THIRTY-SECOND WEEK OF THE YEAR
The church is open all day from dawn till dusk. Tea and coffee are served after the 10.00 a.m. Mass on Sunday.
SUNDAY NOVEMBER 6TH 2005 THIRTY-SECOND WEEK OF THE YEAR
Today’s Gospel: The refusal of the wise virgins to share may appear selfish. But here we are not talking really about lamps and oil but about people and life. There are certain things you cannot borrow or inherit. Your parents or my parents may have been the best people in the world. If so, that is a blessing beyond measure. Bit for all that it cannot be taken for granted that we will automatically become decent, caring men and women. We can learn from one another, be inspired by one another, but in the last analysis we shape our own destiny. Character cannot be transferred or borrowed. We must build it for ourselves. The same is true of the faith. Parents and other people are reminded that it is their responsibility to hand on the faith to the younger generation. But again faith is not like a farm of land or a legacy. It cannot be given by a parent to a child. Yes, all kinds of encouragement and good example can help enormously, but in the end, the young person as they grow up to maturity must accept or reject the invitation in his or her own heart. The arrival of children of their own can often be a decisive moment for young parents, but always remember, God has his own way of welcoming people home, even if along unexpected routes.
Rest in Peace: Betty Nicholls’ funeral will be this coming Friday, November 11th at 11.00 a.m. She’s finally reunited with her husband Bill who died in the war in 1943 and her brother Louis who also died that same year in the war. She is survived by two daughters Anne and Pip and five great grandchildren. She will be buried alongside her sister Pat in Eppleworth cemetery. May she rest in peace. Amen.
Holy Cross Cemetery Sunday: Our annual tradition of visiting the graves of our deceased relatives and friends in Eppleworth cemetery will take place next Sunday afternoon. We gather at 3.00 p.m. at the bottom entrance and then visit the graves of our loved ones, saying a short prayer at each, and ending up at the grave of Fr. McEntegart. It normally takes about an hour.
Generator Fund: Dermot tells me that from the 27th of June until the 31st of October we raised £pound;3,031.91 (that’s almost £pound;800 each month or £pound;200 per week!). Ab Fab!
Craft Stall: Jan will be running this on the weekend of November 12/13 at the back of the church. An opportunity to get some early Christmas presents and to help others at the same time. maybe you have something you could offer for the stall? Jan’s telephone number is 845496.
The Garden Room Bookings: Please, please contact Jan firstly if you want to book the room, no matter what for. We’ve had a couple of double bookings this past week and it’s a bit embarrassing. Telephone her on 845496.
Tai Chi – Interested? There will be a class here on Monday 7 and 14 from 10.00 until 11.30 in The Garden Room. It’s for all levels. I might even pop in myself! The classes normally are at the Darby and Joan Club but there is work going on there at the moment. If there is an interest a class might begin here.
Missing! From the kitchen in The Garden Room, one, large pan. Do you know where it is? I came to the rescue at the Lunch Club with a couple of pans from the house! Return it please, even if anonymously!
Aromatherapy – a complementary medicine: Have a relaxing day learning about the healing properties of aromatherapy oils. There will be an opportunity to choose oils for personal use and experience the benefits of massage. If possible, please bring along a small brown pill or medicine bottle to take home your own special aromatherapy recipe. Lunch, tea and coffee will be provided. Price £pound;10 for the day. To reserve a place please call Norah Hanson on 802814. It’s at the Endsleigh Centre on Saturday November 19th from 10.00 a.m. – 3.00 p.m.
Sold, s/h Ford, one infallible driver: The only car ever owned by the late Pope John Paul II has been sold at an auction in Las Vegas for £pound;340,000. John Paul clocked up 60,000 miles on trips to the mountains in a light blue 1975 Ford which was bought on Saturday last by John O’Quinn, a Houston lawyer. ‘The car will never be driven.’ said the 62-year-old multimillionaire. ‘Bit I’ll be able to go back and touch this car and feel the Pope’s spirit.’
(Anybody want to make me an offer for my Ford?)
Graeme Souness, Steve Bruce and Sven Goran Eriksson met God. God said to them: ‘Anything you want to know, I will tell you.’ Graeme Souness asked: ‘When are Newcastle next going to win the Premiership?’ ‘2084,’ God replied. ‘I’ll be dead by then,’ Souness said. ‘Yes you will,’ God replied. Steve Bruce asked: ‘When are Birmingham City next going to win the Premiership?’ ‘2090,’ God replied. ‘I’ll be dead by then,’ Bruce said. ‘Yes you will,’ God replied. Sven Goran Eriksson asked: ‘When are England next going to win the World Cup?’ God replied: ‘I don’t know, I’ll be dead by then.’
The Hull Savoyards will be at Holy Cross this Thursday to entertain us with, amongst other items, a costume version of “Trial by Jury”. We start at 7.30 p.m. and admission is £pound;4 and £pound;3 for concessions. Refreshments will be served at the interval. Please do try and support us and let your friends know about it too. Any profits will go to the Generator Fund.
Parish Prayer Circle Intention for Friday: “Remembrance Day and we pray for all those who died in the various conflicts during the past hundred years. May they rest in peace. We pray that we will be inspired by their sacrifice to work positively for peace – in our homes and families, with our neighbours and between nations.”
Pastoral Area Meeting: This will be at St. Anthony’s at 7.30 p.m. on Wednesday and again we look for about four parishioners to come along and share what is going on in the various parishes. No previous experience necessary!
CWL News: Our Cake Stall last weekend raised £pound;104 which we will give to the parish St. Vincent de Paul Conference to help them with their work both in the parish and further afield. Thank you once again for supporting us so generously! Our November Mass for our deceased members will be next Monday, November 13th at 7.00 p.m. and it’s always lovely to welcome the parishioners to join with us in remembering these past parishioners, our friends and neighbours.
Anne Brittain’s Coffee Morning last Thursday raised over £pound;200 for her sister’s mission in Kiloloran in the Philippines. Anne was overwhelmed by the response of the parish and by your tremendous generosity. She still has some of the ‘special home-made’ cards from the women’s’ cooperative available.
Lourdes 2006 Youth Pilgrimage: We are having a ‘big push’ on this at St. Mary’s College this week, so if your children come home talking about it, you’ll know what they’re on about! We really do need to know as soon as possible who might be interested in coming with us, so get your thinking hats on! And spread the word! Dulcie Pullen meet some people during the week, with children at St. Mary’s, who had never heard about it and who desperately wanted their children to go to Lourdes. So don’t take it for granted that everyone knows about it! Our parish will sponsor our own young people to the amount of half the cost and other parishes are now starting to do the same! It’s a real investment in the future of the church in Hull and also in the future of our own young people. Have you children or grandchildren who you think might be interested? Speak to them and to me also.
Trust the Catcher. One of the most thrilling events at the circus is the flying trapeze act. Talking to one of the trapeze acrobats who perform in a German circus, the late Henri Nouwen learnt that the real star of the act is not the one who flies but the one who catches. “The flyer does nothing, the catcher does everything,” the man told him. The flyer has to have complete confidence that the catcher, with split second timing, will be there to grab him out of the air as he comes soaring over in the long leap. The worst thing the flyer can do, he explained, is to try to catch the catcher. He could break his wrists or injure his own. He simply has to trust the catcher completely and let himself be caught. There comes a time in our life when we too have to take that long leap. We have to let go of all that weighs us down and soar out into the unknown sure that we will not fall, that we will be caught and held. Our meeting on Tuesday evening brought together about twenty parishioners, all interested in seeking new ways of deepening their faith, especially in this time of uncertainty in the diocese. We looked at gathering together in small groups in each other’s homes to discuss various aspects of our faith, such as the Mass and Scripture, to name but a few. So now is the time to practice this soaring, to take that leap of faith every day, ready to leave the safe platform of our own plans and ideas to respond to that call deep within our hearts. ‘Come follow me,’ Jesus says to each of his disciples, an invitation to a new way of living. Unless we are ready to let go of whatever shackles us we will find it impossible to taste the freedom Jesus promises us. How hard it is to cut the cord of our securities, to take up our cross and follow Jesus on a road we almost certainly do not want to go. We have so many good reasons that make a lot of sense, that excuse us from taking that risk of faith. Look at that rich young man in the Gospel (Mark 10:21). Such a good man! So full of zeal, so faithful to his religion. Jesus loved him. And yet – he could not make that leap. He could not risk his riches for the precarious promise of treasure in heaven. ‘His face fell.’ This was not what he expected; this was not part of his plan. Jesus did not stop loving that young man, nor will he stop loving us when we too baulk at following him wholeheartedly. But ours is the sadness and the pain and the awful sense of having lost something precious. Trust the Catcher. Trust that we can let go, that we can take that mighty, fearsome leap and that we will be caught by the One who ‘holds the whole world in his hands.’ If we get into the habit of letting go now in the daily happenings of our lives, we will be ready when that final call comes to soar free as a bird into the outstretched arms of our God.
Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor writes about small faith sharing groups: “I first experienced the power of small faith sharing communities in my first two parishes, in and near Portsmouth from 1957 to 1966. Towards the end of my period in the first parish, a group of people invited me to join their monthly meetings. They met together in different houses to pray, to read a passage of the Gospel and to reflect on the circumstances of their daily lives. It was my first lesson in the value of a basic Christian community. My subsequent experience confirms that such faith clusters, or communities, allows a whole mix of people – married, unmarried, young and old – to discover a new and deeper experience of faith through prayer, scripture, community and service to others. What struck me then about the role of the Church in our culture, and what has continued with me throughout my ministry, is that our influence is most tangibly felt through the actual witness of the people of God. The authenticity and effectiveness of that witness is in turn dependent, at least in part, on our continuing to develop and mature as people of deep spirituality and holiness. Within smaller groups, where a degree of trust and confidence becomes inherent, people are encouraged and inspired to go further and deeper on their faith journey than they might otherwise.”
Anniversaries this coming week:
Saturday – Stella Marie Wiles (Sheila’s daughter) and Evelyn Sharp.
Sunday – Frederick Hodgson (Fred’s father), Fr. J.F. Fitzgerald, Ann Joys (Leo Murphy’s grandmother) and Winifred Jarvis.
Monday – Richard English (Dorothy’s father-in-law), Terence Gilson (brother of Dennis) and Charles Shakespeare (Kath’s husband).
Tuesday – Peter Sanders (Sheila Levett’s husband), Harold Cornthwaite (Chris Clarke’s grandfather), Franco Ciuffetelli and Eddie Hughes (Eithne’s brother-in-law).
Wednesday – Annie Walker (Rolf Kennedy’s mother-in-law) and Anne Fortes (sister of Jean Dex).
Friday – Mary Loughlin (Tony Woods-McConville grandmother) and Dorothy Eeles (Wilf’s wife).
Saturday – Mgr. Philip Purcell, Parish Priest of Holy Cross (RIP 1995) and Anne Lapinskas.
Sunday – Arthur Swallow and Eileen Lawless (Norah Hanson’s sister-in-law).
Mass Intentions for the coming week:
Saturday – 6.30 – Ken Trigg
Sunday – 10.00 – Jim Gardham
Monday – 9.00 – Charlie Shakespeare (A)
Tuesday – 7.00 – Brenda Allen (CWL)
Wednesday – 9.00 – Eve Travers (RIP)
Thursday – 9.00 – Jack Case (RIP)
Friday – 11.00 – Requiem Mass for Betty Nicholls
Saturday – 9.00 – The Parishioners
Saturday – 6.30 – Day and Clarke Families
Sunday – 10.00 – John and Mary Gavin
Sick and Housebound Parishioners: Please remember in your prayers Veronica Homan who is on the final stage of her journey to God, and also Dorothy Hood recovering in Castle Hill after an operation last Tuesday, Harold Ward, Alice Sinclair, Anita Marshall, Edna Swindell, Ivy Behan, Willy Parker, Peter Price, Lilian Fowlston, Michael Pinder who is home at last, Fiona Kilkenny, Mary Rowe, Stuart Buchan, Paddy Falvey, Elsie Murphy, Agnes Pidd, Roy and Dominic Caley and Ursula Stainton.
Hull Faith Forum: Monday 14th, November at the Endsleigh Centre. The talk is “Gaudium at Spes – The Church and the World.” Everyone is welcome and it starts at 7.30 p.m.
Remember, remember, the fifth of November: Today, Saturday, marks the 400th anniversary of one of the most notorious acts of treason in British history. A group of Catholic conspirators, among them a Yorkshireman, Guy Fawkes, tried to blow up parliament. It is a crime that has resonated down the centuries. Nobody then doubted – and few have since – that the 1605 Gunpowder Plot amounted to treason, nor that the penalty would be as inevitable as it was gruesome – lengthy torture, followed by grisly execution. Yet Fawkes would not have considered himself a traitor. He put his religion before his country. During the final few years of Elizabeth’s reign he even enlisted in the Spanish army to fight for the cause. Once more, the cry of “treason” is being levelled against British citizens who put their religion before their country. Another Yorkshireman, Mohamed Sidique Khan, one of the London suicide bombers, left a video in which he accused western governments of “continuously perpetuating injustice against my people all over the world…” The conspirators believed that religion was of primary importance, as do Islamic jihadis today, and that violent insurrection was a legitimate response to a government and society that refused to subscribe to their way of seeing the world. There was one difference between what happened after the Gunpowder Plot and now and that is the absence today of widespread persecution of the religious group thought to be responsible. After 1605, there was a wave of anti-Catholicism; rightly, we do not blame anyone other than the terrorists for their actions. The 1605 plotters had their Osama bin Laden figure in Robert Catesby, a wealthy religious fanatic who provided the money for the conspirators. He was charismatic and built up a cadre of devoted followers. He had been involved in discussions with the Spanish government in 1602 about arranging a rebellion in England and was one of those arrested as a precaution in 1603 after the death of Elizabeth. When the plot was uncovered Catesby fled London but he was tracked down and killed in a battle with the king’s troops. Another of the conspirators, Thomas Percy, was a Catholic convert and a member of a great aristocratic family, the Northumberlands. It was Percy who rented the property in which Guy Fawkes was found. So, violent religious fundamentalism is not a new threat to Britain and nor is it uniquely Islamist. The appalling persecution of Catholics was no more justified by the murderous intentions of the Gunpowder Plotters than the branding of all Muslims would be today by the fact that the London suicide bombers were of the same religion. Although most November 5th bonfires burn Guy Fawkes in effigy, for centuries it was more likely to be the Pope, as it still is in some parts of the country. Yet the vast majority of Catholics under James I were loyal to their king and country and paid an unjustifiably heavy price for the actions of the plotters. As we remember once more the Fifth of November, let us also not forget what a frightened and intolerant society we once were and how far we have come in the intervening 400 years. [Adapted from Philip Johnston in The Telegraph, Monday, October 31st 2005]
Posted by Father Pat at 12:00 AM