if the pain in our hip makes us unable to focus on God, or tired out by our daily tasks, we occasionally miss our formal prayer. As St Paul says in the 12th chapter of his letter to the Romans: “I urge you to offer your very selves as living sacrifices holy and pleasing to God –this is your spiritual act of worship.” All with Jesus, and all for Jesus, of course.
Holy Week. As Christ walks with you, so this week the Church invites you to walk with Christ.
The ceremonies are not just ceremonials; they are sacraments; they make present the very events that we remember in our minds. The ceremonies allow us to walk into Jerusalem with Jesus, carrying palms and shouting Hosanna to the King. They allow us, literally, to sit at table with him at the Last Supper and receive from his own sacred hands his Body and Blood, the food of everlasting life; to follow Him from the Upper Room to the Garden of Gethsemane where he invites us to stay awhile and pray with Him. They allow us to stand, literally, beneath the Cross and offer with Christ that supreme Sacrifice that gives God all honour and glory. They permit us access to the Garden of Resurrection, here, literally, we meet the Risen Christ as he brings hope to the world and new and everlasting life to those who believe in Him. These ceremonies should on no account be missed by those who want to walk with Christ.
God bless you,
Fr Antony.
***********************************************************************
10 April 2011
I have often said to you that I never preach to others without preaching to myself at the same time. So it is that during this past week I have been reflecting quite a lot on what I said to you last Sunday. So, if you will bear with me, let me repeat to you now something of what I said then, so that we may link it with our Lenten reflections on Prayer.
The word that we least understand in the English dictionary, or any other dictionary for that matter, is the word “God”. He is simply and completely different from how we could ever imagine Him to be. In fact, we cannot even begin to imagine Him.
To illustrate this I asked you last Sunday to imagine trying to explain to a profoundly deaf person what the singing of a thrush sounds like, or the crooning of Elvis, or the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
Or the smell of a rose in late summer, or garlic frying in olive oil, to a person who has never enjoyed the sense of smell.
Or, in the context of last Sundays Gospel about the blind man, trying to describe colour to a person who has never seen anything in his life. Imagine trying to explain the difference between red and purple; imagine trying to describe an autumn sunset.
Such persons could never possibly imagine these things. So, likewise but even more so, can we never come anywhere near imagining what God is really like. We simply don’t have the necessary faculties.
We see something beautiful and it tells us that God is Beauty. But try imagining Beauty! You can imagine a beautiful person, but you can’t imagine Beauty Itself. Or Goodness Itself! Or Truth Itself! Or Power Itself! We can imagine powerful things, we can think of a nuclear bomb, but we cannot imagine Power Itself; but God is such. We see life all about us, in the birds and the bees, in our own experience of it, but who has ever seen, or could ever imagine, Life Itself, the origin and source of all that lives? But such is God. “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life”.
Now let’s apply all this to prayer and to the theme we have been concentrating on this Lent—that we can only get through to this unimaginable God with Christ at our side.
How could we possibly approach such a Being as God? What possible impact could our humble prayers and petitions make on such a One as this? Christ is the answer. God has fixed it for us. When we pray, Christ prays with us. Our prayers therefore have the power to move mountains, for they are His prayers, and He is God Himself, Power Itself. He tells us that when we pray we should behave as if we have already received what we are asking for. Why? Because such an attitude expresses our faith that He is at our side; and with Him, all things are possible.
So it is that we approach the ineffable God with the ineffable God at our side; the all good God with Goodness Itself at our side; the all powerful God with Power Itself at our side. How could such prayer fail? Just think about it.
We spoke in last week’s Newsletter about the changes that are to be introduced into the Mass texts at the end of this year and of the need we have of preparing ourselves for them.
One of the features of the New Missal is that it will require new music. Those parts of the Mass, such as the Gloria, Credo, Sanctus and Agnus Dei will have their own prescribed music. We will no longer be allowed, as we do at present, to sing the Gloria, for example, to a hymn tune. We will need to learn these new settings.
Fortunately we have a faithful band of parishioners who have remained loyally at their post, despite everything, at times, collapsing around them. I refer, of course, to our choir. They, and our two organists, will, I hope, learn these new texts and lead us in the singing of them. Such a lead will be essential, and I am most grateful in advance for what they will do for us—of this, I am certain.
And finally, Sister Jennifer is returning home. I don’t mean to Ireland, thank God, but to Caroline Rd.
When I went into hospital in mid July for my op, it was pretty obvious I would be out of action for three to four months. Who would ‘man’ the Presbytery for all this time, answering the door and the ever-ringing phone? Sr Jennifer volunteered to leave her own flat and take up residence here. When I came back, I wasn’t well enough to cope on my own; Sr Jennifer stayed on. Then came the radio-therapy and the problems I had during Christmastide: Sr Jennifer stayed on. When I came back in January, I still wasn’t up to much, so again she stayed on. For nine long months! I cannot express how much help she has been to me, and therefore, to the Parish as well; only God knows. She is one in a million, and He will justly reward her.
God bless you all,
Fr Antony
**********************************************************************
Dear Parishioner,
3 April 2011
Some weeks ago, I mentioned in the Newsletter that this Advent will see a change in the texts of the Mass, and advised you not to buy a new missal at the present time. I don’t suppose that news was welcomed by many; it means starting all over again learning the prayers of the Mass, such as the Gloria and the Creed. And just to keep that smile on your face for a moment or two longer, let me tell you that it will be more difficult to learn these new texts than it was before. Then, it was a question of learning texts from scratch, now it is a question of tweaking these texts and remembering the tweaks!
But that is all the bad news over and done with. The good news will take a lot longer to tell. In fact, the Bishops of England and Wales want us priests to spend most of the time between now and Advent slowly but surely explaining the changes in the Mass to you, so that you will understand all the better what it is about and what the individual parts and prayers are really saying, how they fit together, and what the Mass as a complete act of worship really is. I will enjoy the challenge.
The Mass is the most wonderful action that takes place on earth. And that’s a fact. Christians have always known this in their bones and have always tried to make the human dimension of the Mass as beautiful as is humanly possible. The old Latin Mass was a masterpiece of poetry, every word, every phrase carefully constructed to evoke images from Scripture and to sound sweet and pleasing to the ear. You really had to understand the language to appreciate this, but many loved it to bits without even understanding a word. The poor contributed their pennies willingly and joyfully to raise the magnificent cathedrals throughout Europe and beyond precisely to house the Mass. Those glorious monuments to faith in these islands, the cathedrals that escaped the vandalism of the Reformation, speak to us of the value our forefathers put on the Sacrament of Holy Mass.
But the Pope and Bishops of the world, at the Second Vatican Council in the 60’s decided that despite the beauty of the Latin Liturgy, it was vital that the people understand the worship they are attending. So they decreed that the Liturgy of the Mass be translated into the various languages of the world. Although they knew that the ancient loveliness would go, they also knew that the intrinsic beauty of what the Mass is, the divine Sacrament, would always remain unchanged.
Once the green light had been given to translating the Mass into the vernacular, enthusiasm boiled over. People were excited at the prospect. The translations were undertaken and completed in a hurry. The result was what we have now, a Mass where most of the texts have lost all that beauty and depth which the Latin Liturgy displayed. The Church soon realised that what we have now is not good enough, not accurate enough, failing to express the depth of meaning the old Latin text expressed. So it decided to revise the whole thing. Experts have been at it now for, I think, about twelve years. At last they have come to their final version which has finally received the approval of the Holy Father. At last the revised version of the English Missal is a worthy successor of the Latin, and is now ready for publication, available for use in the autumn, in readiness for Advent. It is indeed something for all of us to look forward to.
We are now in this last column of our Newsletter and I haven’t even begun to reflect on prayer, as I promised to do during Lent. So, in what space remains, here goes:
I have been trying so far to help cultivate an awareness of the ever present Christ in your lives, trying to help you to be aware that when you pray you pray to the Father with Jesus and through Jesus, that, in fact, this is the only way that prayer can reach the Father.
But prayer is not just a monologue, not just me speaking to God; but a dialogue, God and I speaking together. How can this be?
Jesus, St John tells us, inspired as he was by the Holy Spirit, is the Word of God. The Word in the presence of the Father before time began; the Word now made flesh. But the Scriptures are also the Word of God. This means that when we read the Scriptures, Christ speaks to us. This is of gigantic importance to our spiritual lives. To pray therefore with the Bible open before us is to speak to God and at the same time to listen to Him ; a true dialogue. You need to try it to see how powerful it is.
God bless you, Fr Antony
**************************************************************************
Dear Parishioner,
27 March 2011
On Thursday evening we had our second debate on the first section of Some Definite Purpose. You will surely remember by now that this is the document released by the Bishops of England and Wales to prompt us in our nationwide reflections on the Papal Visit. It was a good meeting, though very poorly attended. But if, as I have encouraged you to do, you have discussed the document within your family, then the main work is being achieved. But these parish meetings are very important, and I would encourage you to attend them, if you possibly can.
This time we focussed on the words of Blessed John Henry Newman:
God has created me to do Him some definite service; He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission…I am a link in a chain.
The discussion turned on how God uses us to bring other people into his Church. The Faith is God’s great gift to us; faith is the fundamental virtue. Without it there is nothing. The grace of faith in our hearts allows us to embrace the Gospel, that God loved the world so much that he sent his only Son to our rescue, that God died on a Cross for us in the person of Jesus Christ. Without faith, no one can possibly accept this. This is why we call our religion our “Faith”, our Catholic Faith.
It follows from this that no one, with his foot in the door or twisting our arm up our back can ever force us to believe. This is a gift that only God can give.
We noted that there is a kind of sixth sense in Catholics whereby a spouse will not try to push the other into the Faith. This inner awareness of what is proper comes from the Holy Spirit and the Church calls it the “sensus fidei” – the instinct of faith.
But this does not stop us, indeed this should prompt us, to co-operate with God is his wonderful plan for our salvation. We are called to be fellow-workers with Christ, as St Paul calls us, so that we can be, as God wants us to be, channels of grace and light leading others to the Truth, which is Jesus Christ, our Lord.
We now move on to discuss the second section entitled Growth in Confidence and is printed out below. Again, the main idea is that you discuss this within your own family; this is where it will have its greatest impact. You might even care to come back to it more than once. At parish level we will discuss it on 12May: at 230pm and again at 730pm .
And finally, we have a new Secretary, Sharon Ruzicka. We say Good Bye to Mandy after 12 years of very faithful and most efficient service to me and to the Parish. She leaves for family reasons. We are extremely grateful to her for all she has done, and in recognition of this, we have presented her with an Apple Ipad, with which she is over the moon! Thanks, Mandy.
Sharon is most efficient and very happy to be working with us and for us. We welcome her wholeheartedly and wish her many years of glad service to the Parish.
God bless you, Fr Antony
SOME DEFININTE PURPOSE
Growth in Confidence
Repeatedly, members of the Catholic Community admit that they don’t engage in faith conversations because they don’t know what to say. There is an urgent need to address this. Knowledge gaps can be filled if we’re prepared to give time to fill them. Pope Benedict spoke (particularly in the context of what we receive from the writings of Blessed John Henry Newman) about the formation of a well-instructed laity.
Quoting Newman, he said at Crofton Park, Birmingham, on 19 ‘September:
“I want a laity, not arrogant, not rash in speech, not disputatious, but men who know their religion, who enter into it, who know just where they stand, who know what they hold and what they do not, who know their creed so well that they can give an account of it, who know so much of history that they can defend it”
Every Catholic should make time for daily prayer and spiritual reading of some kind. This doesn’t mean that we have to stock our shelves with weighty theology books. What the Holy Father specifically highlighted in this context was study of the Word of God, our Catholic history and the Creed. He reminded us of the importance of prayer, reception of the Sacraments and the role of conscience. It is important to add to this list the benefits of making time to study the Pope’s speeches, homilies and addresses. The accounts of the lives of the saints, in particular, also offer a treasure trove of inspiration and teaching.
*************************************************************************
Dear Parishioner,
20 March 2011
Continuing our Lenten reflections on Prayer, let me first remind you of something we spoke about some weeks ago: the tradition of ending our prayers with the words, through Christ our Lord. This tradition goes right back to the earliest days of the Church and reflects a distinctly Christian mind-set.
St Paul, writing to his convert Timothy wrote: “For there is one God and one mediator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all people”. One Mediator. This means that there is only one way of getting into heaven and only one way of heavenly graces getting out of heaven, namely through Jesus Christ, the Mediator. We can only get into heaven through Jesus Christ and equally our prayers can only reach into heaven through Jesus Christ. Therefore, when we pray, we pray with Jesus, whether we are aware of it or not, and this is why we end all our prayers with the words through Christ our Lord
This is what I want you to reflect on today, that all our prayers are prayed with Christ and only get to the ears of God through Christ. This ties in with what Baptism has done to us. Baptism has united us to Christ in our inmost being; we have become one with him; and by uniting us to Him we are united to his Body, the Church. This means that we cannot possibly pray except with Jesus and through Jesus. We never pray alone—it cannot be done. Christ prays to his Father whenever we pray. And whenever we pray, the Church, spread throughout the world, prays with us and through us.
There is a close similarity between our own personal prayer and our attendance at Mass. At Mass, the Sacrament makes Christ present in his dying and rising, present as our merciful Redeemer, our one Mediator. We offer his sacrifice with him. In our personal prayer we likewise offer our prayer along with his all-powerful intercessions, even though, most of the time, we are not conscious of it.
But, if, as an exercise for Lent, we could make an effort to be more aware of this presence of Christ whenever we pray, what a wonderful new dimension it would give to our prayers, how profoundly our prayers would change, and how joyful our prayers would become as we develop a more comfortable and conscious awareness of the abiding presence in our lives of our most merciful Redeemer, Friend and Brother.
I would like to remind you that at parish level, and at family level too, we are currently discussing Pope Benedict’s recent visit to this country. The Bishops of England and Wales have asked us to do this. The booklet they have recently put out, Some Definite Purpose, is the subject matter of our reflections. The current section under our collective examination is on the Website Notice Board. Please look it up and join in the debate. The next parish session is on Thursday evening at 730pm at Stella Maris .
In addition to this, I would ask you to consider watching, ideally with the family, the official DVD of the Papal Visit. I have bought five copies of it, “Heart Speaks to Heart—the Visit of Pope Benedict XVI”. If you would like to borrow a copy, they are available in the sacristy; just ask Sr Jennifer. Also available are copies of the DVD which focuses on the Pope’s meeting with the young people. These are going out among the Altar Servers first, but will be available to everyone in due time.
On Wednesday, at 730pm, we will be holding our Deanery Penitential Service for Lent. The Bishop will be here as will all the priests of the Deanery.
The service will be exactly the same as the service we hold on the first Saturday of the month. This monthly service is very short and sweet, usually only about twenty minutes, but it is always disappointing as to the number of parishioners who attend it. I hope the service on Wednesday will be far, far better attended.
It will be short, and that is a promise (unless the Bishop goes on a bit in his sermon– which, of course, I never do).
Lent is the time for reconciliation with God. Come to this wonderful Sacrament. It doesn’t matter if you have forgotten those prayers you were taught as a child: you don’t need them. It doesn’t matter how long it is since your last confession. It doesn’t matter what you have to confess—Christ is our most merciful Redeemer, Friend and Brother. Just come.
God bless you, Fr Antony
***************************************************************************
Dear Parishioner,
13 March 2011
The story is told of an Irish man who was taken around the Guinness factory outside Dublin. So eager was he to view the great vat of foaming, frothing, black liquid that he leaned too far forward and fell into it. Like all drowning men, he came up three times. On the third time he was heard to utter this fervent prayer: Lord, make my tongue adequate to the task.
Lord, make my tongue adequate to the task. How can anyone’s tongue be adequate to the task of prayer? Adequate to praising the infinite God who gave us being and life? Adequate to thanking Him for all his benefits to us, principal among which is that He died for us? Adequate to expressing our regret for offending so loving a Father and so gracious a Redeemer? No-one.
So the first thing we come to realise when we consider prayer is that our efforts are always inadequate, always imperfect. But it is our obvious duty to keep in close communion with this God who has made Himself known to us. Inadequate or not, we are obliged to pray. Not to do so, would be pig-headed ingratitude, making us miss out on what is supremely advantageous to us.
I have often spoken to you about the need to keep the Lord’s Sermon on the Mount before our eyes, but especially during Lent, and I would like to draw your attention today to the words that introduce it.
Now when Jesus saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him, and he began to teach them.
……..when Jesus saw the crowds. This is the starting point of all prayer. Prayer never starts with us; the initiative always comes from Jesus. We think we have decided to pray, but the reality is that God’s grace is inspiring us to do; if it did not, we would not pray at all.
Begin your prayer by imagining Jesus looking at you, as he looked at those crowds. But not exactly so. See him looking at you, not as one of a crowd, but in your own unique individuality. It is essential to all prayer that we be keenly aware of this scrutiny of God. Spiritual writers talk about “putting ourselves into the presence of God”. This is not make-believe or playing games; this is fact; Christ is really present. If we are to pray at all, we must be aware of this piercing gaze of Christ which comprehends us totally.
……he went up on a mountainside. Christ’s purpose is always to raise us up to a higher plane. Prayer always achieves this.
……and sat down. He sits down to teach. Prayer is always a learning exercise. No matter how dry we may find it on any particular occasion, we are always instructed by it.
……His disciples came to him. See yourself coming to him. See yourself kneeling before Him. Put your hands into his and return his gaze.
There is no need to say anything. Just stay there, in that silent attitude, just as a couple in love do not need to speak. Just being there with the beloved says it all. If you can spend the whole of your prayer time just kneeling there in spirit, looking into the eyes of the Lord and saying nothing, your prayer will already have reached considerable heights.
When I say “kneeling there” I instantly add “in spirit”. You don’t need to kneel down to pray. The more comfortable you are the better.
Words, therefore, are not the most important element in prayer. It is you who are praying, your whole self, body, soul and spirit, not just your mind. That’s why it doesn’t matter too much if your mind wanders, which it most surely will. Prayer is not an exercise in concentration. Prayer is essentially the expressing of your loving relationship with God your Father and with Christ your merciful Saviour. The Spirit you received at Baptism prays on your behalf from deep within you, we have St Paul’s word for it. The old man, sitting at the back of the church day after day, hour after hour, was asked to describe his prayer. He simply said: “He looks at me and I look at Him”. Could there be a better description?
We’ll continue our reflections on prayer next week, and, hopefully throughout Lent; but in the meantime, get on with it. Every day.
This Lent we will not be having our usual penitential week; but instead one Penitential Service for the whole Deanery. This will be on 23 March at 730pm, here at Our Lady’s. The Bishop will be present, as will all the priests of the Deanery. I hope you will be too.
Sacramental Confession should be a standard part of our Lenten observances, as we prepare ourselves for the great celebration of the Death and Resurrection of the Lord. In Christ’s Name I ask you to bring this Sacrament back into your lives. Apart from the Deanery Penitential Service, there is ample opportunity in the Parish timetable for you to avail yourself regularly of this powerful Sacrament .
God bless you, Fr Antony
*********************************************************************
Dear Parishioner,
6 March 2011
Supermarket adverts for the ingredients of pancakes remind us, if we need reminding, that Tuesday is Shrove Tuesday, but more importantly, that Wednesday is Ash Wednesday. Eggs and flour and lemons and sugar are all at specially low prices, but there are lots of spiritual ingredients which are entirely free at the Lord’s own Supermarket, ingredients needed more keenly by our inner selves than ever a pancake is needed by palate or stomach!
Wonderful technology. You rub your packet of flour against a laser beam and up comes its description and price. Behind the scenes, the unseen bit of the technology is telling Mr Tesco that there is one packet of flour sold . One tiny bit of profit made; but every little helps!
Life is so very much like browsing round a supermarket. Compare it with your own life, as a Lenten exercise. On every side there are things that appeal to our senses, things that are screaming out at us to take them from the shelf and pop them into the trolley. Very often we resist the temptation. There is too much sugar in this; it will taste nice to my lips but will do no good at all to my hips. Sometimes prudence prevails.
But very often prudence fails, and we go the way the managers want us to go. The packaging of the product and the lay out of the shelves are so subtly organised that the desired effect, namely our giving way to temptation, is surely achieved. This is a bargain; I don’t really need it, but wouldn’t I be silly to miss out on such an offer? And that little bar of chocolate positioned so conveniently by the till… well, I might as well have it, if I have bought all this other stuff. Then comes the check-out.
Then comes the check-out indeed! Lent is here again. This is the season which helps us keep our eyes on the check-out of life. Pile all you fancy into your trolley, but that trolley will eventually have to pass through the check-out when every item will be scrutinised and every decision to buy or not to buy accounted for and charged .
Will the day of Judgement be like standing at the check-out watching the bill you have to pay grow bigger and bigger as every item of your lifetime is assessed and added? Being fooled here; being fooled there; giving way to this temptation, resisting that; winning here, losing there—and all the time alarmed to realise that every little detail of life, good and bad, has been registered by that unerring heavenly laser, now running across the barcode of your life?
Yes, I think Judgement Day will be something like that, but with one very big difference. The Person at the check-out will be your Friend, your Brother—indeed, your most merciful Redeemer and Tremendous Lover, who has given his very life for you, who has painfully at times and joyfully at others watched every detail of your life unfold, how you were so easily fooled and led into temptation, how often so very weak, how poverty-stricken you really were when you were lashing out your money on expensive material things. And he sees that there is no money in your purse to pay this final bill. So He pays it for you with a different kind of currency. That is why Lent ends with Good Friday. He alone can pay this kind of bill; and he does so with his Precious Blood.
Luther, the Protestant Reformer, made the mistake of thinking that because Christ alone can pay the bill and because He has already paid the bill, then it doesn’t matter whether we do good or ill.
But it does matter and matters hugely. Christ doesn’t want us to do evil. He wants us to reflect his own holiness. He doesn’t want that divine laser to register a mass of rottenness, but a living soul that laboured to do as He has commanded us; who has tried to love God as He deserves to be loved; who has tried to love his neighbour as himself; who has striven to be holy, “because I Myself am holy, says the LORD”. Who, in a word, has struggled to be like his Lord and Master, Jesus Christ.
So let me encourage you to use your Lent well. Strive to be more like Christ in your day to day life. Strive to know him more clearly, love him more dearly and follow him more nearly. Do something special to deepen your relationship with Him. Prayer is all important. Why not try to come to the Adoration on Wednesday evenings? Or to the Stations of the Cross? Or to the Holy Hour on Fridays at 3pm?Or to an extra daily Mass? “Buy corn and wine without money” as the scriptures say, ingredients for your eternal soul, not for some burned, tossed and uncaught pancake that ends up on the floor!
God bless you, Fr Antony
******************************
Dear Parishioner,
27 February 2011
You will remember that a few weeks ago I introduced you to Some Definite Purpose. This, you will recall, is the scheme the Bishops have devised to keep the momentum going of the recent visit to this country of our Holy Father, Pope Benedict. We decided to divide the document into six, allowing us to reflect on each section of it over a couple of months, thereby coving the whole document in the course of the year. I printed out the first part, To Know Our Purpose, in that Newsletter on 13 February. And now I ask you: Did you, as suggested, discuss it within your family? I hope you did; and if you haven’t, I hope you will. It is so important that what concerns our Faith should be taken as seriously, indeed more seriously, than anything else.
The Parish Council met on Thursday evening and this scheme was discussed. You will remember in that same Newsletter I suggested that we discuss this document not only within our families but also at Parish level. To enable as many people as possible to attend, we decided that each meeting should be held twice, once in the afternoon and again in the evening. The dates of these, and I hope you will note them in your diaries, are: 10 March at 230pm at Stella Maris and 24 March at 730pm. Other meetings will be arranged and announced in due course. Let’s really put our backs into this effort to further the good that has already come out of this Visit, for our own benefit, for the benefit of our Parish, and, indeed for the benefit of the whole Church.
It is a year now since I last attended a meeting of the Parish Council. My recent illness caused me to miss the autumn meeting. The lengthened period between attendance brought home to me once again what I was beginning to take for granted. I saw, as it were, with fresh eyes all the good work that is going on in this parish for the furtherance of Christ’s Kingdom. We pray every day, and many times a day, that “thy Kingdom come”. It is here, in the work we are doing in the parish, that we are bringing that Kingdom about.
The PC represents us all and, as it were, gives us a bird’s eye view of all that is going on, both within the parish groups and in our own individual lives. It reveals considerable zeal for the cause of Christ.
** Our Lord’s last words were the command to baptise all nations; we listen in the PC to the Baptism Team speaking of their efforts to explain to parents the wonder and the consequent responsibilities of this Sacrament and to explain to them that Baptism is the beginning of a wonderful life’s journey with Christ, not just a one-off excuse for a party.
** Teaching was the activity which filled most of Our Lord’s public ministry. We hear in the PC of the teaching that goes on in the Parish, not just in the School, but in the lessons after school in preparation for the Sacraments of Holy Communion and Confirmation. We appreciate the generosity of those who devote so much of their person al time and energies to this task; and we equally recognise how vital it is that young people today have an adequate grasp of their Catholic Faith.
** Christian teaching should lead to worship. We learn to know God and his Christ; from that knowledge worship naturally springs. We heard in the PC how so many of our young people are actively involved in the worship of God by serving at his Altar; how so many of them are attending retreats suited to their age group; how five of them are preparing for the trip of their lives when they go to Madrid in August to meet the Holy Father for the World Youth Day.
** The care of the sick was one of Our Lord’s priorities and any society worthy of his Name must be equally concerned. We listened in the PC to reports from our caring groups, how the lonely are visited regularly in their own homes by the SVP, how the hospital is visited weekly, bed by bed, by GAS, in addition to the scheduled visits of Sr Jennifer, Fr Gordon and myself.
** I could go on. But you get the picture. Our PC reveals a parish that is working well in the service of Christ, and working well even when the Parish Priest is out of action for several months. But complacency must be far from us; there is still so very much to do; still so many people to get actively involved in the work of the Church; still so many Catholics to be brought back to the worship of God and to the fulfilment of their Baptismal vows before it is too late for them; still so many people out there who need to be introduced to Christ and his holy Catholic Church. There is always an urgency about the work of the Church.
Evidence of the increasing vitality of our parish is the growing number of young parents with their children at the Sunday Mass. It delights my heart, as it surely delights the Heart of Christ a thousand times more, to see these parents coming up for Holy Communion and presenting their children for a blessing. Somehow this moment sums up what Christian parenthood really is: the love within the family, between husband and wife, parents and children, being enfolded by the overarching love of Christ, made present in the Mass.
How privileged these particular children are! Nothing, surely, could give them a better start in life! They experience not only the love of parents, essential to their growth into mature and balanced human persons, but also the love of God which is the origin and source, the meaning and purpose of life and everything else. At this moment of Holy Communion, it seems to me, the divine love and the human love themselves embrace and form a unity which is the perfect atmosphere and ambience for the child to grow up in..
God bless you, Fr Antony.
***********************************************************************************
Dear Parishioner,
20 February 2011
Ask a Catholic to say a prayer for something and he/she will probably say an Our Father, a Hail Mary and a Glory be. For centuries now, these prayers have gone together in Catholic devotion.
A Jew or Muslim could say the Our Father with complete sincerity and devotion, addressing the God of Heaven, the God of the Old Testament or Allah (both, in reality, the same one God). But we Christians say this prayer Our Lord taught us in a different way, in the radiant light of Christ. In other words, we pray it in the light of the Incarnation: we address a God who has become Our Father and has proved that He is by sending his Only Son to become one of us and for love of us to die for us.
This incarnational dimension of our Faith is essential. It is the Hail Mary that expresses this and brings it home to us. So, let us give some thought to this prayer today, which we have been saying since childhood.
While the Our Father was given to us by Our Lord Himself and Christians have said in its entirety from the very beginning, the Hail Mary on the other hand took centuries to develop. The first example of the prayer exactly as we know it appeared as late as 1495 in a work by Savonarola, a copy of which is in the British Museum.
The prayer is self-evidently in three parts: the salutation of the Archangel Gabriel, the greeting of Elizabeth, and the petition which concludes the prayer.
The prayer begins with the salutation used by the Angel Gabriel as he approached Mary with the request that she co-operate with the Almighty and bear in her womb the Son of God, Christ our Lord: Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.
For many centuries in the Church, these words stood alone. Christians used them simply as a greeting to Mary, just as the Angel had done. Nothing more was said.
Because this was a salutation, the medieval mind envisioned the Angel bowing before Our Lady as he said it. There developed a practice, therefore, of bowing or genuflecting while saying these words. It is recorded of St Louis of France that “without counting his other prayers, the holy King knelt down fifty times every evening; each time he stood upright then knelt again and repeated slowly the Ave Maria”. But he seems to have been outdone by St Aybert, in the twelfth century, who, it is reported, recited 150 Hail Marys daily, a hundred with genuflections and fifty with prostrations. (A medieval equivalent of visiting the gym, perhaps!)
These words, Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee are full of meaning. First of all, full of grace means full of the Spirit. She had been conceived without original sin; the Holy Spirit had dwelt within her soul from the moment of her conception, with no personal sin either to dim the brightness. She was the perfect human being – just as God had intended us to be when he created Eve.
The Lord is with thee. How often in the Mass does the priest say to us: The Lord be with you! In Mary’s case, it wasn’t a prayerful hope expressed by the Angel as it is with us, but a fact. The Lord was with her and was about to be so intimately united to her that He would take flesh in her womb.
But it wasn’t until the end of the twelfth century that the words of Elizabeth were joined to the words of the Angel: Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb. Elizabeth spoke these words to her cousin Mary when Mary, the younger woman, went to Elizabeth’s assistance in her confinement. As she said these words the future John the Baptist leapt for joy in Elizabeth’s womb.
Blessed…blessed. Blessed Mary and blessed Jesus. Mary was indeed blessed among women for she alone was chosen by God to be the Mother of his Son. Jesus, the fruit of her womb, is blessed indeed for he is the mighty God from whom all blessings flow.
By the time of the Reformation in the sixteenth century the petition at the end of the Hail Mary was still unformed. The new Protestants ridiculed the Catholics because their prayer to Mary wasn’t a proper prayer – it was a greeting and nothing more. Thus, down to nearly the end of the sixteenth century the Hail Mary ended with the holy name of Jesus – at least in its liturgical use. In popular devotion people were beginning to add a petition to it, that Mary’s prayers would aid them in their need, and especially at their death.
It was the Council of Trent, in the Catechism it gave us, that officially added the petition we are now familiar with: Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. There are two moments that matter – now and the moment we die. God lives in the eternal present, the eternal now. We cannot find him in our yesterdays nor in our tomorrows – only now. And when that now is our last moment, it will be vital that we are facing in his direction. Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.
The Council of Trent addresses Mary with the title given to her at the Council of Ephesus in the year 431 when it declared that it was right and proper to address Mary as Theotokos, or Mother of God. Her child was human: she is the mother of Jesus. Her child is divine: she is the mother of God. She gave birth to the One who is really and truly both God and Man and for that reason, and in that sense, she is truly his Mother. Mother of God is Mary’s greatest title, the truth from which all her other graces and blessings flow.
The Our Father recognises God and gives Him his rightful place in our lives. The Hail Mary, first and foremost, recognises his Son as the One who came among us as Mary’s Child, true God and true Man. Mary is, and has always been the touchstone of orthodoxy. If you recognise Christ for what and who he really is you will honour and venerate his Mother. If your belief in Christ is not in full accordance with the ancient faith of the Church, you will show her little or no respect. But may we always love her and venerate her with all our hearts
You will find the Timetable for the Week on the Notice Board in the porch and on the Notice Board on the website. God bless you, Fr Antony
*****************************************************************************************
Dear Parishioner,
Sunday 13 February
The visit last year of the Holy Father to Great Britain was regarded by everyone, and felt by all of us Catholics, to have been not only a great success on the human level, but also a great grace from God to the Church in this country.
Convinced of this, the Bishops of England and Wales are eager that we build on the experience of the Pope’s visit and equally build on the grace that has been given to us. They want us to follow up the Visit with a year of reflection and prayer. They have produced a document entitled Some Definite Purpose which they want us to use as a basis of our reflections.
The document is divided into six sections. I propose to publish one at a time over the next year, starting today. It will give us space for proper reflection and discussion. Ideally it should be discussed within the family. Ideally, parents and older children could sit down together and talk about it. I would invite the parish groups, including the older Altar Servers and Young People of the Parish, to discuss each section as it appears. And maybe we could discuss it as a Parish as well. There is a Parish Council Meeting coming up on Thursday 24 February when I shall be asking advice as how best to get this discussed at parish level. Let’s throw ourselves into this venture which evidently is inspired by Almighty God.
There has been a very good response to the fund raising for sending the young people to the World Youth Day in August. I would like to thank in particular the “Stella Maris Crafters” for their generous donation of £100.
And finally, have you made that shortcut to the Parish Website on your computer desktop yet?
SOME DEFININTE PURPOSE
TO KNOW OUR PURPOSE
One of the key things that the Holy Father reminded us was to “know our purpose”. Pope Benedict repeatedly spelt out that the reason the Church exists and the vocation of the baptised is to proclaim the Gospel. He said at Oscott Seminary on 19 September: “In the course of my visit it has become clear to me how deep a thirst there is among the British people for the Good News of Jesus Christ. You have been chosen by God to offer them the living water of the Gospel…be sure to present in its fullness the life-giving message of the Gospel”. The laity has an essential part to play in mission which above all involves finding ways of communicating to others the reality of the unconditional love and mercy of God. One of the best ways to point others towards this reality is by responding to the universal call to holiness, remembering that Christian mission is lived and expressed in joy.
Blessed John Henry Newman wrote and meditated: “God has created me to do Him some definite service, He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission…I am a link in a chain”. It is timely for us all to pray and reflect on what work we have been called to do, however small or great. Now is a good time to ask the Lord to speak to you heart-to-heart. It may mean that you receive an invitation from the Lord to serve in a new way, or it could be that you are inspired to continue the tasks you have already been entrusted with. Either way, you know that your calling and work makes a unique contribution to the mission of the Church.
“…it is the whole Church that received the mission to evangelise; the work of each individual is important for the whole…. (Evangelii Nuntiandi 15)
God bless you, Fr Antony.
Dear Parishioner,
23 January 2011
Amy Owen Thomas, Lauren Watson, Varum Isaac, Owen Williams and Tomek Michalski will be heading for Madrid on 16 August. They will be going on the trip of their lives, one that they will remember when they are old and grey—which means for a very long time, for they are all still youngsters. All of them, are, or have been, part of our Altar Team, which, I say again, is the envy of the Diocese. All of them are the kind of young Christians a Catholic Parish can be justly proud of, “planted and built in Jesus Christ, firm in the Faith” as the official Youth Day logo puts it.
Their destination will be that of hundreds of thousands of like minded young Catholics who will be travelling to Madrid from every corner of the world to meet up with the Holy Father for the celebration of World Youth Day 2011. The Catholic Church is the Ancient Church, but she is, as well, always young, always new, always enthusiastic. Such are the unsuspected graces and surprises God has in store for each of us, such are the marvellous things God in Christ has done for us, that it should always be exciting to be a Catholic Christian . These young people express that excitement and zeal which burns at the heart of the Church, and which has always blazed there from the time the Holy Spirit came down as fire upon Our Lady and the Apostles.
Our young parishioners will travel with their fellow young people from the Diocese before joining up in Spain with their fellow Catholics from all over the world. It will give them a deep insight into what the word “Catholic” means, how people of every age-group, of every nationality, culture, language, financial and social background can be really and truly one in mind and heart. Only the Catholic Church, under the leadership and unifying power of the Holy Father, can do this, and our young people will experience it in a vibrant and exciting way.
In seven months they will be there . Before that, we have to find the wherewithal to send them!
The whole package will cost £550 per person. We are sending five, so that works out at £2,750. The families of the young people have agreed to pay £50 each, so that leaves the Parish with £2,500 to find. It would be good if the five young people themselves could agree on some activity which they could do together and for which they could get themselves sponsored. The rest of the money will need to come from the Parish. If you would like to make a contribution, please do; hand it in personally or put it in the collection bag, marking it “World Youth Day”. I will keep you updated as to how much we have raised and, if need be, we will have a retiring collection later. We have already received a £220 and a £10 donation, so we are on our way.
Thirty altar servers is the present count! The old parish youth clubs played their part and did a lot of good with their billiards and table-tennis, but how much better to keep the youngsters of the Parish close to the Church by keeping them close to the very heart of the Church, the Mass, where Christ Himself is sacramentally present. Our parish youth work focuses on the Altar Servers and I am so grateful to the parents for their willing cooperation and to Sister Jennifer especially.
The days will come when the little ones who now serve on the Altar will themselves be travelling to some distant destination to attend a future World Youth Day with some future Holy Father. At the 930am Mass next Sunday we will be receiving into the Guild of St Stephen some of these future World Youth Day attendees: Louis Elliot, Liam Geraghty, Krzysztof Kornick, Molly Barlow, Corrie Williams and Robin Hanna. I hope that all our servers will make an effort to be at this Mass. These youngsters have served regularly since they made their First Holy Communion. Now they are in Year 6 and have proved themselves faithful; it is time for them to be formally admitted to the Guild and recognised as qualified and trustworthy Altar Servers, part of a great Team.
Still on the theme of our young people, the First Holy Communion lessons are beginning for the children not attending Blessed William Davies School. I am, as always, deeply grateful to Mrs Elaine Dingsdale, the Head Teacher, for giving her precious free time to this all important work. The lessons will take place at Stella Maris on Monday afternoons after school, from 4 to 4.45pm. They begin this Monday, 24 January. Apart from half terms and Easter Holidays, they will be every Monday; the lesson will appear in the weekly timetable.
And, finally, a reminder to all Year 7 and Year 8 pupils that their sessions preparing for Confirmation are on Tuesdays from 4 to 5pm. Again I thank Mrs Margaret Hunt and Mrs Fleur Williams for this invaluable work and urge parents to ensure their children attend. Two further years of Catholic education for children leaving primary school is absolutely vital in this day and age.
God bless you, Fr Antony
Dear Parishioner,
16 January 2011
I don’t know quite where to start this Newsletter. The last time I wrote to you was on the first Sunday of Advent, at the beginning of December, when I was going on about football. A lot has happened since. Advent and Christmas have come and gone, and we are now well into January, well into the New Year.
So I suppose a good start would be to wish you all a very Happy New Year. A little late, but better than never. May it be filled with blessings for each and every one of you.
Last year was my 13th year in Llandudno. I completed that year on Saturday. Thirteen. “Unlucky for some” they say at Bingo. And so it would appear to have been in my case: diagnosed with aggressive cancer in the early days of the year; a long wait for the op; three months unpleasant recuperation after it; then news that it was showing signs of spreading and needing further treatment; six weeks back in the parish; a month of radio-therapy followed by an horrendous month over Christmas battling with the side effects of the treatment complicated by a lung infection and a severe bout of asthma.
Am I telling you this to get your sympathy? Most certainly not—I know I have had that already and in abundance. I want to thank you for the tremendous support you have been to me through the year and especially in that final fling over the Christmas period. Thank you for so many cards, so many Masses, so many prayers, so many gifts. You quite overwhelmed me.
No, I mention my “Annus Horibilis”, as the Queen might say, to encourage those of you who have got your own sufferings, and I know how valiantly so many of you put up with them. I want to tell you that my 13th year in Llandudno was a year of blessings for me. I said to a very close friend of mine that if I were standing again on the threshold of 2010 with the foreknowledge of what lay ahead of me and with the choice to change it completely, I think I would decide to leave it exactly as it was. She simply said to me, “I don’t believe you, Father”.
Maybe she was right; maybe if I had had that chance and opportunity, I might have opted for a year of health and prosperity. You never quite know how you would react in such circumstances. But I honestly believe that, given the opportunity, I would have left the year unfold exactly as it did. I have benefitted so much from it in my inner self that I would have been mad to miss out on it for a comfortable time. Just as you showed your love for me in so many ways during my illness, so did Almighty God, in ways so completely unexpected, so subtle, so penetrating. I have spent a life time preaching the power of the Cross; now I think I know just a little bit of what I am talking about.
I’m not trying to make myself out to be a martyr; many, very many of you, have suffered and are suffering far in excess of anything I have yet had to put up with, and, unlike me, keeping your mouths shut about it. But I just don’t want anyone to miss out on the power of Christ’s Cross. Put yourself into the strong hands of Christ. “Let Go” as the cliché says, “and let God”. Recognise that God is doing something in your life; doing what he sees best, and therefore what really is best for you. So, let the Cross lift you up as it lifted Christ up, and find yourself being raised in a completely different and wonderful way. And let your prayer be summed up in those words we hear every time we come to Mass: “Father, all powerful and ever living God, we do well always and everywhere to give you thanks, through Jesus Christ our Lord”.
On a similar and related theme, let me remind you that we will be having what I call our Mass for the Walking Wounded, the Mass of Anointing, on Saturday 12 February at 530pm. We missed out on this Mass in August because I was ill at the time (you will remember that we hold this Mass twice a year, on the Saturdays nearest to the Feasts of Our Lady of Lourdes, and the Assumption). The Sacrament of the Sick is a very powerful instrument of God; make a note of the date in your diary.
Another date I would like you to remember is the day following this Mass of the Sick, the Sunday in Marriage Week, 13 February at 4pm, when we offer married people the opportunity to renew their dedication to each other by the renewal of their marriage vows. As always, this service will be open to anyone of any faith, who holds Marriage in esteem. Again, I am pleased to tell you, it will be conducted jointly by Bishop Gerard Crane and his wife, Deacon Pam. For some years now they have undertaken this service to the delight of all who have attended it. And, as usual, the ceremony will be followed by refreshments over at Stella Maris, with a wee dram to toast one’s beloved.
And again on a related theme, let me congratulate Des Blease and her husband Bill on their marriage here at Our Lady’s last Tuesday. The Nuptial Mass was attended by so many parishioners and created such a wonderful atmosphere that the joy was almost tangible. We wish them a married life filled with God’s choicest blessings.
God bless you, Fr Antony
Dear Parishioner,
24 April 2011
May I wish you all a very happy and joyful Easter. This joy follows the simple awareness of what Easter really is and what Easter has really done for us. Not this Easter, but the first one. Every subsequent Easter is a remembering of the wonders of the first one and how that first one has transformed our lives.
That first Easter transformed the lives of Simon Harris and Sophie Birch on Saturday evening as they were received into full communion with the Holy Catholic Church, Sophie being baptised and both of them receiving the Sacrament of Confirmation. It was the Holy Spirit who brought them to this supreme moment in their lives. We congratulate them, rejoice with them and assure them of our support and our prayers.
But in the context of this great Easter joy, let me share with you a sadness I experienced during last week. When I say “sadness”, I mean much more than that. A relative of mine, whom I dearly love, told me he has become a Buddhist.
A year or two ago, there was talk of local Buddhists buying the property next door to the Presbytery and turning it into a temple. How true that was I do not know, but I rejoiced at the prospect. Buddhists, with their focus on meditation and prayer, have a lot going for them; and every individual Buddhist I have ever met has been a person of deep and infectious peace.
So, why am I so upset by this decision of my relative? If he had been an atheist or someone who had never known Christ, I would have rejoiced with him. But he was a Christian, baptised into Christ and carefully brought up in the Catholic Faith. For him, it is not just a lapsing from the practice of the faith, as it is with so many, but a turning away from Christ and embracing another way. When Our Lord asked Peter whether he would follow the lead of the Jews who were turning away from him, Peter answered, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and to know that you are the Holy One of God.” In other words, there is no one else to go to. Who else could say: “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me will never die”? And, without these words, what would life be to us?
The Buddha who lived in north eastern India sometime between the 6th and 4th century BC was a great and wonderful man, but he was not God-made-Man; he was a wonderful teacher, but he was not the Word of God; he taught a way, but he was not the Way.
Hold tight to your Catholic Faith. It is the greatest gift you have ever received. Follow no other way, for there is only one Way for those who have once been enlightened (as you have) and that Way is Jesus Christ, present and active in his Church.
After Easter, I shall begin in earnest the task of introducing you to the revised translation of the Mass. To do this properly, I will need to reflect on all the parts of the Mass: starting at the beginning and finishing at the end! In other words, I propose, God willing, to give you a complete catechesis on the Mass, its history, its structure, its theology. It will take several months.
I propose to do two things. I will keep the inside page of the Newsletter in the same format as you find it today. The inside box will be devoted to this catechesis. I will also open a new page on the Website entitled “Catechesis on the Mass” where all these accumulating pieces may be kept together.
This, of course, will mean less room on the Newsletter for other things, so when this applies, I propose to transfer the financial report to the Website, as today.
And finally, I wish to thank Fr Gordon who has been a wonderful help during this Holy Week. I thank Sister Jennifer for all her work behind the scenes. I thank the Altar Servers, the Choir and Organists, the Flower Ladies and Brass Cleaners. But, particularly, I thank all of you for giving the good Lord the attention and love he deserves .
God bless you,
Fr Antony