Mersey Leven Catholic Parish
Parish Priest: Fr Mike Delaney mob: 0417 279 437;
email: mike.delaney@catholicpriest.org.au
Assistant Priest: Fr Augustine Ezenwelu mob: 0470 576 857
Postal Address: PO Box 362, Devonport 7310
Parish Office: 90 Stewart Street, Devonport 7310
Office Hours: Tuesday, Wednesday,Thursday 10am-3pm
Office Phone: 6424 2783 Fax: 6423 5160
FaceBook: Mersey Leven Catholic Parish
Weekly Newsletter: mlcathparish.blogspot.com.au
Parish Newsletter: mlcathparishnewsletter.blogspot.com.au
Secretary: Annie Davies/Anne Fisher
Pastoral Council Chair: Mary Davies
Archdiocesan Website: www.hobart.catholic.org.au for news, information and details of other Parishes.
Our Parish Sacramental Life
Baptism: arrangements are made by contacting Parish Office.
Parents attend a Baptismal Preparation Session on first Tuesday of February, April, June, August, October and December.
Reconciliation, Confirmation and Eucharist: Are received following a Family–centred, Parish-based, School-supported Preparation Program.
Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults: prepares adults for reception into the Catholic community.
Marriage: arrangements are made by contacting one of our priests - couples attend a pre-marriage Program
Anointing of the Sick: please contact one of our priests
Reconciliation: Ulverstone - Fridays (10am - 10:30am)
Devonport - Saturday (5:15pm– 5.45pm)
Penguin - Saturday (5:15pm - 5:45pm)Devonport - Saturday (5:15pm– 5.45pm)
FIRST READING
RESPONSORIAL PSALM
(R.) My
soul is thirsting for you, O Lord my God.
GOSPEL ACCLAMATION:Alleluia, alleluia! May the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ enlighten
the eyes of our heart, that we might see how great is the hope to which we are called.
Alleluia!
GOSPEL: Matthew 16: 21-27
PREGO REFLECTION ON TODAY'S GOSPEL:
I ready myself slowly for this text. I read the Gospel,
taking my time. I notice the movement between Jesus and Peter and back again to
Jesus. How is Peter affected by Jesus’ words? How does Peter’s rebuke affect
Jesus? Then, what about Jesus’ response? I listen to their conversation.
I think of my own life. What is my own response to
suffering and death? Is it like the ‘why me’ of Jeremiah? Have I ever
‘remonstrated’ with God over some situation that challenged me? Have there even
been occasions when I might have been a stumbling block to someone else’s
faith?
I remember that Peter was human; and that Jesus was fully
human, too. In a spirit of thanksgiving, I praise God for their undying
fidelity despite real fears and actual temptations. I thank God, also, for
sacrifices I make for others.
I spend some moments in the company of my Lord who
willingly gave his life for my sake. I ask for the gift of his way of thinking
that I might have the strength to do likewise.
Weekday
Masses 2nd - 6th September, 2014
Tuesday: 9:30am
Penguin
Wednesday: 9:30am Latrobe
... St Gregory the
Great
Thursday: 12noon Devonport
Friday: 9:30am
Ulverstone
Saturday: 9:00am Ulverstone
Next
Weekend 6th & 7th September, 2014
Saturday Vigil: 6.00pm Penguin
Devonport
Sunday Mass: 8:30am
Port Sorell (LWC)
9:00am Ulverstone
10:30am Devonport
11:00am Sheffield
5.00pm Latrobe
Eucharistic
Adoration:
Devonport: Every Friday 10am - 12noon,
concluding with Stations of the Cross and Angelus
Devonport: Benediction with Adoration - first Friday of
each month.
Prayer Groups:
Charismatic Renewal - Ulverstone (Community Room) Every
second and fourth Monday of the month 7:30pm (In recess over winter) - Devonport (Emmaus House) Thursdays - 7:30pm
Christian Meditation - Devonport,
Emmaus House - Wednesdays 7pm.
Ministry Rosters 6th &
7th September, 2014
Devonport:
Readers: Vigil: V Riley, A Stegmann 10.30am:
A Hughes, T
Barrientos, C Morriss
Ministers of Communion: Vigil M Doyle, M
Heazlewood, S Innes , M Gerrand, P Shelverton
10.30am: B Peters, F Sly, J Carter, E
McLagan , B Schrader
Cleaners 5th Sept: M.W.C. 12th Sept: S Riley, A Stegmann
Piety Shop 6th Sept: H Thompson 7th Sept: D French Flowers: J Cox, S O'Rourke
Ulverstone:
Reader: C McIver Ministers of Communion: E Standring , M Fennell, L Hay, T Leary
Cleaners: K.S.C. Flowers: P Mapley Hospitality: M & K McKenzie
Penguin:
Greeters: G & N Pearce Commentator: J Barker Readers: A Guest, J Garnsey
Procession: Kiely Family Ministers of Communion: E Nickols , M Hiscutt
Liturgy: Pine
Road
Port Sorell:
Readers: L Post, P Anderson
Clean /Prepare/Flowers: B Lee, A Holloway
Latrobe:
Reader: S Ritchie
Ministers of Communion: M Kavic, H Lim
Procession: I Campbell, M Clarke Music: Jenny & May
Your prayers
are asked for the sick: Kathryn McLennan, Madeline Simpson, Shirley Fidler, Shirley
White, Connie Clavo, Rose Ackerley, Theda (Joan) Bates, Joy
Griffiths, Nene Reyes, John Purtell, Louise Murfet, Joan Stafford, Shanon
Breaden, Tom Knaap, Kath Smith, Kieran McVeigh, Jamie Griffiths, Anne Johnson, Arlene Austria
&.....
Let us pray for those who
have died recently:
Leo Kelly, Lionel
Rosevear, Nico Knaap, David Covington, Athol Wright, Pauline Taylor,
Maureen
Harris, Nancy Padman, Lyn Chessell, Thelma Hutchinson and Cathy Thuaire.
Let us pray for those whose
anniversary occurs about this time: Ruth Healey, Margaret Newell, Laurance Kelcey, Margaret
Hayes, Theodore Clarke, Maxine Milton, Jean Mochrie, Brian Astell, Gwendoline
Jessup, Maria Grieve and Robert Adkins.
May
they Rest in Peace
First Reading
Gospel: Matthew 18:
15-20
FROM FR MIKE:
You will all be pleased to know that my ‘man flu’ wasn't as
bad as I first thought and I managed to survive after a few days of rest and so
I’m now back to my normal ‘good health’. Unfortunately I will need to be in
Launceston at St Vincent's on Wednesday (3rd Sept) for minor surgery to remove a
kidney stone - sadly no Mass on Friday at OLOL (again!) hopefully this is the
last time we will miss this Mass.
As mentioned elsewhere in the newsletter this weekend we are
celebrating Refugee and Migrant Sunday this weekend – and with the current
Australian Policy towards Refugees being looked at with some question around
the world - I give thanks to the many migrants and refugees who are part of our
local community and who have contributed so much to our culture and pray that
we might become a more welcoming and open Australia as we move forward.
Someone asked if it might be possible to podcast a weekly homily –
after some consideration I have managed to give it a try and it can now be found
at http://mikedelaney.podomatic.com/.
Sadly it doesn’t improve with being
posted on the web but it there for anyone who can’t get to Mass – there will
also be some variation depending on which Mass it is recorded at so if it
sounds different it is because I don’t say exactly the same thing at each Mass.
Several weeks ago I mentioned that we would be seeking nominations for
people to be approached to consider training as Lay Liturgical Leaders to
support the present group. Whilst we are
looking for new people the first criteria we are asking people to consider
before nominating a fellow parishioner is are
they a ‘good person’ with a sense of the Church and with a spirit of
prayerfulness? Remember it is not a
popularity contest but rather are they good models of Gospel Values. There will
be nomination forms available from next weekend so please think about who you
might nominate. Thanks to the Lay Liturgical Leaders who are helping at both
Port Sorell and Sheffield this weekend.
This week the Parish Pastoral Council will be meeting to discuss the
Draft Pastoral Plan and the various responses that have been received. The next
stage of the process will then be discussed and presented to the Parish as soon
as possible following the meeting.
Until next week, take
care on the roads and in your homes,
Fr Mike
MIGRANT AND REFUGEE SUNDAY:
Today Sunday 31st August in most Dioceses across Australia Australia
As disciples of Jesus, are we committed to building a
better society and a better world for fostering a culture of encounter and
acceptance?
With the men and women of goodwill, we pray that we can
build a better Australia
KNIGHTS OF THE SOUTHERN CROSS:
Next meeting this Sunday 31st August, at Emmaus
House - 88 Stewart Street
CWL ULVERSTONE - INVITATION: To help us celebrate our 70th birthday we invite any women of the
parish to join us at 11am Mass this Tuesday 2nd September followed by lunch at the Lighthouse Hotel
Ulverstone. For catering purposes or any enquiries please phone Marie Byrne
6425:5774.
MT
ST VINCENT AUXILIARY: will be holding a cake stall at Mt St Vincent Nursing Home Friday 5th
September starting at 9am. Donations of cakes, etc would be greatly
appreciated. All welcome!
CATHOLIC CHARISMATIC RENEWAL: are sponsoring a Healing Mass Thursday
11th September, St Mary's Church Penguin, commencing at 7:30pm. All
denominations are welcome to come and celebrate the liturgy in a vibrant and
dynamic way. After Mass teams will be available for individual prayer. Please
bring a friend and a plate of food for supper and fellowship in the adjacent
hall. If you wish to know more or require transport please contact Celestine
Whiteley 6424:2043, Michael Gaffney 0447 018 068, Zoe Smith 6426:3073 or Tom
Knaap 6425:2442.
CWL ULVERSTONE MEETING: Friday 12th September, 2pm
Community Room, Sacred Heart
Church
MACKILLOP HILL SPIRITUALITY
CENTRE:
Listening to the Universe:
Living Responsively: Presenter: Kateri Duke
rsj
“Each individual person has the power of
participating in the transformation of the whole earth … the magnitude of the
earth’s adventure staggers the human imagination”. (Brian Swimme)
You are invited you to be part of this extraordinary
journey led by Kateri Duke, a Sister of
St Joseph from Adelaide, an experienced facilitator, retreat leader & art
therapist.
Saturday 13th September
10.00am – 3.00pm Cost
$30.00
BYO Lunch. Bookings necessary - Phone: 6428 3095 Email: mackillophill.forth@sosj.org.au
SOCIAL JUSTICE COMMENT:
“Prompted and inspired by the Holy Spirit, we seek with
Christ to bridge the chasms between rich and poor. Like the chasm that
separated the rich man and Lazarus in the parable Jesus told (Luke 16:26), the
sin of global poverty leaves many members of our human family weak and
estranged, outside the gates of warmth, hospitality and love. When we reach out
from our place of comfort and open our gates, we open the way to a new
solidarity as human beings. This solidarity reconciles our differences and
enables us to participate in our real life which is in God and of God’s
fashioning.”
From the Australian Catholic Bishop’s Social Justice
Statement 2013-2014: Lazarus at our Gate: A critical moment in the fight
against world poverty.
FOOTY MARGIN: Round 22 Port Adelaide won by 103 points, therefore ticket
100 was the winner.
Winners: E Smith, C Vanderfeen, T Barker.
BINGO Thursday Nights - OLOL Hall, Devonport. Eyes down 7.30pm!
Callers for Thursday 4th September are Jon
Halley & ??
SAINTS OF THE WEEK:
Feast Days This Week St Giles (September 1)
St Giles is the patron saint of the “handicapped and street people.” According to the Good News Ministries website, those who listened to Saint Giles preach were handicapped beggars, so he built hospitals and safe houses for them that were -accessible to them. Due to his own damaged leg and his concern for the crippled paupers who needed alms for survival, he became the patron saint of beggars and the handicapped.
The site then has the following prayer, asking us to “pray for those who are confined to their beds or wheelchairs, and for street people. Lord, heal them, lead them to therapies that will help them recover, give them shelter and jobs, and show them how to rely on You for their strength. Saint Giles, pray for us. Amen.”
Sept 3 St Gregory the Great, Pope 540 – 604
St. Gregory the Great was born in Rome Rome Constantinople where he remained for five years.
Upon the death of the pope in 590, St. Gregory was elected to succeed him, the
first monk ever elected as the Successor of Peter. (The Crossroads Initiative)
‘Gregory exercised a momentous influence on the doctrine,
the organization, and the discipline of the Catholic Church. If no account were
taken of his work, the evolution of the form of medieval Christianity would be
almost inexplicable. And in so far as the modern Catholic system is a
legitimate development of medieval Catholicism, of this too Gregory may not
unreasonably be termed the Father. Almost all the leading principles of the
later Catholicism are found, at any rate in germ, in Gregory the Great. He is
honoured as a Doctor of the Church.’
Newsletter items must be
received before 12 noon
Thursday – thank you.
Evangelii Gaudium
”The ultimate aim should
be that the Gospel, as preached in categories proper to each culture, will
create a new synthesis with that particular culture. This is always a slow
process...But if we allow doubts and fears to dampen our courage, instead of
being creative we will make no progress whatsoever.”
-
Para
129 from Evangelii
Gaudium, Pope Francis, Nov. 24, 2013
What is freedom?
“Freedom
is the power given by God to act or not to act, to do this or to do that, and
so to perform deliberate actions on one’s own responsibility. Freedom
characterises properly human acts. The more one does what is good, the freer
one becomes. Freedom attains its proper perfection when it is directed toward
God, the highest good and our beatitude. Freedom implies also the possibility
of choosing between good and evil. The choice of evil is an abuse of freedom
and leads to the slavery of sin.”
From:
Compendium of the Catechism of the
Catholic Church: Paragraph 363 (Catholic
Enquiry Centre www.catholicenquiry.com)
Words of Wisdom – St Gregory of Nyssa
“May we never risk the life
of our souls by being resentful or by bearing grudges.”
Meme of the week
It is always fascinating
to see what trends emerge on social media. One of the current ones is the Ice
Bucket Challenge, where a person (often high profile) is challenged to have
cold water thrown on them, for a donation. The purpose is to raise awareness,
and also funds, for research into ALS (Motor Neurone or Lou Gehrig’s disease).
The disease affects nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord and impacts on
voluntary muscle movement.
(As an aside, there are
some commentators in Catholic-land expressing alarm at the challenge, because
it is raising funds for a part of the medical community that uses stem cell
research. Check out the link below for one such perspective.
Either way, the issue is
a serious one so we found this meme quite a light-hearted addition to the mix.
FEARING OUR OWN MATURITY
The original
article can be found at http://ronrolheiser.com/fearing-our-own-maturity/#.VAEL9_mSzAY
Our bodies and our
souls each have their separate aging process, and they aren’t always in
harmony. Thus, T.E. Laurence, in, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, makes this
comment about someone: “He feared his maturity as it grew upon him, with its
ripe thought and finished art, but which lacked the poetry of boyhood to make
living a full end of life … his rangeful, mortal soul was aging faster than his
body, was going to die before it, like most of ours.”
I suspect that all
of us, at some level, fear growing into maturity. It’s not so much that we
don’t want to give up the habits of our youth or that we fear that the joys of
maturity are second-best to the pleasures of youth. There is, I believe, a
deeper reason: We fear, as Laurence puts it, that our maturity will strip us of
the poetry of our youth and make us old before time. What’s meant by that?
We sometimes speak
of an old soul inside a young person, and this is meant both as a compliment
and a criticism, perhaps more the latter. We sometimes look at a young person
whose body is full of life and overfull with energy and see a precociousness of
soul that belies that youth and energy and we can’t help wondering whether that
premature maturity isn’t inhibiting the life-principle. And so we have a mixed
reaction: What a mature young person! But is his or her life too-grey and
sterile before its time?
Reflecting on this,
I was reminded of a comment that Raymond Brown once made in a class. The
context of his remark is important: This was not the comment of a young man
still looking to leave a mark on life, but rather the comment of a very mature,
successful, and respected man who was the envy of his peers. Nearly 70 years
old, wonderfully mature, universally respected for everything from his
scholarship to his personal integrity, he was a mature soul. And still his
comment betrayed the subtle fear that perhaps his maturity had stripped him of
some of the poetry of his boyhood. His comment was something to this effect:
You know when you
reach a certain age, as I have now, and you look back on what you’ve done,
you’re sometimes embarrassed by some of the things you did in your youth, not immoral
things, just things that now, from your present perspective, seem immature and
ill thought-out, things that you are now too wise to ever risk doing. Recalling
them, initially you are a little embarrassed. But then, in those moments where
you feel your age and your present reticence, you sometimes look back and say:
“That’s bravest thing I ever did! Wow, I had nerve then! I’m much more afraid
of things now!”
Jane Urquhart, the
Canadian novelist, echoes this sentiment. Rereading one of her own books which
she had written twenty years before, she comments: “It is tremendously
satisfying to be able to reacquaint myself with the young woman who wrote these
tales, and to know that what was going on in her mind intrigues me still.”
What’s unspoken in her comment is her present admiration (and dare I say, envy)
for the poetry that once infused her younger self.
I had a similar
feeling some years ago when, for a new release of my book, The Restless Heart,
I was asked to update it. I’d written the book when I was still in my twenties,
a lonely and restless young man then, partly looking for my place in life. Now,
nearly 25 years later and somewhat more mature, I was sometimes embarrassed by
some of the things I’d written all those years back; but, like Raymond Brown, I
marvelled at my nerve back then, and, like Jane Urquhart, it was refreshing to
reacquaint myself with the young man who had written that book, sensing that he
had a livelier poetry and more verve in him than the older person who was
rereading that text.
Some of us never
grow-up. The body ages, but the soul remains immature, clinging to adolescence,
fearful of responsibility, fearful of commitment, fearful of opportunity
slipping away, fearful of aging, fearful of own maturity, and, not least,
fearful of death. This is not a formula for happiness, but one for an
ever-increasing fear, disappointment, and bitterness in life. Not growing-up
eventually catches up with everyone, and what judged as cute at twenty,
colorful at 30, and eccentric at 40, becomes intolerable at 50. At a certain
age, even poetry and verve don’t compensate for immaturity. The soul too must
grow-up.
But, for some of
us, the danger is the opposite, we grow old before our time, becoming old souls
in still young bodies, mature, responsible, committed, able to look age,
diminishment, and mortality square in the eye, but devoid of the poetry, verve,
color, and humor which are meant to make a mature person mellow and alive, like
a finely-aged old wine.
