• 13/01/03 CATHOLIC PEACE SUMMIT TO TALK WITH PRESIDENT ARAFAT AND PRESIDENT KATSAV
  

  • A Catholic summit on peace and reconciliation in the Middle East will be staged next week in Jerusalem. The meeting - co-ordinated by the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales and hosted by the Latin Patriarch - brings together six Bishops' Conferences and two European Bishops' groupings. Delegates are to meet the Palestinian Authority's President Yasser Arafat and Israel's President Moshe Katsav.

    Father Frank Turner, Assistant General Secretary (International Affairs) of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales, said: ‘These are grim and painful times for the entire population of the Holy Land, and the Christian community there needs the solidarity, the prayers and the practical support of the Church worldwide. This meeting is a focal point of this solidarity, in which representatives of several bishops' conferences can share in the local Church's mission to work for reconciliation and a just peace.’

    The two-day event is hosted by the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, His Beatitude Michel Sabbah, and attended by delegates from the Catholic Bishops' Conferences in England and Wales, the United States, Canada, Germany, Italy and Spain, the Council of European Bishops' Conferences (CCEE), and the Commission of the Bishops' Conferences of the European Community (COMECE)

    Archbishop Patrick Kelly, of Liverpool, Fr. Frank Turner and Dr David Ryall, of the International Affairs Department, will represent the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales.

    The meeting will focus on the situation and needs of the Christian communities of the Holy Land, and on the Church's mission of peace and reconciliation, in the context of recent humanitarian, political, economic and military developments in the region. Delegates are to discuss the need for international advocacy on Bethlehem, the boundary wall, the relationship between the policy of closures, curfew, settlement expansion and the prospects for a peaceful resolution of the conflict, and the relationship between the situation in the Holy Land and the possible war against Iraq.

    A Holy Land meeting previously took place in January last year (2002) when the Bishops released a ‘Message to the Christians of the Holy Land’ which stated, ‘it is profoundly wrong to keep a people under occupations; it is abhorrent to hold millions of men, women and children confined in one enormous jail; it is likewise reprehensible to take vengeance or undertake resistance with random attacks on innocent people’.

    Others aspects of the initiative included the fostering of support from Episcopal conferences, encouragement of pilgrimages to the Holy Land and parochial and diocesan twinning and supporting Palestinian communities outside the Holy Land and groups working with the Christian community of the Holy Land.

    CONTACT: Ollie Wilson, Catholic Communications Service, UK (0) 20 7901 4803 / 07974 951181
    email - wilsono@cbcew.org.uk
    
    
• 06/11/02 CENTENARY CELEBRATIONS FOR THE BROTHERS OF CHARITY IN LIVERPOOL
  

  • A Mass is to be held at the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King Liverpool, on Sunday, 23rd February 2003 at 3pm, to celebrate one hundred years of the work of the Brothers of Charity on Merseyside.

    The Brothers of Charity opened St Edward's Orphanage at Thingwall Hall in 1903, they also provided secondary schooling for a large number of boys who lived in the surrounding parishes. In 1958 they started caring for people with learning disabilities, and were at the forefront of the development, which enabled many people to live in the community. A warm welcome is extended to former residents or pupils, employees and anyone formerly associated with the work of The Brothers of Charity at Thingwall Hall to attend the Mass of Celebration.

    Further information can be obtained by contacting Angela Batey tel: 0151 228 4439.

    Additional Information

    Having purchased Thingwall Hall in February 1903, The Brothers of Charity opened the doors of St Edward's Orphanage to the first resident, on 18th June, 1903 and until 1956 continued to provide accommodation for boys. Not all the boys where orphans, in fact it is quite heart rending to read some of the entries in the register, family circumstances, extreme poverty, illness of the mother, etc. made it impossible for some boys to live with their families and so they too would be given a place at the Orphanage. St Edward's Orphanage is often confused with St Edward's College, located in Sandfield Park West Derby, under the auspices of the Christian Brothers.

    When a secondary school was needed within the district around the Thingwall Hall area, this task soon fell to the Brothers of Charity as they where already providing schooling for their own boys, they then took into their school the ‘senior boys’ living within some of the surrounding parishes including St Margaret Marys, St Dominics and St Columba’s. St Edwards were renowned for their ability on the football field and for their musical talents, the band being asked to play for all the garden parties and summer fayres that took place far and wide. The latter part of the 1950’s saw the decline in the need of 'orphanage accommodation', parishes had began to build their own Secondary Modern Schools and so an era of care and education ended at Thingwall Hall.

    Being a caring congregation and in line with the vision and values of their Founder, Canon Joseph Peter Trieste, the Brothers looked at other sections of society that they could help and in 1958 they commenced a new era of caring for people with learning disabilities. With the development of supported living in the community, the Brothers were at the fore front of acquiring houses and enabling many people, both men and women, who had lived most of their lives in large institutions to make the transition to live in the community, they now support people in over 50 houses across Merseyside, as well as those living in the bungalows at Thingwall Hall.

    Since the departure of Brother Gregory Boyle, to Sri Lanka in the mid 90’s, there are no longer any Brothers actively involved in the present day services in Liverpool, this is due mainly to the decline in the number of men coming forward to join the congregation. We are however still under the aegis of the Brothers of Charity and still uphold the vision and values of their founder in the caring for others.

• 16/01/03 CATHOLIC SUMMIT SENDS MESSAGE OF SOLIDARITY TO HOLY LAND CHURCH
  

  • A Catholic summit in Jerusalem ended on Thursday 16 January with a message of support for the Christians of the Holy Land and a set of proposals.

    The meeting - which included meetings with President Katsav of Israel and President Arafat of the Palestinian Authority - examined in some depth the situation in the Holy Land.

    The event was hosted by His Beatitude Michel Sabbah, the Latin Patriarch, and attended by delegates from the Catholic Bishops' Conferences in England and Wales, the U.S., Germany, Canada, Spain and Italy as well as the Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the European Community (COMECE) and the Council of European Bishops’ Conferences (CCEE).

    The co-ordination led by Archbishop Patrick Kelly, vice-president of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, Bishop William Skylstad, of the U.S., Bishop Jacques Berthelet, of Canada, Bishop Joan Enric Vives, of Spain, Bishop Reinhard Marx, of Germany, and Monsignor Piergiuseppe Vachelli of Italy issued a call for renewed international advocacy for peace in the Holy Land.

    In a message to the Christians of the Holy Land, the visiting bishops of Europe and North America said: ‘It is clear that fear and mistrust grip many more besides you, our Christian sisters and brothers. Yet at the same time, we have been assured of widespread longing for justice and peace, and have experienced the lively hope that must, it seems, inspire the continued courage and dedication of so many people, not least your own commitment to reconciliation.’

    It added: ‘Until God grants the peace for which we all long, we promise to work without ceasing to help sustain you, our brothers and sisters in faith in Jerusalem, Palestine, Israel and Jordan.

    ‘To you who first witnessed the risen Christ and seek a rightful share in the peace which can be found only in him, we pledge our love and solidarity.’

    The new proposals agreed by the peace summit were:

    1. Increased contact between our conferences and the Church in the Holy Land (the Assembly, the Latin Patriarch, the Nuncio, the Heads of Churches and other relevant Church bodies) is necessary.

    2. The steering capacity of the facilitating bishop's conference ought to be strengthened. To this end, the Coordination facilitator will be responsible (a) for proposing issues for common advocacy (e.g., matters of humanitarian access), and (b) for identifying 'best practices' (e.g., child sponsorship and partnership programs).

    3. Regular and crisis communication among our conferences, on Holy Land issues, ought to be expanded.

    4. Information and proposals for action ought to be extended to a wider circle of conferences and Catholic organisations. Where feasible, additional conferences ought to be invited to participate in our meetings.

    The meeting also agreed that:

    - while resuming pilgrimages of the faithful on a large-scale may not be possible under present circumstances, every effort should be made to encourage pilgrimages by leadership groups in the Church,

    - the material needs of the Holy Land's Christians are urgent,

    - sharing information on how donations are used will encourage further generosity,

    - we value the increased collaboration on the part of local and international Catholic agencies in the Holy Land and will continue to work with such agencies, particularly with Caritas Internationalis,

    - we encourage placing the Holy Land on the agendas of the annual continental and inter-continental Bishops’ meetings and should be prepared to provide information for preparation of these meetings,

    - we support ecumenical collaboration in efforts to express solidarity with the Christians of the Holy Land and take particular note of relevance of 'accompaniment programs' like that sponsored by the World Council of Churches and endorsed by the Heads of Churches in Jerusalem, and

    - interfaith dialogue with Jews and Muslims should be enhanced and it is hoped the fruit of these dialogues will include reconciliation and a shared pursuit of peace.

    The full messages and proposals and a history of the coordination are below.

    For further information contact:
    Ollie Wilson, Catholic Communications Service, 07974 951181
    
    

    ---

    A MESSAGE TO THE CHRISTIANS OF THE HOLY LAND FROM THE VISITING BISHOPS OF EUROPE AND NORTH AMERICA

    January 16, 2003 - Jerusalem

    To our Christian brothers and sisters of the Holy Land;

    To His Beatitude, the Latin Patriarch, the president, and their Excellencies, the members of the Assembly of Catholic Ordinaries of the Holy Land;

    To their Beatitudes, the Greek and Armenian Patriarchs of Jerusalem, and their Excellencies, the bishops and heads of Churches in Jerusalem and the Holy Land;

    A year ago, you shared with us your sufferings and spoke of your yearnings for justice and peace. To our great sorrow, as we return a year later, we have heard not of greater peace and hope, but only of even more violence and deeper despair.

    Security measures have become more oppressive; unemployment has increased; poverty of body, mind and even spirit is ever greater. We have also witnessed people’s dread and dismay at the threat of war in Iraq.

    It is clear that fear and mistrust grip many more besides you, our Christian sisters and brothers. Yet at the same time, we have been assured of a widespread longing for justice and peace, and have experienced the lively hope that must, it seems, inspire the continued courage and dedication of so many people, not least your own commitment to reconciliation.

    Last year we said, ‘The present cycle of violence is a tragedy for everyone. It is profoundly wrong to keep a people under occupation; it is abhorrent to hold millions of men, women and children confined in one enormous jail. It is likewise morally reprehensible to take vengeance or undertake resistance with random attacks on innocent people.’ The continuing violence, in so many different forms, indicates to us: something is profoundly wrong.

    Pope John Paul's words a year ago are confirmed by the sad story of the last twelve months:

    No one can remain indifferent to the injustice of which the Palestinian people have been victims for more than fifty years. No one can contest the right of the Israeli people to live in security. However, neither can anyone forget the innocent victims, on both sides, who fall day after day under the blows of violence. Weapons and bloody attacks will never be the right means for making political statements to the other side. Nor is the logic of the law of retaliation capable any longer of leading to the paths of justice.

    On our return home, we requested our national Bishops' conferences, regional groupings of conferences, and Catholic justice and peace commissions to make advocacy on behalf of peace in the Holy Land a priority matter. This they have done, although this year we have become increasingly aware of the need for these groups to continue their efforts and to co-ordinate their work more effectively. We have continually tried to improve public awareness of the facts, and understanding of the issues underlying the facts. As we promised, we ourselves have returned. Regrettably, our attempts to bring large numbers of pilgrims have so far met only with limited success, though pilgrimages have continued and have been a source of mutual encouragement.

    We renew the promise we made a year ago. Until God grants the peace for which we all long, we promise to work without ceasing to help sustain you, our brothers and sisters in faith in Jerusalem, Palestine, Israel and Jordan. To you who first witnessed the risen Christ and seek a rightful share in the peace which can be found only in him, we pledge our love and solidarity.

    It is because Jesus of Nazareth is risen and his tomb is empty that, especially in the darkest days of your sufferings, we rejoice with you in this sure confidence: ‘Hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.’ (Romans 5:5)

    With our constant prayers, we are

    Devotedly yours in Christ,

    Bishop Jacques Berthelet C.S.V.
    President, Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops

    Archbishop Patrick Kelly
    Vice-President, Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales, and Delegate, Council of Episcopal Conferences of Europe

    Bishop Reinhard Marx,
    Delegate, German Bishops' Conference

    Bishop William Skylstad
    Vice-President, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops

    Bishop Joan Enric Vives
    Delegate, Spanish Bishops' Conference

    Monsignor Piergiuseppe Vachelli
    Sub-Secretary, Italian Bishops' Conference

    16 January2003
    

    ---

    A Proposal to Member Bishop Conferences For Strengthening Coordination in Support of the Church In the Holy Land

    A Working Paper--Strengthening the Coordination

    The continuing violence in the Holy Land and particularly the occupation and siege of the Church of the Nativity in April and May 2002, reveal the need to strengthen the workings of the Coordination. The primary need is for transnational coordination in the areas of advocacy and information sharing.

    Improved coordination will enable our conferences to communicate more effectively with our particular churches as well as with our governments, political leaders and the public. Our advocacy may be improved by taking the following steps.

    1. Increased contact between our conferences and the Church in the Holy Land (the Assembly, the Latin Patriarch, the Nuncio, the Heads of Churches and other relevant church bodies) is necessary.

    2. The steering capacity of the facilitating bishop's conference ought to be strengthened. To this end, the Coordination facilitator will be responsible (a) for proposing issues for common advocacy (e.g., matters of humanitarian access), and (b) for identifying 'best practices' (e.g., child sponsorship and partnership programs).

    3. Regular and crisis communication among our conferences, on Holy Land issues, ought to be expanded.

    4. Information and proposals for action ought to be extended to a wider circle of conferences and Catholic organizations. Where feasible, additional conferences ought to be invited to participate in our meetings.

    Amplification of Last Year's Proposals

    Last year's proposals remain valid. On the basis of what we have learned this last year, we make the following additional recommendations:

    1. In addition to conversion and other spiritual benefits, pilgrimages may be a sign of solidarity with the Christians of the Holy Land and a major source of their material support. While resuming pilgrimages of the faithful on a large-scale may not be possible under present circumstances, every effort should be made to encourage pilgrimages by leadership groups in the Church.

    2. The material needs of the Holy Land's Christians are urgent. We recognise the generosity of several conferences even as we understand our respective conferences are differently poised to offer material help.

    3. We believe that sharing information on how donations are used will encourage further generosity.

    4. We value the increased collaboration on the part of local and international Catholic agencies in the Holy Land. We shall endeavour to collaborate with such agencies, particularly with Caritas Internationalis.

    5. We would encourage placing the Holy Land on the agendas of the annual continental and inter-continental bishops' meetings. The Coordination should be prepared to provide information for preparation of these meetings.

    Ecumenical and Interfaith Activity

    1. We support ecumenical collaboration in efforts to express solidarity with the Christians of the Holy Land. We take particular note of relevance of 'accompaniment programmes' like that sponsored by the World Council of Churches and endorsed by the Heads of Churches in Jerusalem.

    2. Interfaith dialogue with Jews and Muslims should be enhanced. We hope the fruit of these dialogues will include reconciliation and a shared pursuit of peace.

    The Episcopal Conference Coordination in Support of the Church in the Holy Land.

    A Word of Explanation

    During the 1990s, the United States Catholic Conference had worked closely with the Holy See and the Church in the Holy Land on issues related to the Holy Land, particularly on the future of Jerusalem. In 1997, the Secretariat of State asked the USCC to coordinate its policies and activities related to the Holy Land with European conferences. In October 1998, during a meeting of bishops' conferences on Jerusalem, the presidents of American and European conferences agreed to join in an informal coordination.

    The Coordination's founding members consisted of the conferences of Canada, England and Wales, France, Germany, the United States of America, and the Council of Episcopal Conferences of Latin America and the Council of Episcopal Conferences of Europe. From the beginning, it was hoped that Italy and Spain would also join the group. Italy, along with the Bishops' Commission for the European Union (COMECE) joined at the time of the 2002 meeting in Jerusalem, and Spain at the 2003 meeting.

    From 1998 until 2003, the United States Catholic Conference served as facilitator of the Coordination. In mid-2002, the Conference of England and Wales took over primary responsibility for facilitation.

    The Coordination is an informal working group. Authority over policy related to the Holy Land lies with individual conferences and councils/commissions of conferences. The original mandate was a broad one including coordination of finances. At the founding meeting in 1998, the bishop presidents narrowed the mandate to exclude finances, with a focus primarily on advocacy, communication and education. Because of the urgency of the material needs, however, there has been increased coordination of contributions at the local level under the leadership of the Apostolic Nuncio which includes some agencies connected to national conferences. Other areas of consultation have included pilgrimages and Episcopal conference visits.

    From 1998 through 2001, the Coordination operated primarily at the staff level with staff reporting to their respective conferences. The crisis provoked by the al Aqsa Intifada made it desirable for bishop presidents and the representatives to meet once again both to express solidarity with the Christians of the Holy Land and to formalise the ties between the conferences at the level of Episcopal leadership. In 2002, the participants agreed to meet every year as long as the crisis continued. In 2003, expecting a continuation of the crisis, they agreed to meet again in January 2004 in a meeting that would allow them to spend additional time with the faithful of the Holy Land.

• 20/01/03 CALLING SENIOR FOOTBALLERS
  

  • As part of its work to promote cross participation between parish centres, the Archdiocesan Clubs department is launching this year an over 30’s seniors 5-a-side football league to be played at the Powerleague Soccer Centre in Everton.

    Ricky Davies from Club Management Services describes the initiative:

    ‘We are looking for around 12 teams to be split into 2 leagues of 6. The teams will battle for promotion and relegation and we envisage many prizes and spin offs.’

    The Archdiocese already runs open age 5-a-side competitions the latest winners, St William of York, Crosby (picture below).

    

    Ricky Davies added: ‘we have now staged two competitions and St William’s ‘A’ team have won them both - despite very good competition. Their ‘B’ team even managed to come runners up in the Christmas competition.

    ‘The prizes provided by Carling, Carlsberg and Castelmaine XXXX have accumulated over £700 worth of free bar drinks to the winning team.

    We have fabulous prizes - but they all seem to be going in the same direction - St William’s. The challenge is out to other teams to take their crown away’.

    Anyone interested in putting a team into the competitions listed above should contact any local parish centre manager for an entry form. Enquiries from existing seniors/open age teams are also welcome.

    For further information contact Ricky Davies Tel: 0151 522 1033

• 04/02/03 ARCHDIOCESAN BODIES ENDORSE BISHOPS’ CONFERENCEON MILITARY ACTION IN IRAQ
  

  • The Liverpool Archdiocesan Council for Evangelisation meeting on Saturday 1 February 2003 at the Liverpool Archdiocesan Centre for Evangelisation and the Deans of the Archdiocese of Liverpool, meeting on Tuesday 4 February 2003 at St Oswald and St Edmund Arrowsmith Parish, Ashton-in-Makerfield, felt bound, at this critical moment, to make their own the November 2002 Statement of the Bishops of England and Wales about Iraq and the insistence of Pope John Paul that war is not the way to solve differences between nations.

    Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales: Military Action against Iraq

    1. War is a route from which there is no return. The need to avoid war is a cornerstone of Christian teaching. The UK and the USA are currently preparing to send their armed forces into war. If there is war, as well as military casualties on both sides thousands of Iraqi civilians will die. It is our moral responsibility to avoid this war unless, in the face of a grave and imminent threat, there is no other possible means to achieve the just end of disarming Iraq.

    2. Military action can only be a last resort. We recognise United Nations Security Council Resolution 1441 as the legitimate expression of the international community's collective determination to disarm Iraq. At the same time we strongly urge the international community to pursue alternatives to war before it is too late.

    3. Sanctions have not worked. They have imposed a decade of misery on ordinary people whilst allowing an exploitative regime to sustain itself in power. It is time to find a policy that offers Iraq a positive incentive to comply with the demands of the Security Council. In return for genuine disarmament, monitored and verified by the United Nations, the lifting of comprehensive sanctions, and the reintegration of Iraq into the international community, is the route which must now be explored.

    4. Grief for those killed and wounded in war will be the more agonising if their loss results from an armed conflict that could have been avoided without compromise to the common good. We pray that both sides step back from the brink of war. Along with our fellow bishops in other countries we ask our Catholic community and all people of faith to join us in this prayer.

• 08/02/03 MASS OF ORDINATION OF REV PHILIP GREGORY
  

  • Introduction to Mass and Homily preached by the Most Reverend Patrick Kelly, Archbishop of Liverpool, at the Mass of Ordination of Rev Philip Gregory Saturday 8 February 2003. 2.00 pm at Holy Family RC Church, Boothstown.

    Introduction to Mass:

    Today two gifts come to completion: but that completion means something new begins. The first gift that is completed is this: for four weeks, day-by-day, we have received at Mass the letter to the Hebrews. That letter spells out: what is authentic prayer? What is praise; worship in spirit and in truth? What is priesthood, vestment, ritual, hymns all about. The scene is therefore complete to ordain Philip Gregory. And the second gift now completed is his surrender to the Holy Spirit, forming him, through so many people, in so many ways, that today’s step is, well, almost ordinary, no fuss; just right, natural, good, and meant for now. So the word of God today shall form, inspire the prayer with which we will be one with Philip as the Holy Spirit turns him into whatever is acceptable to him. But we too need to turn, to be converted: we ask to be forgiven.

    Homily:

    Philip, for the first time at an ordination, I begin, not sharing, breaking open the word, this day’s deed with everyone around you. Today’s word of God must begin with you. For you have, at one with our Lord, seen the large crowds, you have taken pity on them because they are like sheep without a shepherd. You have seen eyes that have no joy, you have heard aimless chatter with no depth, just frittering away wasted hours; you have seen the furrowed brow, the distracted look that says: what is the point? Why bother? Harassed and dejected.

    And so your are willing to see in all that a call from the same Lord who called Samuel: you are willing to teach them to form them in word and sacrament; the Lord set himself to teach them at some length. Philip that length shall be for your whole life’s length. And it shall not be lots of words, but rich, nourishing words; not lengthy, tedious, drawn out self-indulgent celebrations, but each one just its own right length: the appropriate music; the necessary hymn, the essential silence, to break open this word, to enter into this sacrifice of praise at this moment. It would be wonderful to say with Gandalf: a wizard is never late: he arrives always at the right moment. So shall be your words.

    But now, I must ensure that all of us here appreciate what today means for us. We sing: we see vestments; we are in a beautiful place. But the completed letter to the Hebrews has opened our hearts and eyes to this: on the first Good Friday the temple in Jerusalem was magnificent; glorious vessels; gorgeous vestments; splendid rituals. But the letter has taught us: the deepest praise was on Calvary; the most beautiful sound was the weeping of the women; the most glorious vessel was the rock of Golgotha that I pondered last month, that received the blood of the Lord. And so we endorse Philip’s decision today by realising: ‘Keep doing good works and sharing your resources: these are sacrifices that please God.’ And as he, with me and all your priests, know we must one day give an account of the way we look after your souls, make this a joy for us, not a grief, or you yourselves would be the losers.

    But, that shall not be: Philip, we stand beside you today above all convinced of this:

    ‘The God of peace, of completion, of wholeness, of health of body, mind, spirit, who brought Our Lord Jesus back even from the dead, to become the great Shepherd of the sheep, will make us ready to do his will in any kind of good action. So shall our worship today be gathered into an unending sacrifice of praise, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.’

• 09/02/03 ANNUAL CIVIC MASS AT LIVERPOOL METROPOLITAN CATHEDRAL
  

  • The annual Civic Mass will be celebrated by the Archbishop of Liverpool, the Most Reverend Patrick Kelly, this Sunday, 9 February 2003. The Mass will begin at 11.00 am in the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King, Liverpool. The Archbishop will preach the sermon.

    The Service will be attended by the Lord Mayor of Liverpool, Councillor Jack Spriggs, who will read the first lesson from the Book of Job (58:1-4, 6-7).

    His Honour Judge John Morgan, representing the Honorary Recorder of Liverpool, will read the second lesson from the first letter of St Paul to the Corinthians (9:16-19,22-23).

    The Gospel reading will be taken from St Mark (1:29-39)

    Other Civic Leaders present will include:

    The Mayor and Mayoress of St Helens: Councillor and Mrs J A Brown
    The Mayor and Mayoress of Knowsley: Councillor and Mrs D Friar
    The Mayor and Mayoress of Maghull: Councillor Mrs J Day and Mrs J Blackburn
    The Mayor and Mayoress of Halton: Councillor and Mrs G Redican
    The Mayor of Wigan: Councillor G Roberts
    The Mayor and Mayoress of Warrington: Councillor and Mrs G Warburton
    The Deputy Mayor of Sefton: Councillor A Hill
    The Chairman of Lancashire County Council: Councillor Mrs V Hopley
    The Sheriff of Chester and the Sheriff’s Lady: Councillor and Mrs E Walley
    The Lord Mayor of Hale village
    Representing the Vice Chairman of West Lancashire District Council: Mr T L Abernethy
    
    Deputy Lord Lieutenant of Merseyside: Mr John Fennell
    
    The High Sheriff of Merseyside: Lady Kirsty Pilkington
    
    

    Members of Parliament:

    Joe Benton MP
    Peter Kilfoyle MP
    
    

    Circuit Judges:

    Judge Denis, Clarke Judge Clifton, Judge Macmillan,
    Judge Steel DL, Judge George, Judge Phipps,
    Judge Daley, Judge Swift, Judge Bernstein
    
    

    District Judges:

    Judge Dignan, Judge Donnelly, Judge Coffey
    
    

    Retired Judges:

    His Honour Judge Paterson, His Honour Judge Wickham
    
    

    Magistrates:

    Mr H Wyn Jones: Chairman, Liverpool Magistrates
    Mrs V A Snowling: Chairman, St Helens Magistrates
    Mr I Clark: Chairman, South Sefton Magistrates
    Mr M Redfearn: Chairman, Wirral Magistrates
    H M Winik: Deputy Chairman, Liverpool Magistrates
    Mr R P Stam: Deputy Chairman, South Sefton Magistrates
    Mr J S Sedgwick: Deputy Chairman, St Helens Magistrates
    Mr M McManus: Deputy Chairman, St Helens Magistrates
    Mr D Marley: Deputy Chairman, St Helens Magistrates
    Mr B Worster-Davis: Deputy Chairman, St Helens Magistrates
    Mr D Price: Wirral Magistrates
    Liz Killian: Area Administrator, Wirral Magistrates
    
    

    Former Lord Mayor of Liverpool:

    Councillor Roger Johnston, Councillor Gerard Scott, Councillor Frank Doran
    
    

    Former High Sheriffs of Merseyside:

    Colonel Mary Creagh, Colonel Sir Gerard McClellan, Mrs Anita Samuels
    Sir Kenneth Stoddart, Mrs J Wotherspoon, Mrs D Morgan
    
    

    Armed Forces

    Commodore J E V Madgwick, Lieutenant Kitney, Colonel M G C Amlot
    Major T P Pink, Colonel Mrs Wells-Cole
    
    

    City Councillors:

    Councillor M Storey, Councillor V Best, Councillor F Clucas
    Councillor C Curry, Councillor D Gavin, Councillor P Maloney
    Councillor P Millea, Councillor H Williams
    
    

    Council Officers:

    Liverpool City Council: Mrs A Shepperd
    The Chief Executive of St Helens Borough Council: Mrs Carole Hudson
    Liverpool City Coroner: Mr André Rebello
    
    

    Members of the Consular Corps:

    Mrs N Bertali - Italian Consul
    Mr W J Hannaford - Mexican Consul
    Mr H Alcock - Consul of the Philippines
    
    

    Other guests attending include:

    Mr James Benson: Vice-President of Liverpool Law Society
    Professor Simon Lee and Mrs Patricia Lee: Liverpool Hope University College
    Donald Ritchie and Mrs Ritchie: Senior Pro-Vice Chancellor Liverpool University
    Mrs Hodgkiss: President of Liverpool Society of Chartered Accountants
    Mr B Lawson: Assistant Chief Constable
    Mr Hagen: Deputy Chief Fire Officer
    Mr David Bradbury: Probation Office
    Mr David Mahon: Editor, ‘Catholic Pictorial’
    
    

    In addition there will be representatives from local Catholic High schools and seventy-six representatives from local Catholic Societies working in the Archdiocese of Liverpool.

    The Choir and Orchestra of the Metropolitan Cathedral will be taking part in the music of the Mass under the Director of Music Mr Mervyn Cousins. The music will include the Gloria, Sanctus and Agnus Dei from the Mass in G by Schubert; Handel’s motet ‘Their sound is gone out’ and Sonata in D and the hymns ‘Thou whose almighty word’ words by Marriott, music by Giardini; ‘God is Love’words by Rees, music by Rowlands and ‘Now thank we all our God’ words by Rinkart, music by Cruger.

    
    
• 09/02/03 ANNUAL CIVIC MASS - INTRODUCTION AND HOMILY
  

  • Introduction to Mass and Homily preached by the Most Reverend Patrick Kelly, Archbishop of Liverpool, at the annual Civic Mass in the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King, Liverpool: Sunday 9 February 2003 at 11.00 am.

    Introduction to Mass:

    For three reasons I must be grateful to the Lord Mayor and all of you who choose to accept the invitation to the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King for his year's Civic Mass. We see in this your recognition of the contribution made by the faith communities to the well-being of so many women, men and children. Then we accept the request you are making to us to pray for all you do out of concern for others. Last, but by no means least, it is so good to say ‘thank you’ for your willingness to undertake the often searching demands of public service.

    The word of God read across the Roman Catholic Churches of the world today will invite us to open our minds and hearts to grief, to those sick in body, mind, spirit. That we may accept that judging, healing, renewing word, we ask forgiveness for all hardness of heart.

    Homily:

    The compassion of Jesus for the sick, those deeply troubled in heart and mind. I rejoice that it is a similar compassion, a sensitivity to grief that inspires and sustains so much public service. And the deeper the compassion, the more aware the sensitivity to the grief and its causes, the more likely it will flow into political action, to campaign, protest, refusal to be silent. It would be no surprise that a willingness to be as compassionate as was Jesus of Nazareth, will flow into politics, to civic action and service.

    But the gift we all receive on this particular Sunday is quite specific: it may question some feelings in our hearts, but I am sure it will in the end prove liberating and set us free from what can be stifling ambition. The gift is in this. The healings of Jesus brought him success; the whole town crowding round the door. He had a captive audience. But then he does not do what people like me are tempted not to do: enjoy the fame; seize the moment of power; make the most of the limelight. It is clear he felt that desire, was sorely tempted. But: ‘In the morning, long before dawn, he got up and left the house, and went off to a lonely place and prayed there’. And so when Simon and his companions, heady with success said: ‘Everyone is looking for you,’ his response is deliberate, strong, extraordinary: ‘Let's go elsewhere’.

    I think of the line in T.S.Eliot's mighty play ‘Murder in the Cathedral’. Thomas of Canterbury describes this as the greatest temptation and treason: to do the right action for the wrong reason.

    The liberating gift of the Lord Jesus to us all today is liberation from that ambition that can come between us and commitment only to the common good. Each one of us here has been stirred by compassion and enabled to heal injustice, to bring light where minds are darkened by ignorance or prejudice, to raise up where insecurity, poverty, sickness of body or spirit becomes a fearful burden. But we also dare to accept this fact about ourselves: we are enabled, in Saint Paul's words today to: ‘make ourselves the slave of everyone...weak with the weak...all things to all in order to heal, make whole, save some at any cost.’

    And it seems to me, anyone seriously, consistently, selflessly engaged in public service, even though they may not know it, still less claim it, can look forward with St Paul to share in the Gospel's blessing; and that blessing is joy, peace, life that nothing can destroy.

    
    
• 18/02/03 OBITUARY OF REV JOHN JAMES WHITE
  
  • Born: 24 February 1936
    Ordained: 29 October 1961
    Died: 15 February 2003
    
    

    John James White was born on 24 February 1936 in Bootle, the son of Gerald and Kathleen White. He was born into a seafaring family as his father served in the Merchant Navy with distinction during the Second World War; John was later to proudly display his father’s medals in his presbytery, and continued the family tradition by working for much of his priestly life in the pastoral care of seafarers and their families. John’s early education was at St Peter and St Paul School and at St Francis de Sales School in Liverpool. He studied for the priesthood at St Joseph’s College, Upholland, and at the English College, Rome, and was ordained to the priesthood in Rome on 29 October 1961.

    Following ordination his first appointment was as assistant Priest at St Oswald and St Edmund, Ashton in Makerfield; moving to St Bede, Widnes in 1965. His appointment as Port Chaplain to Atlantic House, Liverpool in 1968 saw the beginning of a long association with the Apostleship of the Sea and in 1973 he was appointed Resident Chaplain at Stella Maris, Bootle. It was during this time that he visited ships in the Port of Liverpool to celebrate Mass each Sunday, often in Italian or Spanish as the needs of the seafarers required. He also served in the Royal Navy Reserve and during the Falklands conflict in 1982 he spent some time in Portsmouth caring for the families of those serving in the South Atlantic.

    In 1985 he was appointed Parish Priest of Sacred Heart, Liverpool and in 1990 took up active service with the Royal Navy, serving as Chaplain in both Plymouth and Rosyth, Scotland. He returned to the Archdiocese in 1992 to take up what was to be his final appointment as Parish Priest of St Thomas of Canterbury, Waterloo. As with many who serve at sea he will be remembered for a wealth of stories and anecdotes of seafaring life. He will be especially remembered for the care he gave not only to those at sea but also to those left behind at home.

    He died peacefully at home with his family in Bootle in the early hours of Saturday 15 February 2003 following a long illness. May he rest in peace.

    His body will be received into St Thomas of Canterbury church, Waterloo, for Mass at 7.30pm on Monday 24 February. His Funeral Mass will be celebrated at 11.00am on Tuesday 25 February at St Thomas of Canterbury, prior to interment at Ford Cemetery.

• 23/02/03 BROTHERS OF CHARITY CENTENARY HOMILY
  

  • Introduction to Mass and Homily preached by the Most Reverend Patrick Kelly, Archbishop of Liverpool, at Mass to celebrate the centenary of the work of the Brothers of Charity on Merseyside. Sunday 23 February 2003 at 3.00 pm in the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King, Liverpool

    Introduction to Mass:

    ‘Give me joy; give me peace; give me love; give me oil.’ This afternoon we are giving thanks for gifts of the Holy Spirit: joy in praising God, not ourselves; peace in resting, not resisting the purposes of God; love, not in dominating; oil, the anointing not of the world's controlling power, or the world's superficial beauty, but the anointing seen in Jesus crucified: strength by forgiving: beauty of selflessness. Not least with Brother Rene Stocknan, the worldwide leader of the Congregation of the Brothers of Charity, we give thanks for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit through the Brothers of Charity for one hundred years on Merseyside.

    Homily:

    ‘God's love had been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.’ That explains what we are doing today. When Saint Paul wrote those words he meant: the love with which God loves each one of us is now at work in us: in us God loves: we are so wonderfully the friends of Jesus that now Jesus is serving others through us. We can now love one another exactly as Jesus loves us.

    And it is that love, that Charity, which has been seen among us for one hundred years here on Merseyside through the Brothers of Charity. But because that love, that Charity, is God's own loving, poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, we do not stop our thanks today with the Brothers and those countless women and men who have been caught up in their story: no: because such love, such Charity is a gift, a wonder of the Holy Spirit, we gladly accepted the words proclaimed from the book of Ecclesiasticus by Mr Nigel Deane: ‘Bless the God of all things, the doer of great deeds everywhere.’

    And because this love is not our own proud do-gooding, because this Charity is not an attempt to make ourselves feel good, it goes hand in hand with the words proclaimed by Brother John O'Shea: ‘be clothed in sincere compassion, in kindness and humility, gentleness and patience: forgive each other.’

    Indeed we have seen our Lord's words fulfilled among us: ‘You did not choose me, no I chose you and I commissioned you go out and bear fruit, fruit that will last.’

    Therefore, with peaceful, joyful, wondering hearts in this Mass, we give thanks to God the Father, through his Son our Lord, inspired by the Holy Spirit from whose gift alone comes love, Charity worthy of the name.

• 25/02/03 HOMILY AT THE FUNERAL MASS OF REV JOHN JAMES WHITE
  

  • Introduction to Mass and Homily preached by the Most Reverend Patrick Kelly, Archbishop of Liverpool, at the Funeral Mass of Rev John James White. 11.00 am on Tuesday 25 February 2003 in the Church of St Thomas of Canterbury, Waterloo.

    Introduction to Mass:

    Assured by the kind, never cynical smile, set free by his light-hearted but whole hearted living of his dying, inspired by the selfless, gracious, generous hospitality of his sisters and brother for him, for me and all who visited him, I dare to say: I am invited by the Lord to inspire fitting remembering, grateful, confident prayer for, well, is it Sean, Chuck, or is it John? Sean to his family; Chuck to us who were his fellow students in Rome; John, well, to most others. We will find the word of God proclaimed this day across the whole Catholic world will enable us to pray God speed for Sean, Chuck, John on his best of all voyages.

    Homily:

    Sean: inspired by his family to walk this way of life, set out by the word of God today: ‘Be sincere of heart, be steadfast…Cling to him and do not leave him…Trust him and he will uphold you, follow a straight path and hope in him.’ A straight path: not least fidelity to the salt in his veins and his service to seafarers and those dear to them. The presence of those of you who represent the Royal Navy among us today means so much, not least to Sean’s family.

    But above all, it seems to me, his sisters and brother who enabled him to accept this word too from the Lord: ‘Be sincere of heart, be steadfast, and do not be alarmed when disaster comes; whatever happens to you, accept it, and in the uncertainties of your humble state, be patient, fine gold is tested in the fire, and chosen men in the furnace of humiliation.’

    To the girls, as Sean called you, to Tony, in the name of us all, many, many heartfelt, admiring thanks. You will for a time, precisely because you held him at the very centre of your life, miss him severely. We will not forget you.

    And what about John White? One day Jesus had to ask the Twelve: ‘What were you arguing about on the road?’ They said nothing because they had been arguing which of them was the greatest. No need for John to be silent about what mattered most to him on his road. His focus, not least among you the people of the parish of the martyr Saint Thomas of Canterbury, was not himself. It was only: the Son of Man, delivered into the hands of men, put to death…and three days later risen again. One ambition he did not see fulfilled was his longing to keep with you the Christmas Feast; the birth as a child of him who said, taking a little child, and putting his arms around him, ‘Anyone who welcomes one of these little children in my name, welcomes me.’

    Finally, what does God’s word say to us who lived with Chuck during formation for ordination? The goal of those days in Rome was this: to make us like the Lord. ‘For the Lord is compassionate, and merciful, he forgives sin and saves in days of distress.’ We were being formed to have such a heart that there could be entrusted to us and then hold day by day the cup of the Lord’s Supper. On our ordination day that cup was handed on to us with this commission: ‘Agnoscite quod agitis; imitamini quod tractatis.’ ‘Be fully aware of what you are doing; imitate what you handle.’ What we do is: ‘Do this in memory of me.’ What we handle is: my body given for you; the cup of my blood poured out for you and for all.

    Chuck, thank you for showing us how: ‘If anyone want to be first, he must make himself, last of all and servant of all.’ As the Lord promised in his word today: ‘You will not be balked of your reword. You who feared the Lord, your hope for good things, will not be disappointed, but everlasting happiness and mercy shall be yours.’

• 02/03/03 PASTORAL LETTER
  

  • To be read at all Masses in all Churches and Chapels of the Archdiocese on the Eighth Sunday of the Year 2 March 2003

    My dear people,
    
    

    I am preparing this message on Friday 7 February. Tomorrow the United Nations Inspectors return to Iraq. Three days ago, the Secretary of State of the United States of America, Colin Powell, presented to the United Nations, a case against Saddam Hussein. Yesterday the Defence Secretary of this country, Geoff Hoon, informed parliament about the deployment of the RAF in the Gulf. Two days ago, at primary schools in Lydiate, I asked how many children in classes of about 30, had close relatives in the Armed Services; at least seven hands went up in each class.

    What the situation will be by the time you receive this, I simply do not know.

    But whatever the situation is, I have no doubt what I must commend to you today. It is going to sound all wrong, but I ask you to bear with me. I ask you as never before to accept the gift of Lent and seize hold of every opportunity to make the weeks of Lent very, very different. Despite the present crisis, or better, because of it, I do not ask you to campaign, start discussion groups, raise money. I ask you: see Lent as leading to one person, one time and one place. It is to lead to Jesus, to his final days, to his last supper in an upper room on a Thursday evening, to his death on a hill called Calvary on a Friday, to his burial in a garden nearby in the heart of Jerusalem. The challenge of Lent is this: not to come to the Easter Vigil with our hands full of our good deeds, not even with money raised for those in greatest need. Lent is to bring us fasting, empty handed, thirsting for new life, new birth of water and the Holy Spirit; for things we cannot achieve for and by ourselves.

    Lent is about fulfilling the promise we receive today through the prophet Hosea: ‘You will come to know the Lord.’

    Above all, in words we will receive when we go out of our way to begin Lent by going to Mass on Wednesday, Ash Wednesday: we need to know again this fact: ‘God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.’ Reconciliation, peace, justice are first and foremost deeds of God in his Son our Lord, Jesus Christ and in him crucified.

    Above all we must approach the challenges of injustice, war, terrorism, greed, as those who know their own need of God. It is perhaps the most staggering example of our arrogance that we can look round us and not be gentle and lowly heart, faced by so much folly and brash confidence, so much failure hand with hand with noisy pride and self-assurance.

    So: welcome Lent. Welcome the patterns of prayer various groups are providing for us to use across the diocese for each week. And these gifts they are preparing, will carry us on through the whole of Eastertide. It is in the seven weeks of Easter, that, renewed at the Easter vigil as those born again of water and the Holy Spirit, we shall see good deeds worthy of God’s children. We shall see flourish from deep, wonderful resources, justice, peace, selflessness, nothing less than love divine. I mean that love which flowed from the pierced heart of the only Son of God, on a Friday, on Calvary, at three o’clock one spring afternoon, in Jerusalem.

    Yours devotedly in Christ,

    Patrick Kelly

    Archbishop of Liverpool

• 05/03/03 ASH WEDNESDAY MASS
  

  • Introduction to Mass and Homily preached by the Most Reverend Patrick Kelly, Archbishop of Liverpool, at Ash Wednesday Mass. 12.10 pm on 5 March 2003 at the Blessed Sacrament Shrine, Liverpool.

    Introduction to Mass:

    Ash Wednesday: The Lord will call out to us: he will give us a stirring challenge through the prophet Joel. Ash Wednesday. St Paul will set us out on the road and this road only: to come to a Friday afternoon at three o’clock and see the sinless one made into sin: to move onwards to Easter Night and at the great vigil and find ourselves born again: become the goodness of God. Ash Wednesday: the Lord himself will set out in what spirit we will give to those in need, pray more often, and fast.

    But now let us pray in quiet need of forgiveness, healing, renewal, in a word of a Redeemer.

    Homily:

    Today all of us must defend ourselves for disobeying our Lord. And then I must defend myself for personally disobeying him.

    First all of us: he said: wash your faces when you fast: we will leave this Mass with black ash on our foreheads for all to see.

    Jesus said: pray secretly. But yet again we cause chaos outside the shrine and everyone knows on bus, in taxi or near the wine-lodge: it’s them Catholics: they’re at their prayers again.

    How dare we disobey? Because we know the great dangers for our days: the danger is not that people will fast to show off: the danger is they will not fast: but live that easy, noisy, fearful way: eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die. For love of them all, out of compassion, today we publicly wear the cross of ash.

    The danger in our day is not proud, conceited, displayed prayer. The danger is prayer-less lives Mass-less lives: lives: no flesh and blood of Jesus lives. Today and all Lent out of love for all, we will be seen, noticed going to Mass more often. My late father, when he discovered our neighbours were Catholic who didn’t go to Mass told us to slam the doors as we set off for early Mass.

    Then the defence I must make for disobeying Jesus. This Lent I am trying to say: in Lent don’t focus on giving alms: don’t see Lent as a time for us to raise money for those in need. It sounds like disobeying him. My reason: Lent is not first about us and any good we do. It is to bring us to give Holy Week and Holy Saturday night to our Lord and him alone. Lent will deepen our longing to come together on Maundy Thursday night, hungry, thirsting for him: to Good Friday, held in silence by his love; the Easter Vigil ready for renewed life of water and the Holy Spirit.

    We will receive the ashes: his gift: our public ‘yes’ to him as we leave Mass. But now once more his last supper, his death, his risen life are among us as we obey his word of love: Do this in memory of me.

• 05/03/03 ASH WEDNESDAY EVENING PRAYER
  

  • Homily preached by the Most Reverend Patrick Kelly, Archbishop of Liverpool, at Ash Wednesday Evening Prayer with Priests. 3.00 pm on 5 March 2003 in the Crypt of the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King, Liverpool.

    Keep on working: let me put with this word under which we as priests begin Lent this year, the words: do everything without complaining, that is working through the narrows, the heaviness: the necessities.

    Now and again the word work in the New Testament has the feel of heavy labour: laborious. It has that feel in the wonderful dialogues at the well in Samaria entrusted to us in the fourth Chapter of Saint John’s gospel. The Lord sends his disciples to a harvest others have laboured to accomplish: above all his labour on the cross. For God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, hauling it round, heaving it back, struggling, striving to halt and turn round headlong, corrupt feelings and desires. It is the labour of his descent into hell, our hell of din, strident emotions, our hell of distracted aimlessness: the hell of my name is Legion: no focus: no one kindly light, but the light as of blinding flashing strobes, disco-style.

    And labour comes at the end of the longest chapter in St. Paul’s first Letter to the Corinthians (1 Corinthians 15) the fruit of so discerning the death of the Lord, is to know him bodily risen: and all heavy, sustained, laborious labour, is not in vain in Jesus risen, whole in body, mind, emotions, feelings. Serene: harmony, shalom.

    Words like discipline belong in Lent: working at our salvation. The discipline of such a pattern of sleep that we work at prayer. I have yet to be convinced that Michael Ivens, SJ, was stating an oddity when he said: I have only met three people of serious prayer who didn’t pray before breakfast.

    But we work with fear and trembling. Not the fear of anxiety or the trembling fearing critical assessment. But fear and trembling because we are labouring on holy ground, to accomplish wonderful things, ‘for God is always at work in us to make us willing and able to obey his own purpose’. The first gift is to discern what God is at work to accomplish in us this Lent. It can be good to use the next days in this way: ponder the renewal of priestly promises we will make at the Mass of Chrism: ponder the promises of those renewed on Easter Night to be ‘innocent and pure as God’s perfect children’. Discern what is the Lenten journey that will enable me to work with God’s work, labour with God’s labouring, struggle within his Son’s reconciling, hauling round, dragging upwards, so that those two acts of promises will flow from heart, mind, emotions, feelings, desires renewed. So shall we under God’s word and in the light of the Spirit set out our Lenten self-denial, prayer, generosity to others.

    In a word, we shall surrender again to the Lenten – Paschal, Pentecostal prayer that sustains our ordained life: Innova in viserbus erum Spiritum Sanctatis: Renew within them the Spirit of Holiness.

• 05/03/03 MASS FOR THE NOVENA OF GRACE
  

  • Introduction to Mass and Homily preached by the Most Reverend Patrick Kelly, Archbishop of Liverpool, at Mass for the Novena of Grace. Ash Wednesday, 5 March 2003, at 7.30 pm in St Mary’s Church, Lowe House, St Helens.

    Introduction to Mass:

    Ash Wednesday Novena of Grace. I think of all of us seeking to deepen this year’s Novena of Grace here at Lowe House, I have the easiest task. Novena of Grace: nine days to ponder: God loves, heals, renews us beyond all deserving: we are free to expect wonderful blessings of new life, stronger service, deeper peace, more abundant than all we can even imagine. And Ash Wednesday is just that: first of all: through the prophet Joel God takes the initiative to give us the repentance, the joyful penitential way of Lent. St Paul, as we will see more fully later, proclaims the amazing deed of God. And the Lord himself sets us free from all judgment except of someone called Father. But now let us pray in quiet, yes, confident need of redemption, forgiveness, healing, of a Redeemer, a Saviour, a Jesus.

    Homily:

    Here, at Lowe House, during the Novena of grace, I have no choice about what I must invite you to ponder, to appreciate, to be the guiding purpose of this Lent. I may, indeed must, as regards more generous giving, deeper prayer, heartfelt and unspectacular fasting, leave you with the words of the Lord Jesus: all is focussed on his Father and ours. I must return to St Paul’s words: For our sake God made the sinless one into sin so that in him we might become the holiness of God.

    Perhaps, perhaps mercy, forgiveness need not have caused surprise. But we are not told about some vague cloud of mercy, a mist of forgiveness, an atmosphere of benevolence. We are here because we accept much, much more. We do not only know, love, serve a God who spoke a word of forgiveness over us. We know and love and follow a God who asked his Son to take on himself our sin. Jesus came closer to us in our sin than we are to ourselves: he feels our temptation: he understands our hard heart: our bitter spirit: our sick desires: our shameful feelings: not from a safe distance but as if they were his very own. He feels as if it were his own our distance from God. Because he is utterly unselfish without sin, he alone can forget himself and not impose his feelings on us: he enters in silent, listening, attentive, still. God made the sinless one into sin.

    Lent is to bring us to him: better to enable us to forget our goodness or sin, and just let Jesus in. He will cry our cry: eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani: My God, My God, why have you forsaken me. He will descend into our hell, into any hell we have inflicted on others, sit there, listen there, feel there: take our hand there and raise us up. So shall we become nothing less than the goodness of God.

    Novena of Grace: nine days to ponder: God does wonderful, undeserved things. Nine days of foster in us this longing: to keep Holy Week with the Lord: to come together for the night of his last supper: to be around the cross at three o’clock on Good Friday. Above all, to keep watch at the Easter Vigil of Easter Night: unexpected gentle light: wonderful new, renewed life as children of God: peace the world cannot give: joy, nothing can destroy.

• 20/03/03 Statement issued on the commencement of armed conflict in Iraq
  

  • Statement issued by the Most Reverend Patrick Kelly, Archbishop of Liverpool, on the commencement of armed conflict in Iraq.

    However strange it may seem I feel the focus of our hearts and minds must not now be war and peace but life and death. I am grateful for the way in which Pope John Paul has taught us not to think and speak about the whole human race but to recognise, to respect and to love every man, woman and child in their wonderful uniqueness. Now is the time to hold in prayer every single person and all those dear to them affected by what is happening in the Middle East.

    Mass to be celebrated

    Archbishop Kelly will celebrate Mass in the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King, Liverpool, at 7.30 pm to give an opportunity for prayer. Everyone is welcome to attend.

• 20/03/03 Mass on the commencement of armed conflict in Iraq
  

  • Introduction to Mass and Homily preached by the Most Reverend Patrick Kelly at Mass following the commencement of armed conflict in Iraq. Thursday 20 March 2003 at 7.30 pm in the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King, Liverpool.

    

    Readings at Mass for Thursday of the Second Week of Lent: Jeremiah 17:5-10; Psalm 1; Luke 16:19-31.

    Introduction to Mass:

    That we may pray in this time of fear, doubt, ignorance, death and suffering, we ask to be reconciled with the Lord Creator, Redeemer, Saviour of all.

    Homily:

    The prophet Jeremiah proclaimed: ‘A curse on the man who puts his trust in man, who relies on things of the flesh, whose heart turns from the Lord.’ How has the human family come to this moment in history? What has happened to all our skill, our cleverness, our power? War, the moment when any person is deliberately killed, when anyone deliberately kills another, is terrible. Each one of us is made in the image and likeness of God. The deliberate killing of any one of us challenges us to ask: where do I put my trust? Can our wisdom, our powers, our resources of hand, heart, mind, accomplish justice and peace? We need what we now do: celebrate the Mass and surrender all we have and are to be caught up into the prayer, the sacrifice, the pleading of Jesus, the Son of God, whose death on the cross is the great deed of reconciliation and peace.

    And the uncertainty of this day, the unexpected nature of how action began, may stir strange feelings in our heart. Did anything in us want a spectacular beginning? It is good that the word of God has space for the complexity of our heart today: ‘The heart is more devious than any other thing, perverse too; who can pierce its secrets?’ We pray, inspired by the psalms: ‘Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts. See if there is any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way of everlasting life.’

    In this Cathedral, we are always reminded, by that banner, of Pentecost Sunday 1982. Here, that day, Pope John Paul called us to forgiveness, reconciliation. One sign of that was his walk along Hope Street to our sister Cathedral. Bishop James has asked to be one with us this evening, with these words sent from the United States:

    ‘I am particularly conscious while I am in America at this moment of the tension throughout the world. Together with all Christian leaders I urge that people of faith should pray earnestly for the leaders of the world, especially for George Bush, Tony Blair and Saddam Hussein. Pray earnestly that God would lead them swiftly into the paths of peace. Just as Jesus wept outside the City of Jerusalem saying: “If only they knew the things that made for peace” so I believe that God sheds tears for the world longing that we may know true shalom.’

    That morning of Pentecost 1982 the Pope during Mass conferred confirmation of twelve young people. The altar was surmounted by three spires reflecting the three spires left standing when Coventry's Cathedral was bombed in the Second World War; bombing which so terribly afflicted our city of Liverpool, especially around the docks. At Coventry the Pope challenged the young people to be built up into a Cathedral of peace. He said: ‘Like a cathedral, peace has to be constructed, patiently and with unshakeable faith. Wherever the strong exploit the weak, wherever the rich take advantage of the poor; wherever great powers seek to dominate...there the making of peace is undone; there the cathedral of peace is again destroyed.’

    In God's wisdom and love, on this Lenten day we receive from our Lord a story absolutely unique in all the challenging, disturbing, vivid stories he told. Today's story of the rich man and poor man begging at his gate is the only one where the whole point of the story is: this evil must be removed from the face of the earth. The gap between rich and poor. Is that the word above all others we must receive this day? The alternative is stark; that gap will destroy peace; and those who do not accept that demand have not a heart ready to receive the truth: the Lord is risen from the dead; that is: their heart is incapable of the Christian faith.

• 25/03/03 Lenten Address: ‘On the Edge...’
  

  • Lenten Address: ‘On the Edge...’ given by the Most Reverend Patrick Kelly, Archbishop of Liverpool. Liverpool Parish Church: Tuesday 25 March 2003 at 1.05 pm.

    On the Edge: that is the atmosphere chosen for our Lenten journey here at the Parish Church this year. On the Edge: Nazareth was on the edge: they used to say: ‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth’. John 1:46. But ‘when the time had fully come’ Galatians 4:4, ‘In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth’. Luke 1:2 6.

    On the edge: Mary was on the edge: her self-portrait revealed ‘low estate’…’low degree’…’hungry’. But Gabriel greeted her: ‘Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with you!’ Luke 1:28.

    On the edge: there is no rush to open mind, heart, body, to a closeness of God never before imagined. But such is the spirit the Lord God is seeking: ‘Thus says the Lord: Heaven is my throne and the earth is my footstool; what is the house that you would build for me and what is my resting place?…But this is the one to whom I will look, to the humble and contrite in spirit, who trembles at my word’. Isaiah 66:1-2.

    ‘And Mary said: “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord: let it be done to me according to your word”’. Luke 1:38.

    And so in the hill country, in a city of Judah, ‘when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the babe leapt in her womb; and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and she exclaimed with a loud cry: “Blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb”’. Luke 1:41-42.

    On the edge as the fullness of time began: captured in this poem of George Every:

    Some say that like Samuel
    taken young to the Temple,
    she slipped from her Hannah
    to dance on the step of the altar
    when she was only three.
    Others call her an orphan
    washing the stairs for a clerical
    household, completely respectable,
    where her attraction at fourteen
    proved a bit of a problem.
    Some kind old carpenter
    had to look after her.
    At least like Samuel
    In this, she listened
    No one else saw an angel.
    The word of the Lord was rare.
    Under the incantation,
    the long, melodious chanting
    she heard from the propitiation
    the voice that spoke of a son.
    
    

    It began on the edge: it only became action, word, deed for all to see in the same way.

    On the edge: a marriage feast was on the edge: ‘On the third day there was a marriage at Cana in Galilee, and the Mother of Jesus was there.’ John 2:1. The wine failed: joy, gladness, hope failed not just in Cana but for our whole human family. Mary saw, as her son so often saw, a ‘multitude of invalids’ John 5:3, ‘When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless like sheep without a shepherd’. Matthew 9:26.

    Mary sees as us on the edge and looks to her Son: ‘They have no wine’. John 2:3. But he points to what the consequence of healing, saving, renewing, gladdening action by him will be. It will be that hour of glory called Golgotha: Calvary. As it was in Nazareth. So it is at Cana: on the edge. But Mary says: ‘Do whatever he tells you.”’ John 2:5.

    On the edge: so it will be when that hour comes: Jesus ‘knelt down and prayed, “Father if you are willing remove this cup from me; nevertheless not my will, but yours, be done”. . . and being in agony he prayed more earnestly; and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down upon the ground’. Luke 22:41-44.

    On the edge: ‘At the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice: “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthami”’. Mark.15:34.

    On the edge: but finally he prayed: ‘Father. Into your hands I commit my spirit’. Luke 24:46: ‘It is accomplished’. John. 19:30.

    For as she prayed at Nazareth, as she prayed at Cana, ‘standing by the cross of Jesus was his Mother’ John 19:25, praying for him at the hour of his death.

    On the edge: Iraq: the Holy Land . . . We shall turn to her Son and say: they have no wine. This other poem of George Every called, ‘The Shroud’, shows where it means we shall go:

    ‘Dying and rising are different
    And difficult. Nothing
    Is automatic in resurrection.
    To die is to participate
    In the flesh of the whole man,
    The old and the new Adam
    Coagulated underground
    And shrouded to be shrined.
    
    ‘On every winding sheet
    Are flesh and blood in print
    As a kind of record.
    Dispersed abroad, unburied
    In years of pestilence,
    Many without penitence,
    Some bore in hands, feet, side
    Marks of the crucified.
    
    ‘How is this image made
    In us. We are afraid
    Always to go further
    From father and mother
    Into the wounded side,
    Where ever to abide
    Will always be to move
    And to be moved by love.’
    
    I am convinced we may end remembering a simple, ancient, wonderfully scriptural prayer: its name: the Angelus.
    
    The angel of the Lord declared unto Mary,
    And she conceived by the Holy Spirit.
    Hail Mary …
    Behold the handmaid of the Lord;
    Be it done unto me according to thy word.
    Hail Mary …
    And the Word was made flesh
    And dwelt amongst us.
    Hail Mary …
    Pray for us, O holy mother of God,
    That we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.
    
    Let us pray
    
    Pour forth, we beseech Thee, O Lord, Thy grace into our hearts, that we to whom the incarnation of Christ, thy Son, was made known by the message of an angel, may be brought by his passion and cross to the glory of his resurrection, through the same Christ our Lord.
    Amen.
    
    May the divine assistance remain always with us, and may the souls of the faithful departed through the mercy of God, rest in peace.
    Amen.
    
• 25/03/03 31 PRIESTS MARK JUBILEES
  

  • Silver, Ruby, Golden, Diamond and Platinum Jubilees in 2003

    

    On Monday 24 March 95 year old Monsignor Denis McDonnell led thirty-one priests from the Archdiocese of Liverpool in celebrating the jubilee of their ordination and giving thanks for a total of 1,335 years of service. There are seven priests celebrating their silver jubilee (25 years); thirteen celebrating their ruby jubilee (40 years); three celebrating their golden jubilee (50 years); seven celebrating their diamond jubilee (60 years); and. Monsignor McDonnell celebrating his platinum jubilee having given seventy years of service. A full list is attached.

    They joined with Archbishop Patrick Kelly and Auxiliary Bishop Vincent Malone for a celebration of Evening Prayer at 6.00 pm at the Archdiocesan Centre for Evangelisation on Croxteth Drive, Sefton Park. The Bishop Emeritus of Middlesbrough and former Auxiliary Bishop of Liverpool, Bishop Augustine Harris preached at the service and members of the Choir of the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King, Liverpool provided the music. Prayers were also said for all involved in the conflict in Iraq.

    Nine of the Jubilarians are now retired including the longest serving, Monsignor McDonnell, who now lives at Nazareth House, Crosby. Seventeen of them work as parish priests in the Archdiocese of Liverpool and another is in parish ministry. Monsignor Peter Cookson, the Dean of the Metropolitan Cathedral celebrates his Ruby Jubilee and the list also includes a lecturer from Ushaw College, Durham, where Monsignor Cookson was at one time President. An Army and Hospital Chaplain are marking their Silver Jubilees.

    Friends and family will joined many of them for the service on Monday evening and individual celebrations will be held throughout the rest of the year.

    Priests of the Archdiocese of Liverpool celebrating their anniversaries in 2003 are:

    Platinum Jubilee of Priesthood (1933-2003)
    Monsignor Canon Denis McDonnell (Retired)	15 June
    Diamond Jubilee of Priesthood (1943-2003)
    Fr Thomas Buckland (Retired)	6 June
    Fr Donal Coffey (Retired)	20 June
    Fr Joseph Connery (Retired)	6 June
    Fr Richard Coughlan (Retired)	13 June
    Fr Thomas Kennedy (English Martyrs Parish, Haydock)	3 June
    Canon Patrick McCannon (Retired)	6 June
    Fr Dermot O’Donoghue (Retired)	4 July
    Golden Jubilee of Priesthood (1953-2003)
    Canon Vincent Burrowes (St Lewis Parish, Croft, Warrington)	30 May
    Fr Joseph Mercer (Retired)	30 May
    Canon Kevin Mullen (St Mary’s Parish, Chorley)	30 May
    Ruby Jubilee of Priesthood (1963-2003)
    Fr Victor Bridges (Holy Angels’ Parish, Kirkby)	8 June
    Monsignor Peter Cookson (Metropolitan Cathedral Dean)	27 October
    Monsignor Anthony Dennick (Our Lady and St Joseph’s Parish, Prescot)	8 June
    Fr James Finnigan (Holy Family, Halewood)	8 June
    Fr Anthony Fleming (St Chad’s Parish, South Hill, Chorley)	8 June
    Fr John Gildea (St Peter and St Michael’s Parish, Warrington)	8 June
    Fr Joseph Kelly (St George’s Parish, Maghull)	8 June
    Fr Peter Kelly (Retired)	8 June
    Monsignor Michael McKenna (St Gregory’s Parish, Chorley)	8 June
    Fr Patrick MacNally (St Jude’s Parish, Wigan)	8 June
    Fr Peter Morgan (Our Lady and St Bernard’s Parish, Liverpool)	8 June
    Fr Brian Newns (St Edmund and St Oswald’s Parish, Ashton)	27 October
    Fr Joseph Robinson (St John the Evangelist Parish, Burscough)	8 June
    Silver Jubilee of Priesthood (1978-2003)
    Fr Stephen Alker (Senior Army Chaplain)	1 July
    Fr Francis Ball (Sacred Heart Parish, Chorley)	2 July
    Fr Christopher Fallon (Ushaw College, Durham)	9 December
    Fr Thomas Gagie (Hospital Chaplaincy)	23 July
    Fr Paul Glover (Holy Family Parish, Halewood)	5 August
    Fr George Russell (St Charles Borromeo Parish, Liverpool)	8 July
    Fr William Simpson (Our Lady, Queen of Peace, Litherland)	22 July

• 26/03/03 PRESCOT CHURCHES TO CELEBRATE
  

  • Deanery Celebration for Prescot, Whiston and Knowsley Village

    The four Roman Catholic Churches in the Prescot Deanery together with the Anglican Parish Church of St Mary, Prescot, are to hold a Celebration of Faith beginning next Sunday, 30 March, and running through the week until Sunday 6 April. The overall theme of the week is ‘The Time is Now: Time for Reflection; Time for Renewal and Time for Change’. Themes chosen to reflect the history of the watch-making area. The churches taking part are: Our Lady and St Joseph, Prescot; the Parish Church of St Mary, Prescot; St Luke, Whiston; St Leo, Whiston and St John Fisher, Knowsley Village; each church will host at least one celebration during the week.

    The Celebration opens with Mass for the anointing of the sick at 3.00 pm on Sunday 30 March in Our Lady and St Joseph’s, Prescot. Through the week some churches will be having early morning Mass and there are to be special celebrations each evening at 7.30 pm as follows:

    Monday 31 March at St Luke’s, Whiston
    with the theme ‘In the Beginning’
    
    
    
    Tuesday 1 April at Our Lady and St Joseph’s, Prescot
    with the theme ‘Who do you say I am?’
    
    
    
    Wednesday 2 April at St Mary’s Parish Church, Prescot
    with the theme ‘The Holy Spirit’
    
    
    
    Thursday 3 April at St John Fisher, Knowsley Village
    with the theme ‘Signs of the Times’
    
    Friday 4 April at St Leo’s, Whiston
    with the theme ‘Time well spent’
    
    There will be a closing Mass on Sunday 6 April at 5.00 pm at St Luke’s, Whiston
    
    The services, which will be led by members of the Catholic Missionary Society, are open to all and everyone is welcome.
    
    
• 04/04/03 LIVERPOOL CATHEDRAL - HOLY WEEK AND EASTER
  

  • METROPOLITAN CATHEDRAL OF CHRIST THE KING, LIVERPOOL HOLY WEEK AND EASTER 2003

    PALM SUNDAY: 13 APRIL
    8.30 am	Mass (Blessed Sacrament Chapel)
    10.00 am	Family Mass (Crypt)
    11.00 am	Procession with Palms and Solemn Mass - Celebrant: Archbishop Patrick Kelly (Weelkes: Hosanna to the Son of David; Duffy: Passion of the Lord – St Matthew)
    3.00 pm	Choral Evening Prayer (Allegri: Miserere mei; Gibbons: Magnificat with fauxbourdons; Gregorian Chant: Stabat Mater)
    7.00 pm	Mass (Crypt)
    MASS - MONDAY 14 APRIL, TUESDAY 15 APRIL, WEDNESDAY 16 APRIL
    8.00 am	Mass (Blessed Sacrament Chapel)
    12.15 pm	Mass (Crypt)
    5.15 pm	Mass (Blessed Sacrament Chapel)
    MONDAY 14 APRIL
    5.15 pm	Sung Mass (followed by Stations of the Cross)
    TUESDAY 15 APRIL
    5.15 pm	Sung Mass (Tallis: Lamentations)
    WEDNESDAY 16 APRIL
    7.30 pm	Mass of Chrism - Celebrant: Archbishop Patrick Kelly (Elgar: The Spirit of the Lord; Parry: I was glad; Rutter: For the beauty of the earth)
    MAUNDY THURSDAY: 17 APRIL
    10.00 am	Office of Readings and Morning Prayer
    7.30 pm	Mass of the Lord's Supper and Washing of the Feet; Celebrant: Archbishop Patrick Kelly (Byrd: Mass for five voices; Durufle: Tantum ergo)
    GOOD FRIDAY: 18 APRIL
    10.00 am	Sung Office of Readings and Morning Prayer (Purcell: Hear my prayer; Byrd: Emendenus in melius; Bruckner: Christus factus est)
    11.30 am	Stations of the Cross led by Archbishop Patrick Kelly
    12.00 Noon-1.00pm and after the 3.00 pm Service	Sacrament of Reconciliation
    3.00 pm	Celebration of the Lord's Passion led by Archbishop Patrick Kelly (Duffy: Passion of the Lord; Ireland: Ex ore innocentium; Mawby: The Reproaches; Lotti: Crucifixus)
    HOLY SATURDAY: 19 APRIL
    10.00 am	Office of Readings and Morning Prayer
    11.00 am-12.00 Noon 3.30-4.30 pm	Sacrament of Reconciliation
    9.00 pm	The Easter Vigil and First Mass of Easter - Celebrant: Archbishop Patrick Kelly (Langlais: Messe Solennelle; Cousins: Dextera Domini; Taverner: Dum transisset Sabbatum)
    EASTER DAY: SUNDAY 20 APRIL
    8.30 am	Mass (Blessed Sacrament Chapel)
    10.00 am	Family Mass (Crypt) - Celebrant: Archbishop Patrick Kelly
    11.00 am	Solemn Mass of Easter (with choir and orchestra)(Mozart: Mass in C K164; Byrd: Haec Dies)
    3.00 pm	Solemn Baptismal Evening Prayer (Shephard: Haec Dies; Vaughan Williams: Rise, heart; Statham: Magnificat in E minor; Lotti: Regina coeli)
    7.00 pm	Mass (Crypt)
    EASTER MONDAY: 21 APRIL
    12.15 pm	Mass (Crypt)

• 10/04/03 HOMILY AT THE FUNERAL OF REV CHARLES HOLLYWOOD
  

  • Homily preached by the Most Reverend Patrick Kelly, Archbishop of Liverpool, at the Funeral Mass of Rev Charles Hollywood. Saint Patrick’s, Livesey Street, Manchester on Thursday 10 April 2003.

    Readings at Mass from the Lectionary for Deaf People: Fifth Sunday in Lent Year A.

    Why are we here? Because the Holy Spirit has blest all of us through Charles Hollywood. The Holy Spirit has gathered us here. We will remember the gifts God our Father has given us through Charles Hollywood.

    But he was a good man: so we will give all glory and worship to God.
    And he taught us: we all pray for mercy.
    We will pray for him: mercy, light, peace.
    Charles Hollywood taught us: Receive as your sisters and brothers deaf people: no eye-people. Let the eye people bless you. So now let us be changed in eye people.
    
    

    First, look at the Lectern: It is broad. Here two people can stand together because: God comes close to us in reading words: God also comes close to us in giving signs.

    Next: we look again at signs we have received today. We see two sisters: Martha and Mary: Two sisters, but very different. Martha: busy; hasty; rushing; quick signs. Mary: quiet; still: slow signs. Different: but sisters: one family.

    Charles Hollywood taught us: the Holy Spirit brings us together into one family: One fellowship. Eye-people : hearing people; signing people: speaking people. The Holy Spirit, through Charles Hollywood has brought us together from all over the world as friends and helped us to grow together in love. We are a sign of peace for the world.

    Now we watch again: Jesus weeps: We see his tears. Today Jesus watches us: Jesus sees our tears: and Jesus rejoices: because tears are love. Today our love is coloured purple: but the water of our tears will be changed into red wine and the wine will be changed into the red blood of Jesus: perfect love: perfect peace: perfect joy.

    Charles Hollywood was chosen by God to give the eye-people a signed prayer. Charles wanted all eye-people to come to the table, here Jesus feeds us with his word, his sign and his best sign and best word: ‘This is my body’…’This is the cup of my blood.’

    And now: look at the candle: the candle proclaims: Jesus is risen from the dead. But look: it is a small light; not a dazzling light. It is a gentle light; not a powerful light. Because Jesus is: merciful, Jesus is humble, Jesus is love. And Charles Hollywood was merciful, he was humble, he was love. He leaves us, but he goes to Jesus. They meet as friends. They will sit together in the evening and enjoy a little drink: the most perfect whisky.

    Because you gave us Charles Hollywood: Father we praise you for ever with Jesus, your Son, in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. Father, we praise you, we thank you, we adore you, for ever and ever. Amen.

• 15/04/03 NEW BISHOP FOR LIVERPOOL
  

  • Name of new Auxiliary Bishop announced

    

    Pope John Paul II has appointed Canon Thomas Williams to be an Auxiliary Bishop in the Archdiocese of Liverpool and Titular Bishop of Mageo (Mayo). The announcement was made at 11.00 am this morning, 15 April, simultaneously in Rome and Liverpool. Bishop-designate Williams was born in Liverpool and at present serves as Parish Priest of St Anthony’s Church, Scotland Road, and Our Lady Immaculate Church, St Domingo Road, Liverpool.

    An Assistant or Auxiliary Bishop supports and helps the Archbishop in the running of the Archdiocese. He is given by Rome the title of a diocese that formerly existed in fact but which now exists in name only. At present the Archdiocese of Liverpool has one Auxiliary Bishop, Vincent Malone. Bishop-designate Williams will work alongside Archbishop Patrick Kelly and Bishop Malone.

    Archbishop Patrick Kelly welcomed the appointment saying:

    ‘I have already written to the Holy Father to thank him for appointing Tom Williams to be assistant Bishop in our Archdiocese. I know I at least speak for Bishop Malone as well as myself saying: I am delighted; I am no less certain that once this becomes public today that joy will be widely shared. It is good indeed that we will be blest by someone who brings a great knowledge and appreciation of the history of the Archdiocese, but also long service, not least to the sick and frail. It is very right that a parish priest of Saint Anthony's and Our Lady Immaculate should be ordained Bishop. Tom's life as a priest, unlike my own and that of most Bishops, has just been, and that is a totally inadequate description, in a parish or hospital setting. It is in that spirit that we will rejoice to celebrate his ordination as a Bishop on the Feast of Saint Augustine of Canterbury which will be the 31st anniversary of his ordination as a priest. Tom, thank you for being willing to be ordained for service as a Bishop; our joyful prayers are with you.’

    Bishop-designate Williams spoke of his appointment:

    ‘I am completely and totally over-awed at the news. I have never hoped nor aspired to be a Bishop. I have always and ever only wanted to be a good priest. All I can say about the future is that it will be a great honour and privilege to be part of Archbishop Patrick’s team, with Bishop Vincent, and a great learning experience.

    ‘I have served in the centre of Liverpool for the past thirty years, and Liverpool, particularly the North End has always been where my home and my heart is. I hope that I will still live in the City Centre, preferably at St Anthony’s. I will have to get to know the rest of the Archdiocese, because, at the moment, my knowledge is only cursory, but I promise to do my best.

    ‘I enjoy being busy, and to my fellow priests and people of the Archdiocese, all I can say is that I will give my heart and soul to support you and be with you, and I pray that you will remember me in your prayers, I’ll certainly need them.’

    Bishop Vincent Malone said:

    ‘I am delighted at the prospect of having a new colleague in the role of co-worker with Archbishop Kelly in episcopal ministry, and doubly delighted that it should be Canon Tom Williams. Tom has won the respect of the clergy of the Archdiocese in more than thirty years of priestly ministry, in parishes, in hospital ministry and in service to his fellow priests. His new, wider responsibilities will endear him to parishioners throughout the Archdiocese who, with the clergy and religious will, I am sure, support him with their prayers.’

    Canon Thomas Williams will be ordained Bishop by Archbishop Patrick Kelly in the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King, Liverpool on Tuesday 27 May 2003 at 12.00 Noon. Further details of the Mass will be released at a later date.

• 15/04/03 BIOGRAPHY OF BISHOP-DESIGNATE THOMAS WILLIAMS
  

  • 

    Thomas Williams was born on Shrove Tuesday, 10 February 1948 at 2A Ashfield Gardens (first landing, second house), Silvester Street, off Scotland Road, Liverpool. His father, Richard, who died in December 1982, was a bargee based in Stanley Dock, and the locks in Lightbody Street, who later advanced to become a Checker in Box 6, based in Gladstone and West Lancashire Docks between 1963 and 1975. His mother, Margaret, who is now 81 years old and living with Tom’s younger sister Marie, was a school cleaner for Ashfield Street Primary and Archbishop Whiteside Schools. The Bishop-designate is the eldest of four children: his sister Margaret teaches at a Primary School in Essex; Marie is a Nurse at Fazakerley Orthopaedic Clinic and his brother Richard is Caretaker at Margaret Beavan School.

    Bishop-designate Williams was an altar server at St Sylvester’s and entered Junior Seminary, to train for the priesthood, at Christleton Hall, Chester, when he was 13 years old in 1961. At the time Archbishop Heenan informed him that he was ‘a bit old!’. After five years of study there under the Headship of Fr Tom Hennessy of the Salvatorian Fathers he went to the English College in Lisbon, Portugal, in September 1966 where he studied Philosophy and Theology until the closure of the College in 1971. He completed his studies at St Joseph’s College, Upholland, the then major Seminary for the Archdiocese of Liverpool.

    Thomas Williams was ordained Deacon on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, 8 December 1971, by Bishop Joseph Gray, then Auxiliary Bishop of Liverpool. As Deacon he served for six months in the St Matthew’s area of Skelmersdale before he was ordained to the priesthood by Archbishop George Andrew Beck on 27 May 1972 in the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King, Liverpool.

    His first appointment was to St Francis of Assisi, Garston in September 1972. Bishop-designate Williams remembers his work there well and says: ‘I will always look back on that parish as my first home as a priest, and my first love’. A year later he took on the added responsibility of being Chaplain to Bellerive Grammar School, a post which he held for seven ‘happy’ years.

    In January 1975 he was appointed to Sacred Heart Parish, Hall Lane, Liverpool where he served with Fr Bernard Dickinson and Fr Bernard Jackson. The two assistant priests served as Chaplains to the Primary Schools and the Royal Liverpool Hospital or ‘Old Royal’. Father Tom says: ‘This was the beginning of nine years as Hospital Chaplain, at the Old Royal for four years and the New Royal for five, and the home of many fond and treasured memories’.

    In 1983 Bishop-designate Williams served at Our Lady of Walsingham parish in Netherton and undertook supply work at St Jude’s, Wigan and Holy Spirit, Netherton. In 1984 he was asked by Bishop Kevin O’Connor to take responsibility for Our Lady Immaculate Parish in St Domingo Road. The ancient Chapel (designed by Pugin and the Lady Altar of the original Liverpool Catholic Cathedral planned in the nineteenth century) was condemned as unusable and Father Tom oversaw the conversion of the Parish Centre into a church which was opened by Archbishop Derek Worlock in 1986. In 1989 he was appointed Parish Priest of St Anthony’s in Scotland Road, Liverpool and assumed additional responsibility for Our Lady Immaculate Parish in 1999.

    During his ministry Bishop-designate Williams has also been a member of the Archdiocesan Finance Advisory Committee since 1977; Secretary and Treasurer of the Fund for retired and sick clergy since 1993; a member of the Liverpool City Centre Ecumenical Team since 1996 and a member of the Archdiocesan Building Projects Committee since 1986. He serves as Chair of Governors of Our Lady Immaculate Primary School where he has been a Governor since 1984; Chair of Governors of Mother Teresa Primary School where he has been a Governor since 1989 and was a Governor of Campion High School from 1986 to 1999 being their Chair from 1989 to 1999. He has been a member of FLAME for twenty-seven years travelling to Lourdes with children and young people with disabilities and has also worked with the St Anthony’s Lourdes Trust finding funding to train local teenagers to work with young people with disabilities in Lourdes. He has also been Chair of Project Jennifer looking at the re-development of the Scotland Road and Great Homer Street district, since it began in 2002.

    His hobbies include a weekly game of golf and he is a member of the Southport and Ainsdale Golf Club. He enjoys horse racing and is a fanatic Evertonian and until the onset of regular Sunday and mid-week fixtures was a season ticket holder for many years. He also says he ‘must’ have one week’s skiing per year!

• 15/04/03 Homily from Mass at the Blessed Sacrament Shrine
  

  • Introduction to Mass and Homily preached by the Most Reverend Patrick Kelly, Archbishop of Liverpool, at 12.10 pm Mass at the Blessed Sacrament Shrine, Liverpool. Tuesday in Holy Week: 15 April 2003.

    Introduction to Mass:

    ‘The days of his life-giving death and glorious resurrection are approaching.’ Today we watch in minute detail the downfall of Judas and the warning of the denial of Peter. But both stories only to lead us in the end to our Lord himself and his Thursday, his Friday, his Saturday night. We look to him, formed in the womb of Mary, to God the Father’s servant for the light, the salvation we need.

    Homily:

    That was so detailed: who was sitting where; pieces of bread, and dipped in the dish; chatting about the poor; and ‘Night had fallen’. And the detail goes on: embarrassing conversation between our Lord and Simon Peter and the detail: cockcrow. But although they are involved, I mean, Judas, Simon Peter, the rest, Jesus makes it clear: It is all about this: ‘Now has the Son of Man been glorified, and in him God had been glorified.’

    In the end it is all about this: not Judas’ betrayal, or Peter’s denial. It is all abut our eyes being opened to see what we must ever more mean by the glory of God. It will not mean power, might, magnificence, domination, control, and beauty as the world may see it. It will mean what we see on Thursday evening: a Lord who washes our feet: on Good Friday, patience, lowliness, selflessness, a crown, but of thorns: a pierced side, a heart broken by loving. And on Holy Saturday night, darkness taken away, not banks of disco lights, but a candle’s gentle ray. Praise to the holiest in the height, and in the depth be praise, in all his words most wonderful most sure in all his ways.

• 16/04/03 Homily from Mass at the Blessed Sacrament Shrine
  

  • Introduction to Mass and Homily preached by the Most Reverend Patrick Kelly, Archbishop of Liverpool, at 12.10 pm Mass at the Blessed Sacrament Shrine, Liverpool. Wednesday in Holy Week: 16 April 2003.

    Introduction to Mass: ‘The days of his life-giving death and glorious resurrection are approaching.’ Today the final creating of space for the Thursday, the Friday, the Saturday Night, that we give to the Lord. We look to him, the perfect disciple, utterly attentive to the will of his Father, to hear our prayer.

    Homily: That is very messy: all bits and pieces: Judas and the chief priests; brief instructions about preparing for the Passover; and Judas once more. And then all of this is put aside. Because from now on the focus moves to depths we must ponder from a fearing, attentive, adoring, wondering distance.

    Tomorrow night the spirit of the supper is not what Judas does, or Simon Peter says, but it is this: Jesus, knowing that he came from the Father and was returning to the Father, rose to wash his disciples’ feet. What he does tomorrow night, the washing, the gift of his own self, is all because of his communion with the father; he accomplishes not the will of Judas, or Peter, but of the Father.

    On Good Friday afternoon, we will be very attentive and again, as it were from a distance we will watch: it is not so much Judas who hands him over; he steps forward himself as the Father invited him to do. It isn’t Pilate that in the end condemns him: Pilate is told the only power over him he has is from above; that is from the Father. It is not the envy of Judas, the cowardice of Pilate, the barbarity of the soldiers that is accomplished: he says: ‘it is accomplished’ meaning the will of his Father.

    And on Holy Saturday Night, the wonder we contemplate is none of our doing: the raising from the dead is the pure, creative, unexpected, undeserved, and undreamt of deed of the Father. That is why that is our night of greatest thanks and praise; it is not about our works and deeds. It is about: ‘This day was made by the Lord, we will rejoice and be glad’.

    And if you would be led even further into these coming days think about coming to the cathedral tonight at 7.30 for the Mass of Chrism. This night we focus all our concern for the sick, or searching for light and truth, our hope of renewal in the Lord and the Lord alone and it will lead us resolutely to set our face towards Jerusalem and the things that happened there in these days.

• 16/04/03 Homily from the Mass of Chrism
  

  • Introduction to Mass and Homily preached by the Most Reverend Patrick Kelly, Archbishop of Liverpool, at the Mass of Chrism. Wednesday 16 April 2003 at 7.30 pm in the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King, Liverpool.

    Introduction to Mass:

    In our troubled world the Lord God has called us to be one with his Son, to share the Spirit which rested on him: to be anointed as he was to bring gladness, liberty, comfort, praise. Because the Lord loves us, we are a kingdom of justice, love, peace: priests to his God and Father.

    Homily:

    Jesus came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up. They used to say: ‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth?’ But on Friday we will go to Golgotha at three o’clock and adore: ‘Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews’.

    Nazareth: lowliness not power: mercy, not domination. So we your priests called out of love for Jesus of Nazareth to bring his peace and love to our brothers and sisters accept this Spirit to form, guide, control us:

    ‘We are careful not to give offence to anybody, lest we should bring discredit on our ministry; as God’s ministers, we must do everything to make ourselves acceptable. We have to show great patience, in time of affliction, of need, of difficulty; when we are tired out, sleepless, and fasting. We have to be pure-minded, enlightened, forgiving and gracious to others. We have to rely on the Holy Spirit, on unaffected love, on the truth of our message, on the power of God. To right and to left we must be armed with innocence; now honoured, now slighted; now traduced, now flattered. They call us deceivers, and we tell the truth; unknown, and we are fully acknowledged; dying men, and see, we live; punished, yes, but not doomed to die; sad men, that rejoice continually; beggars, that bring riches to many; disinherited, and the world is ours.’ (2 Corinthians 6:3-10. Knox version)

    At the Blessing of the Oil of the Sick:

    Once the sign was a helpless child in the poverty of a manger: Jesus a Nazarene: Jesus who ‘offered up prayer and supplications, with loud cries and tears’. (Hebrews 5:7) We anoint the frail, the troubled, the fearful because they enrich us and teach us this: ‘Consider your call; not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many powerful, not many were of noble birth; but God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong’. (1 Corinthians 1:26f).

    At the Blessing of the Oil of Catechumens:

    We need anointing, strengthening, comforting, reassuring on our road into the heart of Jesus of Nazareth because ‘the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God . . .Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews, and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called…Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.

    At the Blessing of the Oil of Chrism:

    Our Lenten journey, out of love for our troubled world, has led us to one person, to one place, to one time: to Jesus of Nazareth, to Jerusalem, to the days of the Passover feast. We have come to know: all life, all holiness comes through his death and resurrection. Our deepest need is to be Christian that is to be his alone: consecrated with the oil of his Spirit, to become one body, one spirit in him. So this is the longing, a longing learnt from Saint Paul for all whom the oil will anoint.

    ‘I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with might through his Spirit . . . and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through the faith; that you being rooted and grounded in love, may have power to comprehend with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to do far more abundantly than all we ask or think, to him be glory in the Church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, for ever and ever. Amen.’ (Ephesians 3:14-21).

• 17/04/03 Homily from Mass of the Lord's Supper
  

  • Introduction to Mass and Homily preached by the Most Reverend Patrick Kelly, Archbishop of Liverpool, at the Mass of the Lord’s Supper. Maundy Thursday 17 April 2003 at 7.30 pm in the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King, Liverpool.

    Introduction to Mass:

    ‘The world’s salvation is in the eucharist’. In the end justice, peace, the well being of every child, depends on the Mass. But this healing, renewing, liberating action for the world, takes us to a night, in Spring: to an upper room in Jerusalem; to bread, wine, a lamb, whose real name is Jesus. Because the Holy Spirit has kept 2000 years faithful to ‘the day before he suffered, to save us all, that is today’ in our name the choir sings our thanks and praise to the God of peace.

    Homily:

    The Lord God will set his enslaved, burdened, weary people free: but it will all come down to: on the tenth day of their first month of the year: to a fragile lamb: bread: bitter herbs: an evening meal.

    And a command, an order, an action seen across every nation, echoed in every language, done in every situation begun ‘on the night he was betrayed’: it shall require only bread and a cup of wine. And the word is spoken and has ever since, everywhere been done: ‘Do this is remembrance of me’.

    And in the course of supper, in the city of Jerusalem, before the feast of the Passover, we must look, watch, see, how the Lord will save, heal, renew the world. And watching exactly what he did we shall learn what resources are needed if the world is to find salvation, healing justice, secure peace.

    ‘I have washed your feet; you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you’.

    Watch now: ponder what is done: remember the night of bread, wine, the Lamb of God: and save the world.

• 18/04/03 Message from the Archbishop, for the Daily Post
  

  • Message from the Most Reverend Patrick Kelly, Archbishop of Liverpool, for the Daily Post, Good Friday 18 April 2003.

    This could be the most demanding Good Friday that Christians have faced for many years. This is nothing to do with many other things that have become tangled up with this time of the year, chocolate eggs, rabbits, bonnets. It is something much more challenging. We find ourselves, who name this Friday Good, seeking in different ways to be faithful to the event that alone made it Good. The challenge, faced by those who are convinced of this, comes from the background this particular year: the aftermath of conflict in the Gulf; terrible tensions in the Holy Land itself; nearer to home, the laborious journey associated with the Good Friday agreement, seeking to edge forward to secure justice and peace in these islands. From this there flows a curious challenge. In the end to be Christian is not primarily about the honesty, correctness, improvement in our own way of life. It is about accepting or rejecting a staggering claim: in a city called Jerusalem, on a hill called Golgotha, at three o’clock in the afternoon one Friday in Spring the Son of God died; and he died in such a way that he reconciles us with God his Father and with one another. Against the background of the enormous display of political, economic, military power witnessed in recent weeks, dare we, do we still claim: the work of reconciling, the work of justice, the work of peace is the deed accomplished on Good Friday. There can be difficulties in accepting a merciful, a just, a benevolent God. What is much more demanding is to say: one Friday in the year is named Good, because on that day in the Middle East, all that mercy, justice and goodness was embodied in a death on Calvary and only be taking to heart that deed shall we be made whole in body, mind, spirit and the world come to justice and peace.

• 18/04/03 Homily from the Celebration of our Lord's Passion
  

  • Homily preached by the Most Reverend Patrick Kelly, Archbishop of Liverpool, at the Celebration of the Lord’s Passion. Good Friday 18 April 2003 at 3.00 pm in the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King, Liverpool.

    Homily:

    It is Good Friday: it is three o’clock, the ninth hour. No other time: no other day will do. Because we do not only know that God is merciful: we are not only convinced that a cloud of loving surrounds us. We know this; we are convinced of this because of what God did on a Friday, in Jerusalem, on a spring afternoon, now nearly 2000 years ago.

    We watched what happened in a garden across the Kedron valley.

    We see events in the house of someone called Caiaphas.

    We go to a Praetorium. And as long as the world’s story lasts, the declaration of God’s wonderful deeds will be inseparable from a weak, vacillating governor called Pontius Pilate.

    We see the one who will judge the living and the dead, brought out to a place called Gabbatha: and rejected as useless to be a credible king.

    We must walk the way of the cross, as ‘carrying his own cross he went out of the city to the place of the skull, or, as it was called in Hebrew, Golgotha’.

    Nailing: squabbles about the title ‘Jesus, the Nazarene, King of the Jews’. The throwing of dice: a Mother standing by his cross. Sponge: vinegar: hyssop. And it, that is the purpose of the loving wisdom, wisest love, generous love, is accomplished.

    A piercing: blood and water: a garden: a new tomb: where we must choose in silent waiting to stay.

• 19/04/03 Homily from the Easter Vigil
  

  • Introduction and Homily preached by the Most Reverend Patrick Kelly, Archbishop of Liverpool, at the Easter Vigil and First Mass of Easter. Saturday 19 April 2003 at 9.00 pm in the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King, Liverpool.

    Introduction:

    Because of what was taking place in the Gulf, the lands of the Bible, our Lenten journey of forty days was precise, narrow, if you like. We so lived Lent that sincerely we came to an upper room, bread, wine, the Lamb of God, in Jerusalem on Thursday. On Friday we stood on Golgotha and watched as his side was pierced and blood and water poured out. Because we made that journey to him and him alone now our concern can range far and wide: twice tonight our focus will be small, precise, detailed. But tonight is light, life, peace, for the world.

    Homily after Gospel

    So now once more we must return to what seems small, detailed, intensely personal. But from there and there alone we may securely, confidently, boldly, range far and wide.

    We go with Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James, and Salome: these three: no one else. We see what they are carrying: spices, and they had bought them, they had not had them ready in advance: they could, because the Sabbath rest was over. It was the first day of the week: very early: but the sun had risen. They look: they see: the stone rolled back: it was very large. They see a young man: I wonder, I wonder, was this the young man who on Thursday night in Gethsemane wearing nothing but a linen cloth when those who arrested Jesus seized him, left the linen cloth and ran off naked. I wonder if his name was Mark. And his word is the whole of the Gospel we call the Gospel according to Mark: ‘Do not be amazed: he is risen: go tell Peter’.

    Detail: precise: but now it all bursts wide open: ‘They fled from the tomb’: trembling and astonishment overcomes them: and they say nothing because they are afraid: the fear of wonder: because nothing, no one can ever be the same again. Betrayal, cowardice, injustice, cruelty, scourging, crown of thorns, crucifixion, burial, death shall never be the same again. Through the world far and wide let there be light.

• 15/05/03 OBITUARY OF RT REV MGR THOMAS MCKENNA
  

  • Thomas Gerard McKenna was born in Liverpool on 24 August 1915, the son of Thomas and Winifred McKenna. His early education was at St Clare's Mixed School in Liverpool before studies for the priesthood at St Joseph’s College, Upholland, and at the Venerable English College and Gregorian University in Rome. He was ordained to the priesthood in St Peter's, Stonyhurst, near Blackburn on 7 June 1941.

    Following ordination his first appointment was as assistant Priest at St Paul’s Parish, West Derby, Liverpool where he stayed for just six months before being appointed as Privy Chamberlain to Pope Pius XII and Secretary to Archbishop Richard Downey living at Archbishop’s House where he was also to serve Archbishop William Godfrey and Archbishop John Carmel Heenan. In 1958 he was appointed as Chancellor of the Archdiocese of Liverpool and in October of the following year as Administrator of the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King, Liverpool. He remained at Mount Pleasant throughout the construction of the new Cathedral and for a further eight years as the first Administrator of the new building. Following the consecration of the Cathedral in May 1967 he was appointed as a Domestic Prelate and to the Metropolitan Cathedral Chapter of Canons, becoming Canon Penitentiary in 1973. He was also made Dean of the area. Whilst at the Cathedral he was able to combine two of his greatest interests: liturgy and classical music.

    In the summer of 1975 he took a three-month sabbatical break returning to the Archdiocese to become Parish Priest of Corpus Christi, Rainford, where his first task was to oversee the building of a new church. He is remembered there as a well-liked, conscientious and prayerful parish priest always having the interests and well being of his parishioners at heart. He remained in Rainford until his retirement in 1998 when he went to live in Southport, enjoying his time there in the company of other retired priests at St Marie’s House.

    He died peacefully while on holiday in the Lake District on Monday 12 May 2003. May he rest in peace.

    His body will be received into Corpus Christi church, Rainford, at 7.30pm on Monday 19 May 2003. His Funeral Mass will be celebrated there at 12.00 Noon on Tuesday 20 May 2003 followed by interment at St Mary’s, Birchley.

• 16/05/03 ARCHBISHOP KELLY'S ADDRESS CCEE MEETING
  

  • Opening Address of the fifth consultation of the European Bishops’ Conferences on our responsibility for creation: formation for responsibility towards creation and sustainable development.

    Address given by the Most Reverend Patrick Kelly, Archbishop of Liverpool and Vice President of the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, in Wroclaw, Poland. Friday 15 May 2003

    ‘I believe in God, the Creator of Heaven and Earth’
    Biblical foundation for formation on the environment.

    1. Biblical Foundations.

    My first concern is that we must not expect too much from the Bible. We must recognise the questions asked and answered in the word of God; we must not presume that questions which are new and occur in our time will find their answer in the Bible. At first this might suggest that we will feel insecure in trying to speak as those who know Our Lord Jesus Christ about the environment, if there are not precise foundations for what we say in the word of God. But I am convinced that if we begin humbly we will recognise the challenge we face and the courage with which we may respond.

    To give an example of only asking the right questions. In 1957 I attended the defence of a doctoral theses at the Gregorian University in Rome. The subject of the theses was: Sacramental Theology in the writing of Peter Paludanus, Peter of the Marsh. At one terrible moment one of the professors asked: ‘But did Peter of the Marsh have a sacramental Theology?’ to which the poor priest presenting the theses could only reply: ‘Well, after all my study I now know that he did not.’ I just wonder if with a name Peter of the Marsh he might have had an environmental theology.

    But to give an example that has arisen in England only at the end of April. Research claims to have shown that fish suffer pain. This has raised the issue: besides campaigns to stop hunting wild animals with dogs, should fishing be banned? And what would that say about him who said: ‘Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch.’ (Luke 5:4.) Risen from the dead he said: ‘Cast the net on the right side of the boat, and you will find some.’ (John 21:6.) And on that occasion when they came ashore ‘they saw a charcoal fire there, with fish lying on it.’ (John 21:9.) Had they been caught by the risen Lord with a hook? What would our biblical foundation be for a debate, a very angry debate I am sure, about the morality of fishing? Does the fact that Jesus risen fished rule out any question for us? We will be wise to be humble, not arrogant, cautious, not hasty, as we seek biblical foundations.

    2. The Old Testament.

    My suggestion is that we remember this: although on Easter Night we read the first chapter of Genesis first and the fourteenth Chapter of Exodus later, the key rests with the Exodus story. From the fact that the Lord came close and in space and time worked wonderful things for an enslaved people, they began to understand all time and all space. The Exodus story, including the strange events associated with a frail, powerless lamb, (Exodus 12:1-8,11,14) declares that forces that enslave, burdens that crush, fear and tyranny shall not have the last word. We then understand that the revelation of God we receive in the first chapters of the book of Genesis do not describe a golden era of long ago. They speak to people terrified by: ‘signs in sun and moon and stars, and upon the earth distress of nations in perplexity at the roaring of the sea and the waves, men fainting with fear and with foreboding of what is coming on the world.’ (Luke 21:25.) The poet of God reveals the poetic, artistic, creative God, who is here and now, amidst a world that so often seems hostile, with forces that manipulate, determine our days, that malignly or at best arbitrarily touch our life – amidst all of this God is speaking for there to be light, order, beauty, goodness. I think it is wise when we receive the word of God in Genesis and all passages related to those chapters, never to lose sight of the Exodus story: the God who is even now working his purpose out. We do not receive an abstract account, as it were a philosophical account of our place in creation.

    3. When we come to ponder the story of our Lord, as we seek to find authentic biblical foundations for our concerns in these days, I suggest that first of all we notice this. ‘Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature, and in favour with God and man.’ (Luke 2:52.) And he grew in wisdom among other ways, by learning from others. The most wonderful example of this must be his meeting with the woman of Syrophoenicia. He was like us in all things but sin. He grew up with, in the strict sense of the word, the prejudices of his own people, including the conviction that the ways of God had been uniquely made known to them. He was prejudiced in favour of the presumption that Jews would be more attuned to the ways of God than any other people. From a Syrophenician woman he learnt that his Father was working where most people did not expect to find God. (Mark 8:24-30. cf Matthew 8:5-13.)

    One essential biblical foundation: we proclaim that in Jesus ‘are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge’ (Colossians 2:3) but not because he never learnt, but because he was always willing to learn. And the Spirit of truth ‘will guide you into all truth; for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak.’ (John 16:13.) The Spirit makes us not those who know everything, who possess with us the truth; the Spirit guides us to be disciples, to listen and to learn; and sometimes that will be from a woman of Syrophoenicia. At least in England it is salutary to recall, it was William Wilberforce, not a Catholic who woke us all up to the horror of slavery. The biblical foundation says: you may have to learn about the environment from some unexpected voices.

    4. But there are other foundations we receive from the life, the words, the attitudes of the Lord. We are wise to notice: he was intensely aware of the world around him, and he was aware of the world as created. To begin with the awareness. This awareness reminds me of what I now have learnt to recognise as an essential foundation in the wonderful writings of Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare: it was not their ability to write; it was their determination to observe, to notice, to see. I am reminded of the first precept recommended for any deep conversion of heart and mind set out by the theologian, Bernard Lonergan: be attentive. Our Lord was attentive. This is seen first of all in the parables. Sower, seed, rocks, birds, good soil, mustard seed, sparrows, workers, yeast, sheep, goats, lilies, foxes, wolves, coins, easy yokes, splinters, beams, green wood, dried wood. But, especially on our day, we must notice: he did not see a world where all was comfortable, obviously in harmony, raising no questions. Every parable has a dark side: there are weeds as well as wheat, wolves as well as sheep, red sunrises as well as red sunsets; sparrows that fall; towers that fall down in earthquakes. He did not look around on an obviously comfortable world and say: God must be Father, Abba. The source of that conviction was not ‘I say to myself what a beautiful world.’ I am always concerned when children are presented a world of chickens, baby rabbits and butterflies and then led on to call God Father. It is like forgetting the dark, death-approaching world, pain and poverty from which arose up that song of pure, defiant faith, the Canticle of the sun of saint Francis. And I was once told the story of the birds was that he said one day: ‘I might as well talk to the birds as talk to this congregation.’ So that is what he did. And this too might be part of a biblical foundation in so far as sustainable development is our concern. Just once, the point of his story was that the shadow, the dark side in this story must be removed. It is the story of the gap between rich and poor: the rich man and Lazarus. Indeed the removal of that evil is linked with readiness to accept the resurrection. (Luke 16: 19-31.)

    But this awareness was also an awareness of creation as such: that he was surrounded by what was gift, not a right. I offer three examples: the first: ‘Do not swear at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, or by earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King.’ (Matthew 5:34.) It hurt him when anyone spoke lightly about heaven or earth or a city. They were caught up into the purposes of his Father; they could not be treated without respect.

    My second example: the story of the transfiguration: (Mark 9:2-8.) I am sure the mountain was Hermon. I am sure part of the event is that as he went ever higher he was literally more and more exhilarated by what he saw. Sea, river, plains, valleys; and the history of his people from Nebo, to Carmel, to the hills around Jerusalem. And of the Lord God who fashioned all this, and guided that history, I am Son and heir, beloved, but also caught up in the story of the sacrifice of Abraham on Moriah, the death of Moses on Nebo, and the persecution of Elijah of Carmel. The conversation can only be about a beloved son who will suffer to set people free. But all of this finds its foundation in awareness of creation, precisely as creation but also of a God found in the joy and sorrows of a people.

    My final example: the Eucharist: no one ever forgot how he gave thanks and praise for bread and wine and fish. You and I never create such an impression.

    It seems to me, it is precisely in this closeness to the earth, but as created, closer than any of us who are creatures, that we see a revelation that he truly is the only, beloved Son of God.

    5. From the struggles of Saint Paul to think through the implications of that meeting on the road to Damascus, (Acts 9:1-31), it is wise to notice this. Saint Paul was convinced: everything, every one must now be understood, judged, loved, treated, respected in the light of Christ the Lord. ‘Do not let what you eat cause the ruin of one from whom Christ died.’ (Romans 14:15.) ‘For the love of Christ controls us, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died.’ (2 Corinthians 5:14.) ‘From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view.’ (2 Corinthians 5:16-21.) And yet we do not find in the letters to the Ephesians a need to abolish slavery. Instead it is written: ‘Slaves, be obedient to those who are your earthly masters,’ (Ephesians 6:5) and, ‘Slaves, obey in everything those who are your earthly masters.’ (Colossians 3:22.)

    We recognise that the foundations given in the Bible do not allow us to escape by asking: ‘What would Jesus or Saint Paul have done?’ The question is, what do we, by becoming as attentive as the Lord was, as willing to learn as he was, as committed to ending the gap between rich and poor as he insisted we must be, as rigorous in thinking through everything anew in the light of the wonder who is the Lord whom he persecuted as Paul was, what will we do?

    6. When ‘the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father.’ (John 1:14.) So it was that: ‘That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands we proclaim also to you…’ (1 John 1:1-4.) And the story begun continued: ‘Without having seen him, you love him; though you do not now see him you believe in him and rejoice with unutterable and exalted joy.’ (1 Peter 1:8.) But the consequences of who he is whom people sought to know more clearly, to love more dearly, to follow more nearly, led to searching, critical questions that were the subject of bitter arguments and long lasting division among those who proclaimed Jesus as Lord and God. In the course of the first 500 years, gathered by many strange ways into councils, but then guided by the Spirit of truth, the Bishops were enabled to give these definitive answers.

    First: Jesus of Nazareth is as truly God as the Father; he is not a lesser deity; he is consubstantial, of one being with the Father.

    Second: This Jesus, who is utterly God, was so among us that it is the Son of God who was born, learnt, wept, suffered and died. Mary is truly: Mother of God. And we give the answer, yes, to the question expressed by the English poet of the first world war, Edwin Muir: ‘Did a God indeed in dying cross my path that day, he on his way and I on mine?’

    Thirdly: His questioning his learning, his fear, were utterly genuine. The fact that he was God did not burn up his humanity. And in giving this teaching, needed to make sure we were not misled in knowing, loving and serving Jesus of Nazareth, our Lord and God, the Bishops were inspired to use four adverbs to describe how that which is divine and that which is human in our Lord relates to each other: they are related to each other without being confused with each other, changed by each other, separated from each other, divided from each other. It seems to me that in the gift of this teaching of the Bishops gathered at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 A.D., we are also given a foundation for understanding how all that is created relates to the one who is Creator.

    The creature is created and not Creator; but never can any creature be understood with out its relationship to the Creator. We do not adore creatures; all their rights are rooted in what has been freely given to them in undeserved, unmerited love. And we are blest because we have been introduced to knowing the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. We have been enabled to begin to ponder: the ones we name God find themselves by losing themselves in adoring, loving, wondering joyful surrender in self-emptying to one another. Each rejoices to give the other space to be utterly unique, but each one only seeks to delight the others by the wonder of their being. And we then see, perhaps, that the meaning of space and time is found in this: (and space and time are the essential stage wherein the environment lives and breathes) space and time enable creatures to be themselves, but always finding themselves by losing themselves in joyful self-giving to delight others.

    This is how C.S.Lewis expresses this in his book: ‘The Problem of Pain’:
    ‘For in self-giving, if anywhere, we touch a rhythm not only of all creation but of all being. For the eternal Word also gives Himself in sacrifice; and that not only on Calvary. For when he was crucified He “did that in the wild weather of His outlying provinces which He had done at home in glory and gladness.” From before the foundation of the world He surrenders begotten Deity back to begetting Deity in obedience. And as the Son glorifies the Father, so also the Father glorifies the Son. And, with submissions, as becomes a layman, I think it was truly said “God loveth not Himself as Himself but as Goodness; and if there were aught better than God, He would love that and not Himself.” For the highest to the lowest, self exists to be abdicated and, by that abdication, becomes the more truly self, to be thereupon yet the more abdicated, and so forever. This is not a heavenly law which we can escape by remaining earthly, nor an earthly law which we can escape by being saved. What is outside the system of self-giving is not earth, nor nature, nor “ordinary life”, but simply and solely Hell.’

    7. During these days I am sure we will be told about many grave situations. My final concern it so discern what foundations do we receive from the word of God for our basic attitude in the face of such serious issues.

    I begin with this description of a Christian: ‘The Christian is the incredibly daring person who dares to proclaim in the midst of an unredeemed world that its redemption has been accomplished.’ And it seems to me that positive attitude I am about to describe is also a gift found in the convictions by which Jewish people live. As we noted earlier, the first chapters of the Bible are not a nostalgia for a lost golden era, but a declaration of God here and now, working out his purposes that all shall be well. As Isaiah declared: ‘My words shall not return to me empty, it shall accomplish that which I purpose and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.’ (Isaiah 55:11.)

    But such a positive attitude may not be taken for granted; the story is told of the disciple of a Rabbi who said to this master: The Messiah has come; the Rabbi went to the window, looked out and said: I see no difference, he has not come. We see this same unexpected development in the sermon of Saint Peter after the healing of the man who used to beg at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple. ‘And now brethren, I know that you acted in ignorance, as did also your rulers. But what God foretold by the mouth of all the prophets, that his Christ should suffer, he thus fulfilled. Repent therefore, and turn again, that your sins may be blotted out, that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord, and that he may send the Christ appointed for you, Jesus.’ (Acts 3:17.) Saint Peter can see: nothing has changed. But the Christ has come; and whatever else needs to be accomplished can only be by him, Jesus. I can only suggest that what convinced Peter that only Jesus can bring about the healing needed is not only in his resurrection, but also in the presence his risen body of wounds transformed from evil to life, and in the way he raised up Peter and those who had denied, deserted, or doubted him.

    We are given the basis for a positive attitude, but it seems to me we must call this not optimism, but hope. I recall how in the days of what was given the acronym MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction, the nuclear balance of terror, some said: God would not allow us to destroy the human race and the planet as a home for life. I was never sure we are given grounds to say this. We are told by the Lord of the declaration: ‘They will respect my son.’ (Mark 12:6), but on Good Friday, the Son, the Beloved ‘gave a loud cry and breathed his last.’ (Mark 15:37.)

    It is true that we are given a positive word: ‘For the Son of God, Jesus Christ…in him it is always “Yes.” For in him every one of God’s promises is a “Yes.”’ (2 Corinthians 1:19f.) But this yes is based, has it foundation in the Son who was crucified, died, was buried, descended into hell. Holy Saturday makes us face up to this challenge: will I entrust myself and all that concerns me to an impotent providence?

    Faced with the story of the last century, Holocaust, Hiroshima, Chernobyl, we will not speak of optimism. We may speak of hope, but hope is a gift of the Holy Spirit. (Romans 5:5; Romans 8:18-39.) Our confidence is not only in the fact that the Son of God was born as one of us; it is rooted precisely in him who is Lord, that is who died and is risen.

    I give the last word to a poem. I have found I have needed this wisdom as I ponder such words as re-building, reconstruction, in the context of the recent military action in the Gulf. I have found myself concerned about the easy assurance that it shall all be for the best. And sometimes I have felt that instead of the specifically long, dark road to Christian hope, we have been offered optimism instead. Optimism excuses us from taking seriously the consequences of our actions that hurt, spoil, disfigure. This poem allows no such escape and makes us face up to the cost of resurrection: it is called ‘The Shroud’ and is by George Every:

    Dying and rising are different
    And difficult. Nothing
    Is automatic in resurrection.
    To die is to participate in the flesh of the whole man,
    The old and the new Adam
    Coagulated underground
    And shrouded to be shined.
    
    On every winding sheet
    Are flesh and blood in print
    As a kind of record.
    Dispersed abroad, unburied
    in years of pestilence,
    many without penitence,
    some bore in hands, feet side
    marks of the crucified.
    
    How is this image made
    In us? We are afraid
    Always to go further
    From father and mother
    Into the wounded side,
    Where ever to abide
    Will always be to move
    And to be moved by love.

    ‘Dying and rising are different and difficult.’ In the letter to the Ephesians the difficulty is expressed in terms of the power needed to accomplish resurrection. But the goal of this power is ‘that you being rooted and grounded in love, may have power to comprehend with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you maybe filled with all the fullness of God.’ (Ephesians 3:14-19)

    The foundation we receive from the Word made flesh, dying and rising is this:

    Concern for the environment is about co-creating the environment, the space and time, where everyone may move and be moved only by love. Not driven by envy, domination, greed, fear, anxiety, suspicion, security, superiority. Resurrection is very difficult. It is about conversion at that level which only the Holy Spirit can accomplish. And with Bernard Lonergan we affirm:

    ‘A religion that promotes self-transcendence to the point, not merely of justice, but of self-sacrificing love, will have a redemptive role in human society, inasmuch as such love can undo the mischief of decline and restore the cumulative process of progress.’ (Method in Theology p.55)

    ‘Now to him, who by the power at work within us is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, for ever and ever. Amen.’ (Ephesians 3:20-21.)

• 16/05/03 URBAN JUNGLE TO REAL LIFE JUNGLE
  

  • In July this year seventeen boys from Cardinal Heenan High School in West Derby will be taken on a trip of a lifetime to Sabah in Borneo. The boys have had to raise £41,000 for this trip and are almost there they need £9,000 to complete the total before they leave in July. They have been fundraising for two years; bag packing, sponsored sky dives, balloon races, charity nights and bingos to name a few. The boys are now in year eleven so all this has been done whilst studying for their GCSE’s, which begin in May this year.

    Whilst they are in Borneo the boys will live in a local village and work with the locals on a project and will also go into the local school and help the children with their English. They will go on an expedition into the jungle and work in an’Orang-utan’ sanctuary. These boys are the youngest group to go from Britain as usually older students undertake this type of expedition. They will be supported throughout the trip by staff from the school: Anne-Marie Ventre (learning mentor and course organiser), Leanne Dowler and Steve McElroy (Deputy Head teacher).

    The boys have been given an extremely sparse list of items they can take so it will be interesting to see how they survive without mobile phones, computers and televisions for three weeks. It will be a wonderful opportunity for them to put something into the local community and also for them to see how others live in such different climates and conditions.

    They still need support so if anyone can offer help in any way such as sponsorship by means of finance or equipment please contact Anne Marie Ventre at the school phone 0151 228-3472, Fax 252-1246 or e-mail cardinal.heenan@merseymail.co.uk

    For further information contact:

    Anne Marie Ventre Tel: 0151 228-3472. Fax 252-1246
    e-mail cardinal.heenan@merseymail.co.uk
• 20/05/03 HOMILY AT THE FUNERAL MASS OF MGR THOMAS MCKENNA
  

  • Introduction to Mass and Homily preached by the Most Reverend Patrick Kelly, Archbishop of Liverpool, at the Funeral Mass of the Right Reverend Monsignor Thomas Gerard McKenna. 12.00 Noon on Tuesday 20 May 2003 in the Church of Corpus Christi, Rainford.

    Introduction to Mass:

    Tom McKenna was found dead kneeling by the side of his bed. It was his way to pray after breakfast. It is clear where our hearts must be centred today as with his Sister-in-Law, his nephew, the rest of the Southport quartet, Leo, Peter and Denis, Corpus Christi, Rainford, we pray him unto eternal life. The Lord shall be our way, our light. It is right and fitting that we receive inspiration from the Acts of the Apostles or, more accurately, the Acts of Jesus, Risen from the dead in is Body the Church. What other Acts matter for a priest. And the words of our Lord himself, Lord of peace, entrusted to us by Saint John shall be our comfort. To that Lord we look for comfort and peace.

    Homily:

    ‘Peace I bequeath to you; my own peace I give you.’ That peace radiated around Tom McKenna. The peace I felt vividly, humblingly present when I came to see him after the shock of that awful break in here. No vengeance, no self-pity. For ‘Do not let your hearts be troubled or afraid.’

    But peace is not soft, childish, all rose-tinted spectacles. Ordained in the midst of the Second World War, at the Church of Saint Peter’s, Stonyhurst, when students from the English College, Rome, were exiled from Rome when Hitler and Mussolini formed a cruel, wicked axis.

    Secretary to three Archbishops, he knew the complexity of the life of the church, the Body of Christ. The book we call the Acts of the Apostles, truly the second book given to us by Saint Luke about what Jesus did, but in this second book, what he does now in his Body, the church: that book is places, towns, villages. It is putting fresh hearts into disciples. It is to encourage perseverance in the faith. But, because it is all about what Jesus risen is doing, it all flows from the grace and mercy of God.

    As secretary, as chancellor, especially as administrator of the Cathedral, in its planning, building, opening, as Bishop Malone, or Dean Peter Cookson know so well, is demanding, varied, frustrating, full of the unexpected; cooperating with so many; cajoling; insisting; waiting; starting again. And throw in a dignitary or two, to be met with all due protocol, in case you get bored.

    But in the midst of all this, another dignitary, indeed royal visitor of sorts, a prince found no way in. ‘The prince of this world is on his way; he has no power over me.’ And why had he no power over Tom? Father Leo tells me of the testimony you the parishioners of Corpus Christi, give to the prayerfulness of your former parish priest. Father Leo says he cannot keep up with that.

    Kneeling by his bedside, he died. Dear Tom, we were brought to know that with our Lord you say: ‘I love the Father and I am doing exactly what the Father told me.’

    So now, the Lord says to you: ‘A peace the world cannot give, this is my gift to you.’

    Eternal rest, grant to him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him, may he rest in peace. Amen.

• 21/05/03 HOMILY FOR CHORAL EVENING PRAYER
  

  • Homily preached by the Most Reverend Patrick Kelly, Archbishop of Liverpool, at Choral Evening Prayer. 4.00 pm on Wednesday 21 May 2003 in the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King, Liverpool. Broadcast live by BBC Radio Three.

    ‘Deeply Exuberant’: I think that's a fair description of this evening's prayer, here in the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King, Liverpool. The sound of organ and voices soars high into the lantern of this building, which with our sister Anglican Cathedral, matters as much as the Liver Birds on Liverpool's skyline.

    We are inspired and challenged by the glorious sounds as they echo around the vast space of the dome above and around us.

    But we really have no choice what sound to make this day in Eastertide. Only exuberant, rousing, thrilling sound does justice to two wonderful facts.

    First: the stone has been rolled away; the tomb is empty; the grave clothes have been unceremoniously dumped on the ground: Jesus needs them no more. He is risen indeed. We accept the call: ‘Rise heart, thy Lord is risen’.

    The second fact: his life is already ours. He declares: ‘I am the vine, you are the branches. Abide in me, and I in you.’ And the confident joy in those words does not depend on spectacular activity, huge productivity, impressive success. The assurance belongs to everyone who welcomes him, not least those who can only stand and wait, sit and wait, lie in a bed and wait. Fruitfulness depends on one thing only: ‘the one who abides in me, and in whom I abide, bears much fruit.’

    The exuberant song this evening proclaims the truth about the most still, and housebound, and bed-ridden, not less than the strong, energetic, entrepreneur.

    The reason is all in this: This I command you, to love one another.

    Glorious sounds, mighty organ, brilliant scintillating music, wonderful skill of voice and hand: they are all unrestrained here this evening because, they're not like noisy gongs or clashing cymbals; they are founded on the love of the Lord, abiding in our hearts.

• 23/05/03 THE EPISCOPAL ORDINATION OF THE RIGHT REVEREND THOMAS WILLIAMS
  

  • THE EPISCOPAL ORDINATION OF THE RIGHT REVEREND THOMAS WILLIAMS AS AUXILIARY BISHOP OF LIVERPOOL

    Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King Tuesday 27 May 2003 at 12.00 Noon

    The Solemn Mass for the Episcopal Ordination of Bishop-designate Thomas Williams is to take place at 12.00 Noon on Tuesday 27 May 2003 at the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King, Liverpool. The Rite of Ordination will be led by the Most Reverend Patrick Kelly, Archbishop of Liverpool.

    Bishops from throughout the country are expected to attend (a list is attached) as are priests and deacons of the Archdiocese and civic dignitaries (a list is attached). Among the congregation will be many parishioners from St Anthony’s church, Scotland Road and Our Lady Immaculate church, Everton, where the Bishop-designate has been Parish Priest.

    The first reading will be taken from the Letter of St Paul to the Thessalonians (Chapter 2 Verses 2-8) and will be read by Mrs Aine Brodie, Headteacher of Our Lady Immaculae Roman Catholic Primary School, Everton. It will be followed by the singing of Psalm 116 in the setting by Philip Duffy and the reading from the Gospel of St Luke (Chapter 10 Verses 1-9).

    The Offertory gifts of bread and wine will be carried forward by members of the family of Bishop Williams.

    Taking part in the music of the Mass will be the Cathedral Choir under the direction of Mervyn Cousins. The music of the Mass will be as follows:

    Hymn: ‘Hail Redeemer’ music by Charles Rigby; words by Patrick Brennan (1877-1952), additional verses by JohnMcHugh.
    Gloria, Sanctus Memorial Acclamation and Amen: music from ‘A Festival Responsorial Mass’ by Philip Duffy (b.1943).
    Psalm 116: music by Philip Duffy.
    Gospel Acclamation: music by Mervyn Cousins (b.1962).
    Hymn: ‘Veni Sancte Spiritus’ music from Gregorian Chant; text attributed to Rabanus Maurus (766-856).
    Litany of the Saints: music by Philip Duffy.
    Hymn: ‘Our God reigns’ text and music by Leonard J Smith.
    Motet: ‘Ecce sacerdos’ music by Edward Elgar (1857-1934).
    Agnus Dei: music by Philip Duffy, adapted from the ‘Mass of St Nicholas’.
    Communion Hymn: ‘This is my Body’: words by Jimmy Owens (verses 1 and 2) and Damian Lundy (verses 3-5); music by Jimmy Owens.
    Communion Motet: ‘The Lord is my Shepherd’: music by Lennox Berkeley (1903-1989).
    Hymn: ‘Soul of my Saviour’: text from Latin 14th century, translation Anonymous; music by William Maher (1823-1877).
    ‘Christus Vincit’: adapted from the Worchester Antiphoner.
    Recessional Hymn: ‘Tell out, my soul’: music by Walter Greatorex (1877-1949); words by Timothy Dudley-Smith (b.1926).
    Organ Voluntary: ‘Intrada’ by Grayston Ives (b.1948).
    

    BISHOPS ATTENDING THE EPISCOPAL ORDINATION:

    Bishop Vincent Malone (Auxiliary Bishop of Liverpool)
    Bishop Kieran Conry (Bishop of Arundel and Brighton)
    Bishop Ambrose Griffiths (Bishop of Hexham and Newcastle)
    Bishop Augustine Harris (Bishop Emeritus of Middlesbrough)
    Bishop Alan Hopes (Auxiliary Bishop of Westminster)
    Bishop Mark Jabale (Bishop of Menevia)
    Bishop David Konstant (Bishop of Leeds)
    Bishop Hugh Lindsay (Bishop Emeritus of Hexham and Newcastle)
    Bishop Bernard Longley (Auxiliary Bishop of Westminster)
    Bishop Patrick O'Donoghue (Bishop of Lancaster)
    Bishop John Rawsthorne (Bishop of Hallam)
    Bishop Arthur Roche (Coadjutor Bishop of Leeds)
    

    CIVIC DIGNITARIES ATTENDING THE EPISCOPAL ORDINATION:

    Among the Civic Dignitaries attending the Episcopal Ordination will be:
    The Lord Lieutenant of Merseyside: Mr Alan Waterworth
    The High Sheriff of Merseyside: Mr Robert Atlay
    The Mayor of Wirral
    The Mayor of St Helens
    The Mayor and Mayoress of Knowsley
    The Chairman of West Lancashire District Council
    The Mayor and Mayoress of Wigan
    The Mayor of Maghull and Consort
    The Mayor and Mayoress of Warrington
    The Lord Mayor and Lady Mayoress of Hale
    Mr John Fennell
    Mr Anthony Brown: Consul of Iceland
    Nunzia Bertali: Consul of Italy
    Professor Simon Lee: Rector of Liverpool Hope University College
    
• 27/05/03 HOMILY FOR THE EPISCOPAL ORDINATION OF BISHOP THOMAS WILLIAMS
  

  • Introduction to Mass and Homily preached by the Most Reverend Patrick Kelly, Archbishop of Liverpool, at the Episcopal Ordination of Thomas Williams. Tuesday 27 May 2003, the Feast of Saint Augustine of Canterbury. 12.00 Noon in the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King Liverpool.

    (Readings and Prayers from the National Proper for the Feast of Saint Augustine.)

    Introduction to Mass:

    We can see around us the word of the Lord which makes our prayer and what we do today pleasing in God’s sight. More mitres than usual: because we are invited to welcome again what has been handed on to us from the apostles through their successors, the bishops. Many priests: because a Bishop is anointed, to be renewed, by the same Holy Spirit, the Spirit of holiness, poured on Thomas Williams thirty-one years ago today, when he was ordained a priest; only the Holy Spirit can renew hearts unto such holiness that the Words of the Word of God ring true on his lips. Religious, men and women, parishioners from across the archdiocese, especially from the parish of Saint Anthony of Egypt, Scotland Road: because a Bishop shall encourage, inspire, above all gather into peace the life formed by abundant gifts of the Holy Spirit. Representatives of other churches and Communities of the Lord Jesus: because the Holy Spirit, who overshadows a Bishop, inspires us in our day to walk the ecumenical way.

    Those who serve in civic life, locally and nationally: because the Good News entrusted to a Bishop is Good News for all creation. But above all, since today is right and fitting in so far as it is the fruit of a story begun in a Mother’s womb, formed within a family, Tom’s Mother and family. Fidelity to the Holy Spirit, to the word of the Lord, dedication to unity, justice, peace: such shall shape our prayer. That our prayer may be sincere, our praise joyful and unrestrained, we ask for pardon, forgiveness, peace.

    Homily:

    During the prayer, which will ordain him Bishop, the book of the Gospels will be held open over the head of Thomas Williams. The Word of the Lord Jesus shall overshadow his whole being. The ‘yes’ to the invitation to be a Bishop, voiced by the Apostolic Nuncio, Archbishop Puente, in the name of the Holy Father, that ‘yes’ did ‘not spring from error, nor was it made with guile.’ It is a ‘yes’ emerging from a conviction refined every day: the Lord Jesus is Good News for all creation. That conviction was surely nourished by the story of glorious predecessors at Saint Anthony’s who 150 years ago handed on not only the Good News, but gave their lives as well.

    And that Good News is all in this greeting: ‘Whatever house you enter, first say: Peace be to this house.’ So it was that the Risen Lord greeted Peter, the apostle who had denied him; so he greeted Thomas, who deserted and doubted him; peace was his greeting for the rest who deserted him and fled. His first word: Peace be with you, peace, that is well being of body, mind, spirit. That word is entrusted to the successors of the forgiven, reconciled, raised up apostles. And the assurance is total. ‘If someone of peace, someone whose heart is already prepared as “an honest and good heart,” ready to “bring forth fruit with patience,”’ (Luke 8:15), the pledge ‘Peace be with you’, will accomplish that which it was sent to you.

    So Tom, it is clear what awesome resources, what abundance of talents, what outstanding qualities of body, mind, spirit, you must be willing to foster if you are to be the herald the Lord wants you to be.

    The answer is: None at all. You are to go as a lamb: not a wolf. Weakness, vulnerability, not power and might accomplish the purposes of Jesus of Nazareth.

    No purse: no bribery, flattery, spin: no attempts to impose upon a captive audience. Your preaching, in so far was we surrender to the Holy Spirit overshadowing you, will have all the courtesy of the Annunciation: an invitation, a call to ponder, weigh up, as Mary did, with space and time.

    No bag: no baggage; no burden, except that yoke, that yoke designed as Joseph often had done, to fit comfortably the shoulders of this ox. Especially as Bishops, we shall not allow the false accuser of the brethren to make us downcast, burdened, and gloomy. Apart from much else: that would be a sure way to turn away any new labourers willing to go into the harvest.

    Instead, eyes shall shine with zest for life as if, well, the blues always win. Tom, you will be overwhelmed by the massive goodness, generosity, patient endurance, holiness all around you in people and priests. You will recognise new reasons every day to say: we do well always and everywhere to give thanks and praise.

    And all because it is not in doubt: ‘The kingdom of God has come near to you.’ God has come close by to forgive, to heal, to raise up, to make glad. God has already reconciled the world to himself. The Lord is risen and rising he raised up those whom had first chosen and sent them out.

    Tom, for your greater joy, for our deeper peace, to the glory and honour of the Father, in the power of the Holy Spirit, welcome his Son’s word to you today: ‘Peace be with you: go out to the whole world and proclaim the good news’. But start in Scotland Road.

• 29/05/03 OBITUARY OF REVEREND JOSEPH ALPHONSUS CONNERY
  
  • Reverend Joseph Alphonsus Connery
    
    Born: 28 November 1914
    Ordained: 6 June 1943
    Died: 26 May 2003
    

    Joseph Connery was born in Moneymore, County Londonderry on 28 November 1914, the son of John and Teresa Connery. His early education was at St Columba’s College in Londonderry before studies for the priesthood at St Peter’s College, Wexford, where he was ordained to the priesthood on 6 June 1943.

    Following ordination he came to serve in the Archdiocese of Liverpool, his first appointment being as Assistant Priest at St Oswald’s, Old Swan in 1943. In 1947 he moved to Wigan to serve at St Joseph’s returning to the City of Liverpool three years later to Our Lady of Reconciliation in Eldon Street. In 1952 he moved to St Swithin’s, Gillmoss and in August 1953 to St Aidan’s, Huyton. He returned to Wigan in October 1960 to be Assistant Priest at St Cuthbert’s, Pemberton.

    In December 1966 he took charge of the new development in Skelmersdale being appointed Parish Priest of St Francis of Assisi in the town. Ten years later in 1976 he took up his final appointment as parish Priest of Our Lady Immaculate, Bryn.

    He retired in 1979 and returned to his native county of Londonderry where he died peacefully on Monday 26 May 2003. May he rest in peace.

• 04/06/03 LIVERPOOL CATHOLIC WOMEN TO MEET
  

  • ‘WOMEN MAKING A DIFFERENCE’
    Liverpool Catholic Women to meet

    Women from throughout the Archdiocese of Liverpool are to hold a day of discussion, prayer and reflection on the theme of ‘Women making a difference’. The meeting which runs from 10.00 am to 3.00 pm on Saturday 14 June 2003, is to be held at the Archdiocese of Liverpool Centre for Evangelisation in Croxteth Drive, Liverpool. It has been organised by a group of women from the Women’s Desk of the Archdiocese and is open to both men and women who would like to spend time reflecting on the role of women in the Catholic Church.

    The theme of the day is taken from the book of the same title by Pamela Hussey and Marigold Best, who will both be present and will address the meeting. Pamela Hussey is a member of the Congregation of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and has worked with the Latin American section of the Catholic Institute for International Relations since 1981; she has also spent time working in El Salvador. Marigold Best works as the Latin American co-ordinator at Quaker Peace and Service helping to strengthen links with the Quaker community in Latin America.

    ‘Women making a difference’ celebrates the achievements of women from different social, economic and ethnic groupings who are working to overcome poverty and exclusion. The book includes many motivating stories of women working as individuals, in small groups, in large organisations and at international level, demonstrating love for neighbour, giving disadvantaged dignity and allowing them to fulfil their potential.

    Clergy from the Archdiocese are also invited and the Archbishop of Liverpool, the Most Reverend Patrick Kelly, will be attending, he says: ‘On previous occasions the fruit of such gatherings has been new depth of prayer and communion with one another. I am sure that this day will be similarly blest.’

    Mrs Linda Mellor of the Liverpool Archdiocese Women’s Desk who is co-ordinating the day says: 'It will be very much a listening exercise in which Catholic women can share their experiences of life in the Church both at local and international level. The participants will be able to express their concerns and their hopes for the future, both practical and spiritual, in a friendly atmosphere of mutual co-operation and understanding.'

    Anyone is welcome to attend the meeting on Saturday 14 June starting at 10.00 am.

    For further information contact Linda Mellor Tel: 0151 423 1692

• 05/06/03 TOP ARTS AWARD FOR LIVERPOOL SCHOOL
  

  • St Sebastian's Catholic Primary School in Kensington has achieved one of the 775 Artsmark awards presented across the country by Arts Council England and is one of 274 schools to achieve Artsmark Gold status.

    Arts Council England's Artsmark award recognises schools that demonstrate a commitment to providing opportunities across all art forms from drama to music, design to literature, and dance to sculpture. The scheme also encourages schools to work in partnership with artists and arts organisations. The official award ceremony is to take place on Wednesday 9 July.

    Margaret Hagan Deputy Head teacher at the school says: ‘I am delighted that the Arts Council has recognised St Sebastian's progressive, well balanced arts education programme which enables pupils to work with local artists. There is a great deal of arts activity going on in the school: the choir are performing in the Philharmonic Hall later this month, a visiting group of African drummers are coming into school to perform, an artist comes into school to work with children throughout the year and we are looking forward to dance and drama productions at the end of this year. Kensington Regeneration and the local EAZ Excite and our own PTA support us in these projects and we have links with the local Kensington arts group All Arts. The support of these groups is invaluable and enables us to fund many exciting projects for the children.’

    In October the new 'Field of Dreams’ Art Centre will be open for school and local community use with exciting times ahead for all the arts in St Sebastian's.

    For any further information, photo opportunities and interviews please contact:
    Margaret Hagan at St Sebastian's on 0151 260 9697.

• 12/06/03 ARCHDIOCESAN ASSEMBLY
  

  • TOWARDS A CREATIVE FUTURE

    Over 100 delegates from the twenty-seven Deaneries of the Archdiocese of Liverpool attended the Archdiocesan Assembly, which met at the Liverpool Archdiocesan Centre for Evangelisation last Saturday, 7 June. The Assembly was held to focus on work taking place at Deanery level following discussions held by the Archdiocesan Council for Evangelisation during their visits to each of the Deaneries.

    In introducing the Assembly Archbishop Patrick Kelly reminded delegates that the criteria for the work of the Church is the mission of Christ saying: ‘We will be wise to be attentive and to interpret and discern every fear, pain, desire, concern emerging at this time, and see if it emerges, not from a thirst for success, but from the longing for God which is only satisfied in the face of Jesus, Son of God, Son of Mary, the face revealed on the veil of Veronica or a Shroud’. He went on to continue the theme when speaking about the provision of Mass and the Sacraments saying: ‘The primary hunger and thirst cannot be met by more Masses, more priests, more choice. It demands something much deeper and more daring, searching and ultimately satisfying’.

    The Archbishop concluded by saying: ‘It may be that this is one of the most demanding and painful gifts we are invited to receive in parts of our diocese. Parishes, once, were able to be self-contained in almost every aspect: Church; priests; Schools from 5 to 16; club; guilds; finance. But perhaps something new has begun to be given to us: nowhere self-sufficient; nowhere self-contained And it is there that we will become evangelisation: radical: cross-inspired: wound-bearing: Church: fellowship: a people who realise that the environment for which we work, in every sense of the word environment, is about Spirit formed space, and so only shall we be able to play our part and renew the face of the earth.’

    Following the Archbishop’s introduction Fr Tony O’Brien, Episcopal Vicar for Finance and Development gave an outline of the way in which Archdiocesan finances are administered. He spoke of the duty of stewardship, both within individual parishes and across the Archdiocese, pointing out that all of the parishes within the Archdiocese are under the registration of a single charitable trust and subject to current charity legislation. He spoke of the changing priorities facing the Archdiocese with growing numbers of elderly priests and the need to make provision for more lay leadership and training.

    Two presentations followed given by teams from the Leyland and Leigh Deaneries. Delegates gave an overview of the Deanery in terms of geography, population and provision for Mass and the Sacraments and spoke of the ways in which they are looking to find collaborative ways forward which embrace the realities of their present situation. In Leyland the Deanery Council for Evangelisation is looking to establish locally owned structures for spiritual growth and adult education and is looking to strengthen the sense of community between the parishes. Delegates from the Leigh Deanery stressed the importance of working with the Archdiocesan Council for Evangelisation and with the Archdiocese as a whole.

    Fr Stephen Pritchard, Archdiocesan Youth Chaplain, and John Biggins, Advisor for the Formation of Young people, then gave a brief update on the progress of work with young people. The Assembly warmly endorsed and strongly affirmed their work.

    Moving on from these presentations during the afternoon session of the Assembly Fr Peter McGrail, the Director of Pastoral Formation, put forward proposals for new patterns of local parish life which he hopes will take us beyond the present situation and into the future. The proposals are to identify three Deaneries where an intense process of discernment and exploration can take place over a period of years which will look towards a different future. The proposals received broad agreement from delegates who asked that they be further explored.

    Elections were also held for two lay representatives on the Archdiocesan Council for Evangelisation and David Delaney and Alan Lowe were elected by the delegates.

• 07/06/03 Archbishop Kelly's Address to the Archdiocesan Assembly
  

  • Opening Address given by the Most Reverend Patrick Kelly, Archbishop of Liverpool, at the Liverpool Archdiocesan Assembly. Saturday 7 June 2003 at the Liverpool Archdiocesan Centre for Evangelisation, Croxteth Drive, Liverpool.

    On the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood up and proclaimed, ‘If any one thirst, let him come to me, and let him who believes in me drink’. As the scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water.’ ‘Now this he said about the Spirit, which those who believed in him were to receive; for as yet the spirit had not been given, because Jesus was not yet glorified.’ (John 7:37-39)

    A theological reflection on the process to respond to changes in one Diocese:

    ‘Success is not one of the names of God, or of Christ, or of his church. The criterion for the mission of the disciples is the mission of Christ: “As the Father has sent me, even so I send you.” (John 20:21). So their spiritual equipment is no different from Jesus’ spiritual equipment, namely the Holy Spirit, who gives them both the “theological virtues, and, as well, the foreboding reminder of the nature, the challenge and the fate of Jesus: “Do you not remember?” (Mark 8:18)’ (Hans Urs von Balthasar: Theo-Drama: Volume V: The Last Act p.178.)

    ‘Men think that the day is what is important: “They have the courage to work, but they do not have the virtue of being able to do nothing. / To relax, to rest, to sleep. / They conduct their affairs very well during the day, / But they will not let me look after them at night. / As if I were not able to take good care of them for one whole night. / The man who cannot sleep is failing to keep faith with hope.’ Then, at the very end, God recalls that one particular night which came down like a linen cloth to cover the body of his dead Son. It shrouded his sleep in ultimate self-surrender to the Father, and his last hope in him who had apparently disappeared forever…This is because self-surrender is ultimate; it is the ultimate in God the Father, in the Son and in the Spirit, and it is the ultimate in man, too, when he has reached the end of his crazy path.’ (ibid p. 188, and quoting Charles Peguy:’ The Gate to the Mystery of the Second Virtue’.)

    Not least, on the eve of Pentecost, it is clear what my task must be. I must reflect in the light precisely of that outpouring of the Holy Spirit, from the pierced side of Christ and from no other source (John 19:31-37), for that only takes place in the hour of glory. And that outpouring, and the hope for which we long, must be found only in the Lord for with whom we keep Holy Saturday, the descent into hell. As certainly as Easter is our great feast, it is certain that Easter Day will never be appreciated and the Easter vigil will never be allowed to call us into all its blessings, unless we discover how to keep the silence of Holy Saturday.

    That means I may not just analyse different responses to the new situations we are experiencing. I must surely try to see what they all have to do with the ‘Ultimates’ in life, as made known in the word of God. And among other gifts, we know what is the ultimate request, desire, thirst, of every heart; it was voiced by the apostle Philip: ‘Philip said to him, Lord, show us the Father, and we shall be satisfied.’ Saint Augustine expressed it in these words: ‘You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless, until they rest in you.’ We will be wise to be attentive and to interpret and discern every fear, pain, desire, concern emerging at this time, and see if it emerges, not from a thirst for success, but from the longing for God which is only satisfied in the face of Jesus, Son of God, Son of Mary, the face revealed on the veil of Veronica or a Shroud.

    I invite you to ponder this poem, written on 8 October 1988 by George Every, with the title: The Shroud:

    Dying and rising are different and difficult. Nothing
    Is automatic in resurrection.
    To die is to participate
    In the flesh of the whole man,
    The old and the new Adam
    Coagulated underground
    And shrouded to be shrined.

    On every winding sheet
    Are flesh and blood in print
    As a kind of record.
    Dispersed abroad, unburied
    In years of pestilence,
    Many without penitence,
    Some bore in hands, feet, side
    Marks of the crucified.

    How is this image made
    In us. We are afraid
    Always to go further
    From father and mother
    Into the wounded side,
    Where ever to abide
    Will always to be to move
    And to be moved by love.

    For a long time it has seemed to me that the final lines of that poem offer the context for everything we decide, say and do. We are wise to reflect on what motivates us: fear, envy, ambition, or love. And similarly, we reflect on how we seek to move others. What resources do we use? Force, threat, power, or only love?

    The scene is now set to consider the issues that have been raised over the past months.

    We must begin with: provision of the Mass and the Sacraments. As we do so, it is wise to take to heart the question our Lord addressed to those who first made steps to follow him: ‘What do you seek?’ (John 1:38). That is the question the Lord addresses to us whenever we draw closer to him. And only one answer is acceptable: ‘Rabbi, where do you abide?’ (ibid) In other words: Rabbi, what moves you and how do you move others. That means we cannot avoid the challenge: when it is said, we want the Mass and the Sacraments, it has to mean: we long for, our hearts need, such celebrations, in terms of the time we set aside, the way we prepare, the encouragement we give to and receive from each other, that, in spirit and in truth: ‘When we eat this bread and drink this cup, we proclaim your death, Lord Jesus, until you come in glory.’ We cannot fit in the Mass and the Sacraments around other concerns; the deep longing, formed by the Holy Spirit, must mean, in the end, renewed thirst for the Lord’s Day as the Lord’s. That was one of the casting out into the depths, about which the Holy Father spoke in his letter as the new millennium began.

    This may mean the opposite of success; there is, in every celebration of the Lord’s Supper, the foreboding reminder of the fate of Jesus. The primary hunger and thirst cannot be met by more Masses, more priests, more choice. It demands something much deeper and more daring, searching and ultimately satisfying.

    Next, it is good to take note of the pain which has been expressed in terms of what has happened in the Archdiocese and is still happening. But it may also be the Spirit-given pain inseparable from new birth. (Matthew 24:8; Luke 21:25-36; Romans 8, but especially vv 18-27). Indeed, in general, we have cause to be concerned that the prayer ‘Maranatha’ has disappeared from the centre of our prayer and our attitude.

    I next come to concern for young people. But what exactly is the concern? It may only be to enable them to have the opportunity, and this can only be when the Spirit opens their heart (Acts 16:14), to see, not least in his Body, the Church, where the weakest members are indispensable (I Corinthians 12:22), the risen Christ. And at no stage must we neglect the foreboding in his story. His way is no more popular today than it was two thousand years ago. It only has the same relevance as the Cross; and that only dealt with sin. When, as late as Ascension Day the apostles still ask about the kingdom, his answer is very close to: ‘Oh no, not again; when the Holy Spirit comes, I trust the penny will finally drop’. (Acts 1:6-8) When the Spirit comes the fruit is: they evangelise Jesus.

    Communication has emerged as a big concern. I must ask, what deep hunger and thirst is this about? I think it is the fruit of the Holy Spirit arousing a longing for communion. But modern communications are not, in the experience of this country, about: koinonia: communion: the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. It is rather about dominating, controlling manipulating, establishing uniformity from supporters, to fashion. I have to confess that I was recently steam-rolled into buying new frames for spectacles: my old ones were judged to be no longer acceptable by the opticians’ criteria. The problem with street credibility is that no one is allowed to say stop and demand to know: who designed this street?

    But communion, as lived by entering into the life of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and nothing less is offered to us, communion as so lived, and the communication needed to form and sustain it is more of this form: the Father gives the Son all the space he can for the Son to be Son. The Father rejoices to see the Son create, invent new ways of being moved and moving only by love, even as far as Calvary. (John 5; Matthew 11:25 –30; Matthew 28:16-20) But the Son only longs for the Father to be known more fully as Father, source of all good, of all potential, of all vastness, of all creativity, and artistry. (cf the same passages and: Mark 10:18; John 6:57; John 10:17-18; John 20:17) And the Holy Spirit rejoices to find new ways for the Father and the Son to be one; the Holy Spirit, not fan clubs, invents: praise, admiration, surprise, delight, affection, respect, wonder, adoration, song, poetry, exuberance, story-telling, languages, music, dance, play. All of these belong within: to be moved and to move by love.

    So communication in the Church must be learnt from the Holy Spirit. I recall these words from John Taylor’s ‘The Go-between God’:

    ‘Marshall McLuhan has taught us to see our whole apparatus of communications as an extension of the human body from the motor car, which puts seven league boots on our feet, to the radio which gives us voices to penetrate every home in the land. But it is significant that all these “extensions” of man are extensions only of his reasoning and assertive consciousness, extension of the apollonian self. The computer makes us fantastically more able to calculate and analyse; it does not help us to mediate. We have instruments to enable us to see everything from the nebulae to the neutron – everything except ourselves. We have immeasurably extended our gift of sight, but not of insight. For that we have the same equipment as the eight-century prophets. Potentially the same but actually for poorer, for while we have been so busy extending one aspect of the knowing and telling self, we have allowed other aspects to atrophy. We have built ourselves up into powerful transmitting stations, but as receiving sets we are feeble.

    ‘What turned a man into a prophet was not eloquence, but vision, not getting the message across, but the getting the message.’ (p.69)

    In this context it is worth noting that nearly all the works of the flesh as described by Saint Paul are such that they restrict others, deny them space, and unite by power. By contrast the gifts of the Spirit, and it must be underlined that they are gifts, not work, so that the glory is to the Father, nearly all create space for others and lead to communion. (Galatians 5:16-26).

    And it is in the context of daring to realise that we are called into the life of Father, Son and Holy, Spirit, that we are able to understand what local must mean for us as we acknowledge that as we move towards a different future, one pattern will not fit every area in the diocese. But at the same time, local does not mean, isolated, private, closed, self-centred. For us, ‘rooted and grounded in love’ (Ephesians 3:17), local means creativity, initiative to discover new ways to be Church, but in such a way as of set purpose to create space for others to be yet more creative, more full of initiative, to delight and gladden and encourage others. Indeed, it is also clear that local must always be large enough, broad enough, varied enough to demand mutual enabling of space. Is that the root of the problem addressed more than once in Corinth (I Corinthians 1.10-13), especially as regards the Lord’s supper, where the body of the Lord was not discerned (I Corinthians 11:17-34). What seems to be a community can in fact be closed, isolated, private, and so too can be its worship. Small, for a group, is not always beautiful.

    It may be that this is one of the most demanding and painful gifts we are invited to receive in parts of our diocese. Parishes, once, were able to be self-contained in almost every aspect: Church; priests; Schools from five to sixteen; club; guilds; finance. But perhaps something new has begun to be given to us: nowhere self-sufficient; nowhere self-contained.

    This is my attempt to read this moment under the whole word of God. I think it can be summed up in:

    ‘where to abide
    will always be to move
    and to be moved by love.’

    And it is there that we will become evangelisation: radical: cross-inspired: wound-bearing: Church: fellowship: a people who realise that the environment for which we work, in every sense of the word environment, is about Spirit formed space, and so only shall we be able to play our part and renew the face of the earth.

• 12/06/03 RECTOR FOR USHAW COLLEGE
  

  • Father Terry Drainey, Spiritual Director to the Royal English College of St Albans at Valladolid in Spain and a priest of the Diocese of Salford has been named as Rector of St Cuthbert’s College, Ushaw, Durham.

    Born in Manchester in 1949, Fr Terry went to Ushaw College as a student in the Junior House but left before entering Major Seminary. Eventually he was sent to the Royal English College Valladolid where he studied in the Augustinian Studium of the University of the Comillas. He was ordained for the diocese of Salford in 1975 and worked for ten years as an assistant priest. In 1986 he was loaned to the Archdiocese of Kisumu in Western Kenya as a ‘Fidei donum’ priest. On his return in 1991 he worked as Parish Priest until he was appointed as spiritual director to the Royal English College of St Albans at Valladolid in Spain in 1997. During this time, the staff of the College embarked on the project of developing a propaedeutic or foundational year to help candidates thoroughly prepare for priestly formation. Fr Terry eventually became the Director of the Year.

    He says of his appointment: ‘I am overwhelmed that I should have been considered for such an important position as Rector of Ushaw College, and am very moved by the trust and confidence that has been extended to me by the Bishops of the Northern Province and Shrewsbury. To be asked to cooperate in the Bishops’ care for the formation of vocations to the priesthood is a very awe-inspiring task. I would also like to express my appreciation at the recognition that it was only right and fitting to make provision for training priests in the North of England and to re-emphasise the need for truly integrated formation so as to provide priests capable of and equipped for the New Evangelisation.’

    The Most Reverend Patrick Kelly, Archbishop of Liverpool, who as Metropolitan Archbishop is Chair of Governors at Ushaw, says: ‘The Bishops of the Northern Province and Shrewsbury responding to the many representations about what is needed at this time have appointed not a President but a Rector to St Cuthbert’s College, Ushaw, Durham. The meaning of this is a desire to ensure that the Rector has all the space needed for his focus to be the formation of students precisely for the priesthood. We have realised that the other activities, which must take place on the site of Ushaw College if we are able to make responsible use of this great asset, must benefit from different people concerned for their specific development. In the past everything tended to find its way to the desk of the one named President. I am sure that Fr Terry Drainey will enjoy the support of the entire Governing Body and all those involved in every aspect of life at Ushaw.’

• 15/06/03 Platinum Jubilee of the Right Reverend Monsignor Denis McDonnell
  

  • Homily preached by the Most Reverend Patrick Kelly, Archbishop of Liverpool, at Mass of Thanksgiving for the Platinum Jubilee of the Right Reverend Monsignor Denis McDonnell. Nazareth House, Crosby: Sunday 15 June 2003.

    There is one sign used in celebration with deaf people which is very inadequate. It is the sign for ‘baptise’: a pouring from a bowl. Since pouring from a jug, shell, bowl, baptismal cup is what usually happens it should be all right. But baptism means: to plunge down, deep, under the waters.

    So our Lord’s words today mean: go an plunge people deep down into the wonder who is the Father; plunge people deep down into all it means that Jesus his son is our Lord; go and immerse people deep into the life, joy, peace, who is the Holy Spirit.

    Now I am certain: when someone is ordained the Holy Spirit touches them at the point where they are most themselves. The Holy Spirit takes hold of the name spoken when they were conceived in their Mother’s womb; and that name was spoken again when in Baptism there was the loud and clear declaration: this child is the fruit of their parents’ love, but this child was loved into the world above all by God. And ordination takes hold of that baptismal moment and deepens, strengthens, renews what then took place.

    So plunged into the name of the Father; immersed into the glorious fact: God is Father. Now Father could sound old. And being plunged into the Father could sound like eyes losing their sparkle, interest on the wane, concerns narrower. How wonderfully our platinum Jubilarian and his next door neighbour Pat McCannon give the lie to that suggestion. God is the one, who in words both Denis and Pat spoke hundreds of times for many years as priests: Introibo ad altar Dei; ad Deum qui laetificat iuventutem meam: I will go to the altar of God the God who gladdens my youthfulness. Closer to the Father is closer to the spring in the step, the glint in the eye, the curiosity of mind inseparable from true youthfulness.

    But plunged too, into his Son, Jesus of Nazareth, our Lord. And to be plunged into him is to realise: we do not only know God as a great cloud of mercy and love; we know about a God who came to make the smallest details his own: an inn and stable in Bethlehem: a sycamore tree in Jericho; boats by Galilee; a deep well Samaria; a garden full of olive trees called Gethsemane; a hill top, like a skull called Calvary; three o’clock on a Friday afternoon. And inseparable from: a Mary, and an Elizabeth; and two sets of brothers, Peter and Andrew and James and John, and a twin called Thomas; Pilate and a Caiaphas; Timaeus and Martha. So a priest called from his Mother’s womb, seized up into the love of Jesus in baptism, called by this same Lord to go in his name, will respect, delight, remember details. I gather Father Joe Kelly after his recent visit to our retired priests across the Irish Sea, as is only right and fitting came to report to a certain Jubilarian; each one and the details of their life in our diocese was recalled with wit, precision, delight. After all, a priest in the steps of our one Good Shepherd is called like his Lord to know his own by name, not as faceless others, but sisters and brothers.

    And the Holy Spirit, into which each one of us is plunged in baptism, is the one received in ordination to renew us in holiness every day. And holiness is life, holiness is vitality, holiness is creativity, holiness sparkles and refreshes and renews; here is nothing stale, boring, cynical, false. For seventy years above all of growth in holiness, in fidelity to the word of God, in prayer to the Father, in being pruned by the gracious, but searching vine-dresser, but only so that every day there shall be more fruit. For that we give thanks. And the fruit must now be greater every day. I always agree with using at every Easter Vigil the Irish reaction to any Feis: Sure, ‘t’was the best ever. Every Easter Vigil is bound to be the best ever, because our God is bursting with new life; our Risen Lord is an inexhaustible source of surprise, and wonderful things; the Holy Spirit is for ever renewing the face of the earth. Denis, for seventy years of vitality, wit, sparkle wisdom, but all out of love for the Lord, in his name we thank you.

• 15/06/03 FOUR DEACONS ORDAINED
  

  • To work in Crosby, Gateacre, Haydock and Whiston

    A Purchasing Officer, a retired Electrical Engineer, a retired teacher and a Book Salesman were ordained as Permanent Deacons by the Auxiliary Bishop of Liverpool, the Right Reverend Thomas Williams, on Sunday, 15 June 2003, at the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King, Liverpool, during Mass at 3.00 pm. The first Permanent Deacons were ordained for the Archdiocese of Liverpool twenty-three years ago in the Cathedral in 1979, and the programme of formation and training begun in 1977 has seen ordinations every year.

    The order of the permanent diaconate was restored in the Roman Catholic Church in 1967 after the Second Vatican Council; deacons had served in the early Church but in later centuries the diaconate had been conferred only as a preliminary to ordination to the priesthood.

    After ordination a deacon is appointed to a parish and works with the parish priest in pastoral care. Whilst he cannot say Mass he assists the priest at Mass and can perform the Sacraments of baptism, matrimony, and Christian burial when these take place outside Mass.

    The four men ordained on Sunday are:

    Peter Barr, who is a parishioner of Blessed English Martyrs, Haydock, St Helens, where he will serve as Deacon. He is married to Mary Theresa and has adult children. He works as a Purchasing Officer.

    Ernest Cyril Paul Diggory, who is a parishioner of St Peter and St Paul, Crosby, where he will serve as Deacon. He is married to Eileen Mary and is a retired Electrical Engineer.

    Harold Anthony Green, who is a parishioner of St Luke, Whiston, where he will serve as Deacon. He is married to Veronica and is a retired teacher.

    Martin Scott Sanderson, who is a parishioner of Our Lady of the Assumption, Gateacre, Liverpool where he will serve as Deacon. He is married to Kathleen Teresa and has a seventeen-year-old son who is still at school. Martin works as a Book salesman.

• 22/06/03 Archbishop Kelly's Homily at Mass for the Mill Hill Centenary
  

  • Introduction to Mass and Homily preached by the Most Reverend Patrick Kelly, Archbishop of Liverpool, at Mass marking the 100th anniversary of the death on 19 June 1903 of Herbert Cardinal Vaughan. The Twelfth Sunday of Ordinary Time, 22 June 2003, at 2.30 pm in the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King, Liverpool.

    Introduction to Mass:

    The love of Christ overwhelms us: we reflect one man has died for all. In those words St Paul today describes what drives him on to make known to all the Lord Jesus and his dying for us. The love of Christ: the motto of Herbert Vaughan when he became Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster was: ‘Amare et Servire’ ‘to love and to serve’: in 1893 he wrote: ‘Two words seem to me to sum up the programme which is before us – Amare et Servire. Love must be the root out of which service must spring up. Without love, service demanding care and self-sacrifice will never endure.’ Above all today we come together to give thanks for God’s forming among us, through Cardinal Vaughan, the Mill Hill story, priests, brothers, sisters, red boxes; a story driven by the fact: one man, Jesus Christ our Lord, died for all; the love of Christ overwhelms us. And that same overwhelming love overwhelms even our sin.

    Homily:

    The sun was setting over Lake Magadi in Kenya. Soon the darkness would be total; it would be a moonless night. A young Masai man had just guided us back from where his family lived with their flocks. It had taken nearly two hours; but with his skill that was half that the outward journey had taken our four-wheel truck. Dark was minutes away; he was invited to stay the night and walk home when daylight returned. He thanked us, but in complete serenity stepped out into the night.

    I think of another young man: on a lake called Galilee, fierce storm; waves breaking over the boat; he is asleep, in serenity and peace. That moment by Magadi in Kenya, that story on Lake Galilee, make me ponder the delicacy of the task inspired by Cardinal Vaughan. At a time when we were short of priests it was clear to him: a Church that does not reach out to others is not alive. Even though the first priests formed by his Society of Saint Joseph lived often only three or four years, before Africa’s fierce environment and scourges such as malaria claimed their life, still they went. But they went to give and receive. I needed that Masai youth to reveal to me Our Lord’s peace in the midst of darkness and storm and night. But that young man needed to know that the Son of the Maker of the wonderful land he called home, has died for him and all those dear to him. Through this Lord Jesus there was a serenity and peace nothing could destroy. But over the years those who have taken up the story of Mill Hill have taught us to realise that we may only go into another world if we walk humbly. I still feel; few young people are as truly mature as that young man. I feared lest besides the wonder of Our Lord we took with him the trappings of our society so often not at peace, rarely serene.

    But without the nourishment of the table of the Lord’s word and the Lord’s Body our hunger and thirst cannot be satisfied. That conviction drove Herbert Vaughan to initiate other wonderful enterprises. In Salford he looked and saw: children in need were being fed, clothed, housed. But he asked one more question: many of these abandoned children, children orphaned by the sicknesses that wiped out thousands in the 19th century, many had been promised something else in baptism: to know the Lord, to be at home in his Body the Church, to receive light from the Word of God, to be nourished by the Bread of heaven, to rejoice in the gifts of the Holy Spirit.

    So he founded in Salford and in Westminster what he called Rescue Societies; that did not mean rescue from homelessness, hunger, destitution; it was all that plus rescue from not knowing the Lord Jesus. His concern was Evangelisation.

    Evangelisation inspired him to found the Catholic Truth Society: the purpose to raise money, not to make profits, but to publish cheap pamphlets the poorest could afford and so know the Lord more clearly, love him more dearly and follow him more nearly.

    He was convinced the Lord died for all. He judged no one by the standards of the flesh: power, influence, cleverness, skills: what mattered was this: for each and everyone the Son of God died. Each one was set free at a great price, the precious Blood of the Son of God. And so in Westminster he dared to hasten forward to build a great Cathedral: it had to be big enough for the needs of the largest diocese in this country. But he wanted it to be such that it could be completed eventually. In God’s wonderful ways, the first great celebration in the Cathedral of the Precious Blood, Westminster was the funeral one hundred years ago of Herbert Cardinal Vaughan. And it is still gloriously unfinished. I wonder if it ever will be? But at his tomb in Mill Hill I am sure Herbert Cardinal Vaughan rests in the serenity of that young Masai warrior, the peace of his Lord on the cushion in a storm tossed boat.

    Today I am wearing a ring with another date: 20 June 1947: the day when a Mill Hill priest, Fred Hall became Bishop of Kisumu, in Kenya. The ring was a present from a family whose son, Charles had shared a Japanese prison with Fred during the Second World War. Fred cared for the young man, until he died. His sister Annie gave the ring to Fred. Inside it reads: ‘Illuminare in Tenebris’. ‘Bring light to those in darkness.’ Fred, on my appointment to Salford, gave it to me; he was born in Burnley; in my turn I have handed it on to Bishop Brian, but borrowed it for today. One more link in a chain. And I am sure, because he chose a device called Saint Joseph’s Penny, to fund his Rescue Society in Salford, the red boxes are valued by him as much as any link in that chain.

    ‘Amare et Servire’: ‘to love and to serve’: ‘Love must be the root out of which service must spring up. Without love, service, demanding care and self-sacrifice, will never endure.’

    We have seen in Herbert Vaughan and what God made to come to pass through him that ‘For anyone who is in Christ there is a new creation; the old creation has gone, and now the new one is here.’

• 25/06/03 Archdiocese of Liverpool Lourdes Pilgrimage 2003
  

  • PILGRIMAGE PREPARATION WELL UNDERWAY

    Seventy-third annual Liverpool Archdiocesan Pilgrimage to Lourdes

    Preparations are well underway for the seventy-third annual Liverpool Archdiocesan Pilgrimage to Lourdes, which will take place from Saturday 26 July to Friday 1 August 2003. The Right Reverend Vincent Malone, Auxiliary Bishop of Liverpool will be leading the pilgrimage this year and the Right Reverend Thomas Williams, Auxiliary Bishop of Liverpool, will also be travelling with over 1,100 pilgrims to the French Shrine. 500 of the pilgrims will travel by air on three special flights from Liverpool John Lennon Airport while a further 300 have other flights or overland coaches. 350 youth pilgrims who will travel by coach from Crosby, Knowsley, Leyland, Liverpool, St Helens, Warrington and Widnes will join them.

    Sunday 6 July 2003: Service of the Sick at 3.00 pm at St Benet’s, Netherton

    The next major stage of preparation for the pilgrimage is the Service of the Sick which is to be held at 3.00 pm on Sunday 6 July 2003 at St Benet’s RC Church, Netherton. Mass will be celebrated by the Director of the Liverpool Archdiocesan Lourdes Pilgrimage Association, Monsignor John Butchard, and afterwards all registered sick and disabled pilgrims are expected to meet their nurses, doctors and carers.

    Monsignor Butchard will also be the Celebrant at the traditional Lourdes Pilgrimage Departure Mass which will be celebrated at 8.00 pm on Thursday 24 July 2003 in the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King, Liverpool.

    At this time many groups of volunteers are meeting regularly to organise the pilgrimage and train for the work they will be doing in Lourdes. Preparations include: liaison with Liverpool’s John Lennon Airport, work in which the Friends of the Airport are very helpful; medical and nursing documentation for all registered sick pilgrims; personal and general care requirements for the sick pilgrims; catering and household arrangements for the Accueil St Frai (the hospital accommodation in Lourdes which is staffed by volunteers); arrangements for the movement and placing of pilgrims in wheelchairs on the journey and at the services in Lourdes; teams to help pilgrims bathe in the waters of Lourdes; musical rehearsals and liturgical preparations and the printing of the annual handbook for distribution to all affiliate pilgrims.

    The volunteers are all members of the Hospitalite of Our Lady of Lourdes (Liverpool Branch) who pay their own way and spend their whole pilgrimage caring for those who need support both while travelling and in Lourdes; they also provide support for registered sick and disabled pilgrims who are able to stay in hotels. They are assisted by the 350 members of the Youth Pilgrimage who are led by their Director, the Archdiocesan Youth Chaplain, Fr Stephen Pritchard. Their main work is to provide ‘pushing power’ for the wheelchair pilgrims to enable them to move round Lourdes from the Accueil and hotel to the various services.

    While in Lourdes the pilgrims will join in many of the daily activities which are organised there. Mass will be celebrated daily, usually in one of the Basilicas, but on one morning the pilgrims will be able to celebrate with other English speaking groups at the Grotto; the holiest place in Lourdes where it is believed that the Virgin Mary appeared to St Bernadette on eighteen occasions 145 years ago in 1858. On another day the pilgrims will join the International Celebration of Mass with pilgrims from throughout the world taking part. All the prayer celebrations will be accompanied by the Lourdes Music Group which is led by Fr Grant Maddock, the parish priest of Christ the King church, Queens Drive, Liverpool. In the early evenings pilgrims will take part in the Eucharistic Procession at 5.00 pm and later at 9.00 pm in the Marian Torchlight Procession.

    The theme of the pilgrimage is ‘A people from every nation’ reflecting the worldwide Church. This year has also been designated by Pope John Paul II as the year of the Rosary and pilgrims will be praying the five new ‘Mysteries of Light’ created by the Pope and reflecting on: the Baptism of Jesus in the River Jordan, the Wedding Feast at Cana, Jesus announcing the Kingdom of God, the Transfiguration of Jesus and the institution of the Holy Eucharist at the Last Supper.

    Once finalised the full timetable for the Pilgrimage will be published.

    For further information contact:

    Monsignor John Butchard,
    Director of the Liverpool Archdiocesan Lourdes Pilgrimage Association
    Tel: 0151 526 8468 Fax: 0151 286 8597

• 27/06/03 Archbishop Kelly's Homily at Mass of Thanksgiving: Sacred Heart church, St Helens
  

  • Introduction to Mass and Homily preached by the Most Reverend Patrick Kelly, Archbishop of Liverpool, at Mass of Thanksgiving for the Parish of Sacred Heart, St Helens. Feast of the Sacred Heart: Friday 27 June 2003 at 7.30 pm in the church of the Sacred Heart, St Helens.

    Introduction to Mass:

    Listen to the word of the Lord: ‘I took them in my arms…I led them with reins of kindness, with leading strings of love.’ The Lord has led us by reins of kindness, with leading-strings of love, to gather us together to give thanks for the story of kindness, love, the kindness and love flowing from the well of the pierced Sacred Heart, spelt out in the story of the parish and church of the Sacred Heart, St Helens. We sing of the Heart of Jesus, fount of love and mercy: in that assurance we pray for the forgiveness we need.

    Homily:

    The word of God proclaimed on your feast this year has been fulfilled in the history of this parish. Through his affectionate, sensitive, often hurting prophet, Hosea, the Lord said: ‘Listen to the word of the Lord: When Israel was a child I loved him.’ At the font, thousands of times the Lord God has said over a child: you are my child, my son my daughter, I take you in my arms. And at the font thousands of parents and God Parents have promised to be at one with the Lord God and made this promise: ‘We will lead them with reins of kindness, with leading strings of love.’ In countless families that promise has been kept and that promise has flowed into the work of teachers in schools. Often feeling the need to condemn, the heart of God has so beaten in our hearts that through the Lord, with him, in him thousands have been able to say: ‘I will not give rein to my anger; for I am a child of God, not merely human; I am one with the Holy One in our midst. I will play my part in enabling others to draw water with joy from the wells of the Saviour’. So there have been first Communions, first confessions: each and every one a new drawing close to the Heart of Jesus.

    Over so many years here, through the people and priests of this parish, this Church, the prayer of Saint Paul has been heard, has become flesh if you wish in our midst. ‘This, then, is what I pray, kneeling before the Father: Out of his infinite glory, may he give you the power through his Spirit for your hidden self to grow strong, so that Christ may live in your hearts through faith, and then planted in love and built on love, you will with all the saints have strength to grasp the breadth and the length, the height and the depth; until knowing the love of Christ, which is beyond all knowledge, you are filled with the utter fullness of God.’ Through the Holy Spirit poured out in Confirmation, hidden selves have been called to become strong in love, in service, in fidelity to the Lord, in ever-deeper hunger for our Lord as our only bread of life, so that Christ will live in our hearts through faith. The love of Christ has been seen in the married life of those who chose to celebrate their wedding precisely in a church named: the Sacred Heart.

    The Sacred Heart: so we come to the most wonderful word of all we receive this evening, and the most demanding too: ‘They will look on the one whom they have pierced.’ We are called to look up and gaze at a pierced side, a broken heart, I do not know why, but many times in the last few months I have found myself driven to ponder this poem: it is called ‘The Shroud’:

    Dying and rising are different
    And difficult. Nothing
    Is automatic in resurrection.
    To die is to participate
    In the flesh of the whole man,
    The old and the new Adam
    Coagulated underground
    And shrouded to be shrined.

    On every winding sheet
    Are flesh and blood in print
    As a kind of record.
    Dispersed abroad, unburied
    In years of pestilence,
    Many without penitence,
    Some bore in hands, feet, side
    Marks of the crucified.

    How is this image made in us? We are afraid
    Always to go further
    From father and mother
    Into the wounded side,
    Where ever to abide
    Will always be to move
    And to be moved by love.

    There is the reason for all our thanksgiving tonight and our longing for the future: for every, often hidden way, in which the image of the crucified, in hands, feet, side, has been made in us and those before us, we give thanks and wondering praise. For the future, the longing is this to overcome all fear and be willing

    ‘always to go further
    from father and mother
    into the wounded side,
    where ever to abide
    will always be to move
    and to be moved by love.’

    To be moved by love, in all we decide, say and do; to seek to move others only by love, whenever we speak or do. Nothing less is the life, which we draw as water from the well-spring of salvation. For the well-spring flows from the pierced heart, the wounded side and nowhere else. Whatever pain, anger, anxiety, fear, sorrow washes over us tonight, we can be certain: the Hoy Spirit will enable us, each and every one to see formed in us the marks of the crucified.

    This evening, with many meanings we will sing: ‘The Day thou gavest, Lord, is ended.’ Whenever I am invited to sing this hymn, when we remember ‘our brethren neath the western skies,’ my prayerful thoughts always reach out to those I know from among our own priests serving in Latin America. Some hearts may feel broken this evening; in the town of St Helen, the town of the Holy Cross, the town of the Passionists, of Blessed Dominic and Father Ignatius, and Elizabeth Prout, I dare to pray: ‘Above all may hearts be broken as was the heart of your Son, that our love may flow as widely, as generously as from his: for “one of the soldiers pierced his side with a lance and immediately there came out blood and water. As the scripture had promised: ‘From his heart shall flow streams of living water.’

• 30/06/03 Obituary of Rev Christopher Donald Crowley
  

  • Reverend Christopher Donald Crowley
    Born: 22 November 1933
    Ordained: 31 May 1958
    Died: 27 June 2003

    Christopher Donald Crowley was born in Cork City on 22 November 1933, the son of Christopher and Eileen Crowley. He studied at the National School in Ireland and later at Stonyhurst College, Lancashire, before studies for the priesthood at St Joseph’s College, Upholland, where he was ordained to the priesthood on 31 May 1958.

    Following ordination his first appointment was as Assistant Priest at St Monica’s, Bootle, in September 1958 and three months later in December 1958 he took on additional responsibility as Chaplain to St Monica’s Mixed School. It was during this time that he also worked with the Young Christian Workers in both school and parish. In May 1974 he moved to be Assistant Priest at St Mary’s, Woolton and five years later in 1979 to St Marie on the Sands Parish, Southport. Two years later in September 1981 he was appointed as Parish Priest of St Marie on the Sands where he remained until he took up what was to be his final appointment as Parish Priest of St Mary’s, Euxton, Chorley in August 1997.

    He will be remembered as a fine priest with a good sense of humour who offered a welcome to all. He was a regular visitor to his native Cork where he enjoyed the company of his family. He retained throughout his life a love of the Jesuit School at Stonyhurst where he had been educated, often returning there and delighting in the sporting achievements of the school. His last years were marked by serious illness and he won the admiration of his parishioners for the way in which he fought off growing weakness and continued to minister to them. He died peacefully in the early hours of Friday 27 June 2003. May he rest in peace.

    His body will be received into St Mary’s church, Euxton at 5.00 pm on Thursday 3 July when Mass will be celebrated. His Funeral Mass will be celebrated there at 3.00 pm on Friday 4 July before interment in Euxton.

• 30/06/03 Obituary of Rev John Francis Murphy
  

  • Reverend John Francis Murphy
    Born: 5 January 1911
    Ordained: 24 June 1934
    Died: 28 June 2003

    John Francis Murphy was born in Cobh, County Cork on 5 January 1911, the son of Thomas Patrick and Mary Frances Murphy. He studied at the Presentation College, Cobh and at Christian Brothers Schools in County Cork, before studies for the priesthood at All Hallows College, Dublin, where he was ordained on 24 June 1934.

    Following ordination he came to work in the Archdiocese of Liverpool his first appointment being as Assistant Priest at Our Lady Immaculate Parish, Everton, in February 1935. In April 1951 he moved to be Assistant Priest at All Saints, Anfield, Liverpool and in November 1955 to St Alphonsus, Liverpool. In January 1958 he became priest in charge at St Gabriel, Higher Folds, Leigh moving back to Liverpool as Parish Priest of Holy Name, Fazakerley in May 1963. He was then appointed to Our Lady of Compassion, Formby in July 1970 and to St Joseph’s, Birkdale in September 1979. Twelve years later he retired and returned to live in Ireland where he died peacefully on the morning of Saturday 28 June 2003. May he rest in peace.

    His Funeral Mass will be celebrated at Our Lady of Victories church, Sallynoggin, County Dublin at 10.00 am on Wednesday 2 July. A Memorial Mass is to be celebrated in the Archdiocese of Liverpool as soon as practically possible.

• 04/07/03 Archbishop Kelly's Homily - Funeral of Rev Christopher Crowley
  

  • Introduction to Mass and Homily preached by the Most Reverend Patrick Kelly, Archbishop of Liverpool, at the Funeral Mass of Rev Christopher Crowley. Friday 4 July 2003 at 3.00 pm in the Church of St Mary, Euxton.

    Introduction to Mass:

    A funeral Mass in the afternoon: a burial as the shadows are beginning to lengthen around St Mary;s, Euxton. We will see: an evening prayer is the perfect setting for the funeral of Christopher Crowley. We will see: God has blest us with the time of day, to pray Chris on his final journey, to pray with and for his brother Fred, and all his family who gave him to us to be our priest, with Mamie, with Michael and all of you whom he valued so deeply in his health and sickness too. Only sin can divide us in the end. We ask the Lord to forgive, to raise us up, to lighten every darkness.

    Homily:

    I want to read again very precious lines from the massive story of an evening near Emmaus: this time I read them from this Bible: in the cover it reads: Mrs J.Carr Altham. Presented by her husband on the 17th of February 1896, Liverpool. It’s my Anglican grandmother’s. I wonder why they were in Liverpool? Their home was Morecambe.

    But the blessed lines: ‘And they drew right into the village, whither they went: and he made as if to go on further. But they constrained him, saying, Abide with us: for it is toward evening, and the day is far spent. And he went in to tarry with them.’ There is the inspiration of the hymn: Abide with me, fast falls the eventide. Eventide, the perfect time to tarry with them: to offer a space of peace, of graciousness, of comfort to heal burdened hearts, to wipe away the tears from every cheek. Chris was blest with a spirit of the eventide: in him we saw the presence of a God of whom we say: ‘See, this is our God, in whom we hoped for salvation, the Lord is the one in whom we hoped’. Last Friday all of us were stuck for words: the death was not truly sudden and yet it was: because he had walked the way of chemotherapy, of night drawing in, with an eventide spirit. No loud drama, no strident heroics: but an evening stroll, talking it over with the Lord, until the moment when the Lord, welcomed over and over again in the breaking of bread, and ‘Did not his heart burn within him as he opened the scriptures for us’; until all that gave way to the Lord who at the end of the day, insists he shall sit down, and the Lord shall wait upon him.

    For that promise for life’s eventide, was declared every time Chris enabled us to obey the command: ‘Do this in memory of me’. And that deed is always an evening deed: it cannot be rushed: for ‘on the same night he was betrayed’ he broke bread for us: it is always the Lord’s Supper to which we are invited. And true to the Lord who tarries in the evening Chris tarried not least with his brother priests: Peter Crowther, Pat MacNally, Jonathan Cotton all made a point of telling me: but only the day before we spoke together, no haste: he tarried with them and renewed them. He had all the time of his tarrying Lord.

    So it shall be that, this evening, we will slowly, gratefully, prayerfully honour his body to burial, with John Henry Lingard’s evening hymn Mary, Star of the Sea: and surely shall she, refuge in grief, pray for us this eventide.

• 08/07/03 NEW LOOK FOR FORMBY’S GILD HALL
  

  • Champagne bookings on the way

    The Parish Centre of Our Lady of Compassion Roman Catholic Church, Formby, known as the Gild Hall has gained substantial funding support for a major re-launch and makeover from the Archdiocese of Liverpool.

    The £120,000 expenditure will see the upstairs members’ club largely untouched, however, the larger downstairs will be significantly re-modelled to form the function suites, a new kitchen and disabled access facilities.

    The Hall will be able to offer quality packages for such occasions as weddings and other family events, business meetings and use by local community groups. A host of special promotions, such as free champagne with every booking and special rates for charities, will be launched.

    Mr Colin Bennett, the newly appointed Manager of The Gild Hall says ‘This news is a fantastic boost, we are very excited about the Hall's potential and are looking forward to making the best of this terrific opportunity for the area.’

    Ricky Davies of the Parish Centre Management Team for the Archdiocese of Liverpool says: ‘The Gild Hall has served as a valuable social asset to the people of Formby for much of the last century. We hope that this investment will update this tremendous facility to enable it to serve the people for at least the rest of this century.’

    People will be able to see the new changes when The Gild Hall hosts this years Formby Show this coming Saturday, July 12th 2003.

• 10/07/03 MISSIONARY SOCIETY CELEBRATES 45th ANNIVERSARY
  

  • Liverpool priests serve with the Society of St James in Latin America

    BOSTON -- The feast of the St. James the Apostle, July 25, 2003 will commemorate the 45th anniversary of the canonical founding of the Missionary Society of St. James the Apostle by Richard Cardinal Cushing. Frs. Denis Parry and Simon Cadwallader from the Archdiocese of Liverpool are presently serving with the missionary group.

    The year 1958 marked the 150th anniversary of the establishment of the diocese of Boston and then Archbishop Richard Cushing desired to honour the occasion in a memorable way. By this date Cushing was internationally known as a generous financier of churches, colleges, high schools, hospitals, convents, and similar establishments. But what could the greatest brick and mortar bishop of the 20th century do to commemorate the establishing anniversary of the archdiocese?

    Cushing happened to mention a ‘great idea’ in his February 1, 1958 weekly column of ‘The Pilot’ newspaper. The possibility of establishing a missionary society of diocesan priests in honour of the archdiocesan anniversary. The idea was quickly reported as breaking news by several national newspapers. Soon after Cushing received congratulatory letters from Archbishop Amleto Giovanni Cicognani, Apostolic Delegate to the United States and Archbishop Antonio C. Samore, Vicar General of Rome and Secretary of the Sacred Congregation of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs.

    Acknowledging the interest of the Vatican officials, Cushing described his idea as having progressed to the ‘so-dream’ stage...even though the publicity it received was only accidental. ‘If it is God's Will it will come into existence in due time.’ God's Will it must have been for on April 30, 1958 Cushing welcomed the first official volunteer of the Society of St. James and two weeks later on May 11, 1958 Cushing publicly announced his founding of the Missionary Society of St. James the Apostle.

    On the feast of the St. James the Apostle, July 25, 1958, Cushing formally founded the Society of Saint St. James the Apostle by a decree: ‘We, Richard J. Cushing, by the Grace of God and the favour of the Apostolic See, Archbishop of Boston, do by this decree erect and constitute a pious society in aid of the Church in Latin America. We place this Society under the patronage of St. James the Apostle, and to it we give the name "The Pious Society of St. James the Apostle.’

    During the past forty-five years the Missionary Society of St. James the Apostle and its supporters have sustained by alms and prayers over 300 diocesan priests from 108 dioceses all over the world. Frs. Denis Parry and Simon Cadwallader are among the current forty missionary diocesan priests from the United States, England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales working out of mission parishes in coastal, jungle, mountainous and urban areas of Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador.

    For further information contact the Society of St. James at 24 Clark Street, Boston, MA 02109; Tel: 617-742-4715; www.socstjames.com

• 16/07/03 ANNUAL LOURDES PILGRIMAGE
  

  • Timetable published for seventy-third annual Liverpool Archdiocesan Pilgrimage those at home encouraged to join the pilgrims in prayer.

    The timetable has been published for the seventy-third annual Liverpool Archdiocesan Pilgrimage to Lourdes, which is to take place from Saturday 26 July to Friday 1 August 2003. The Right Reverend Vincent Malone, Auxiliary Bishop of Liverpool will be leading the pilgrimage this year and the Right Reverend Thomas Williams, Auxiliary Bishop of Liverpool, will also be travelling with over 1,100 pilgrims to the French Shrine. 500 of the pilgrims will travel by air on three special flights from Liverpool John Lennon Airport while a further 300 have other flights or overland coaches. 350 youth pilgrims will travel by coach from Crosby, Knowsley, Leyland, Liverpool, St Helens, Warrington and Widnes to join them.

    In addition people in the parishes of the Archdiocese are being encouraged to join the pilgrims in prayer during each day of the journey. Lists of prayers and intentions are being distributed to all parishes and for the first time will be available on the Archdiocesan website at www.archdiocese-of-liverpool.co.uk allowing all who wish to ‘take part’ with the pilgrims.

    After travelling from Liverpool the pilgrimage will begin with Mass attended by all the sick and helpers, which will be celebrated in the Chapel of Notre Dame de Doulours. The theme of the pilgrimage is ‘A people from every nation’ reflecting the worldwide Church and on Wednesday morning, 30 July, the pilgrims will join the International Celebration of Mass with others from throughout the world taking part. Two days earlier on Monday 28 July the pilgrims will be able to celebrate Mass at the Grotto; the holiest place in Lourdes where it is believed that the Virgin Mary appeared to St Bernadette on eighteen occasions 145 years ago in 1858. Pilgrims from the English Dioceses of Arundel and Brighton, Hexham and Newcastle and Salford who will be in Lourdes at the same time will join them there. All the prayer celebrations will be accompanied by the Lourdes Music Group, which is led by Fr Grant Maddock, the parish priest of Christ the King church, Queens Drive, Liverpool.

    As well as attending the formal services listed on the timetable there will be opportunities for the pilgrims to visit the Grotto for private prayer and for the sick pilgrims to bathe in the baths at the shrine. In the early evenings pilgrims will be able to take part in the Eucharistic Procession at 5.00 pm and later at 9.00 pm in the Marian Torchlight Procession.

    A copy of the full timetable and prayer intentions is attached.

    For further information contact: Monsignor John Butchard, Director of the Liverpool Archdiocesan Lourdes Pilgrimage Association. Tel: 0151 526 8468 Fax: 0151 286 8597

• 17/07/03 CATHEDRAL CHOIR TO LEAVE FOR CANADA
  

  • Twelve Day Tour to start next week

    The Choir of the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King, Liverpool are preparing to leave for a twelve day tour of Canada on Thursday 24 July to give concerts and to participate in church services in and around the cities of Toronto and Montreal including recitals at the Royal Conservatoire of Music in Toronto and at the Basilica of Notre Dame in Montreal.

    The youngest of the forty-four strong party which will leave the Metropolitan Cathedral, Liverpool, at 7.30 am on Thursday 24 July, is just nine years old. Ten staff and helpers including the Choir Chaplain, Rev John Gorman, will be accompanying the thirty-four travelling musicians. The Choristers come from throughout the Archdiocese of Liverpool including: Crosby, Huyton, Knowsley, Liverpool, St Helens, Southport, and Widnes.

    The Director of Music at Liverpool's Metropolitan Cathedral, Mervyn Cousins says: 'The Tour is proving to be very exciting as it is the culmination of our singing in the past year and also of the many fund raising events which have made it possible. The venues for both singing and sightseeing are awesome and I’m sure it will be an experience which none of us will ever forget.’

    The first part of the tour takes place in Toronto: on the evening of Saturday 26 July the Choir will sing in the Church of St Martin in the Fields; followed by St Michael’s Cathedral and St James Cathedral in the city the following day, then the Royal Conservatoire of Music on Tuesday 29 July. As well as recitals and rehearsals there will also be time for some sightseeing including the SkyDome and Canadian National (CN) Tower as well as a trip to Niagara Falls on Monday 28 July. On Wednesday 30 July the party flies to Montreal where their first engagement is the following day at the Cathedral of St Mary, Queen of the World. On Friday August 1 they will sing at the Oratory of St Joseph followed by two recitals the following day: at the Basilica of Notre Dame on the Saturday morning and finally for Mass and a recital at the Basilica of St Patrick that evening. The party arrive back in Liverpool at 6.00 am on the morning of Monday 4 August.

    This will be the twelfth major tour undertaken by the Choir, previous visits have been made to France (1972 and 1978); England (1980); The Netherlands, Germany and Luxembourg (1984); Italy (1987); Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium (1990); France and Belgium (1993); Hungary (1995); Spain (1997); United States of America (1999) and The Netherlands and Germany (2001).

    For further information contact:
    Mervyn Cousins, Director of Music: Tel: 0151 708 7283 Fax: 0151 708 7274

• 19/07/03 Archbishop Kelly's Homily - Ordination of Rev Philip Reece
  

  • Introduction to Mass and Homily preached by the Most Reverend Patrick Kelly, Archbishop of Liverpool, at the Mass of Ordination of Rev Philip Reece. Saturday 19 July 2003 at 3.00 pm in the Church of Christ the King, Childwall, Liverpool.

    Introduction to Mass:

    One of many blessings in being able to say: ‘it’s nearly fifty years since I began my own formation towards ordination’ is this, I can see how from time to time different, searching, illuminating, enriching aspects of life and ministry, of priestly life and ministry are appreciated in a new way. One aspect, very strong fifty years ago, less so recently is this: we must always in one breath utter the words priest and victim: priest as meaning power goes all wrong without the self-sacrifice in compassion of victim. Philip Reece, who fulfilling already obedience he promised when he was ordained a deacon, has followed his Bishop’s advice and allowed the Gospel appointed for this Saturday at Mass across the Catholic world to be proclaimed as the inspiration for our prayerful understanding of what we do.

    So we will ponder Jesus the chosen, suffering servant who died for all, so reconciling the world and it is the Lord’s reconciling word at the supper which will be put in his mouth.

    So that we all, his family, his friends, those who have walked alongside him to this day, fittingly may pray his ordination, we accept the appeal: ‘be reconciled to God’.

    Homily:

    The Gospel passage Michael proclaimed enables us to ponder this hymn: a hymn for the baptism of our Lord, which was surely the Lord’s ordination to allow God to reconcile the world to himself in him:

    When Jesus comes to be baptised,
    he leaves the hidden years behind,
    the years of safety and of peace,
    to bear the sins of all mankind.

    The Spirit of the Lord comes down,
    anoints the Christ to suffering,
    to preach the word, to free the bound,
    and to the mourner, comfort bring.

    He will not quench the dying flame,
    and what is bruised he will not break,
    but heal the wound injustice dealt,
    and out of death his triumph make.

    Our everlasting Father, praise,
    with Christ, his well-beloved Son,
    who with the Spirit reigns serene,
    untroubled Trinity in One.

    Now receive that hymn again, with some small changes.

    When Philip comes to be ordained,
    he leaves the hidden years behind,
    the years of safety and of peace,
    to bear the sins of all mankind.

    The Spirit of the Lord comes down,
    anoints the priest to suffering,
    to preach the word, to free the bound,
    and to the mourner, comfort bring.

    He will not quench the dying flame,
    and what is bruised he will not break,
    but heal the wound injustice dealt,
    and out of death his triumph make.

    Our everlasting Father, praise,
    with Christ, his well-beloved Son,
    who with the Spirit reigns serene,
    untroubled Trinity in One.

    Fifty years ago we were reminded: priest and victim: one with our Lord in that public, not hidden, not safe, but sent way to speak, to do, to heal the wounds of injustice, but ultimately to deal with sin: to be able to say in the name of Christ, be reconciled to God.

    So it is that the words, the deed most entrusted to the heart, and so to the lips of a priest ‘See, I am putting my words into your mouth’, are the last supper’s reconciling, forgiving deed and word:

    ‘This is my body which will be given up for you . . . This is cup of my blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant. It will be shed for you and for all so that sins may be forgiven. Do this in memory of me’.

    Philip, for you, for me, for every priest, one challenge is above, below, beyond, beneath all others: how can one man die for all? What sort of heart can be so one with a sinner’s heart, that this heart can plead, suffer, be broken for others. The answer is a scandal to so much sloppy thinking of our day. It is the saint who deeply, to the very depths, enters into the hardened, sinful heart. Many say: sinners understand sinners: nonsense: sinners, as sinners, are locked in self: no space, no imagination, no affection to enter the world of another. It’s as simple as the advice: bad back: don’t go to someone else with a bad back: all they will do is talk about their own. So Philip, the great prayer for you today is:

    Renew within him the Spirit of Holiness. Be a saint. So you shall be one with the suffering servant: full of life not empty and so devouring, you will not quench dying flames or break what is bruised. From the abundance of life and holiness accomplished in you by the Spirit you shall out of even death’s depths triumph make. Because you are one with the holy one in his reconciling deed, in Christ’s name you shall appeal: ‘Be reconciled to God’.

• 29/07/03 ARCHBISHOP KELLY TO ATTEND MEXICO CITY CONFERENCE
  

  • International meeting on ministry to deaf people

    This coming Friday, 1 August, the Most Reverend Patrick Kelly, Archbishop of Liverpool, is to travel to Mexico City to attend an international meeting looking at ministry to deaf people in the Roman Catholic Church. The Archbishop will be travelling in his capacity as President of the International Catholic Foundation at the service of deaf people, an organisation that, since its inaugural conference in Dublin in 1971, has sought to promote the needs of deaf people both in the Church and society generally. Three other representatives from the Archdiocese of Liverpool will also be travelling to the Conference: Sister Dorothy Hindle, who leads Nugent Care Society’s presence among deaf and hard of hearing people; Mrs Eileen Hosie from Boothstown and Mrs Catherine McGowan Corish from Widnes.

    Archbishop Kelly says: ‘Among the greatest blessings and challenges entrusted to me has been involvement with the world of Deaf people. I am convinced that the enterprise we are engaged in, is necessary for the well being of society and not just the Christian family. Deaf people can experience deep loneliness: those across the world inspired by our Lord to long for deep communion with our deaf sisters and brothers, can work in isolation. So a decision was made to bring together all these people for support, encouragement, a deeper, wider, truly Catholic communion and world-wide friendship.’

    Sister Dorthy Hindle says: ‘ I feel delighted and privileged to be able to travel to Mexico City and to have the opportunity to be part of this multicultural conference. It really is the chance of a lifetime and I am thrilled to be going.’

    Among the topics which the Conference will examine are: Mexico through the eyes of young deaf Catholics, deaf culture and language, evangelisation and the deaf community and ‘The Ministry of collaboration: A way forward’. As well as delegates from Europe those taking part in the Conference include people from Guatemala, Venezuela, Trinidad and Tobago, the USA and a local team from Mexico.

    On Sunday next, 3 August, Archbishop Kelly will concelebrate Mass with Cardinal Norbert Rivera, Archbishop of Mexico City, in the Church of San Hippolito and on Tuesday, 5 August, delegates will travel to the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadeloupe where Archbishop Kelly will celebrate Mass, he will also lead the closing prayers of the Conference on Thursday 7 August.

• 30/07/03 CONFERENCE CENTRE AT LACE ACHIEVES TOP ACCREDITATION
  

  • Hospitality Assured Meetings Standard for Sefton Park Venue

    The Conference Centre at LACE has become one of only fifty conference venues in the country, eight of which are in the Merseyside region, to achieve Hospitality Assured Meetings accreditation from the Meetings Industry Association. The award, which was received this week, represents the ultimate accolade for upholding and practising the highest standards for conference venues. The accreditation is set to become the standard by which providers of such services will be judged and chosen throughout the country.

    In order to achieve this status the team at LACE have had to undergo a process of thorough assessment covering all aspects of the service they provide to welcome those who use the Centre; the result is that they join an elite of accredited companies selected for the exceptional quality of their service.

    Conference Centre Manager, Eryl Parry, says: ‘As a team we are proud to be in the first group of venues in the area to achieve this rigorous set of standards. It is a testament to everyone at LACE who have worked extremely hard to maintain and deliver the highest standard of customer service to the very many delegates who use our facilities - and keep coming back!’

    As well as showing a commitment to excellence and a service that constantly exceeds expectations the accreditation provides a series of standards by which the Conference Centre at LACE will be able to continually assess its performance as the team aims to build even further on their success.

    For further information contact:
    Eryl Parry, Conference Centre Manager Tel: 0151 522 1005

• 03/08/03 Pastoral Letter
  

  • To be read at all Masses in all Churches and Chapels of the Archdiocese on the Eighteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time, 3 August 2003
    July 2003

    Dear brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ,

    Today I will be concelebrating Mass with Cardinal Norbert Rivera, Archbishop of Mexico City.

    The occasion is a conference for deaf people and those called to walk with them. Our hosts will be the deaf community in Mexico. On Tuesday, the feast of our Lady of the Snows we will be pilgrims at the shrine of our Lady of Guadaloupe. Sister Dorothy Hindle, who leads Nugent Care Society’s presence among deaf and hard of hearing people, Mrs Eileen Hosie from Boothstown and Mrs Catherine McGowan Corish from Widnes will be taking part.

    This conference has been planned by the International Catholic Foundation at the Service of Deaf People. This Foundation is a group of people from different countries whom I am sure the Lord has brought together to accomplish the purposes of his Father’s wisdom and love. We saw this: deaf people can experience deep loneliness: those across the world inspired by our Lord to long for deep communion with our deaf sisters and brothers, can work in isolation. So a decision was made: no-one else is bringing together all these people for support, encouragement, a deeper, wider, truly Catholic communion and world-wide friendship.

    Generous benefactors, mostly from Belgium, have made it possible to cover all the costs of the conference especially for people from central and South America. To the very last minute we know upheavals in some countries can restrain movement. But, after blest gatherings in Europe, often using English as the primary spoken language, we were determined to reach out: this time Spanish will be the primary spoken language: we have had to find funds to ensure adequate interpretation into many sign languages: American Sign Language, British Sign Language: Mexican: Canadian: Venezuelan: Guatemalan: and that of Trinidad.

    Something says: we must be mad: but that something is the devil, father of lies and false accuser: Satan hates any enterprise to foster wider, more demanding, more searching communion. Please pray for us: may the challenge given to us by St Paul be fulfilled for us and through us:

    ‘Your mind must be renewed by a spiritual revolution, so that you can put on the new self that has been created in God’s way, in the goodness and holiness of the truth’.

    From the conference I go to my cousin in Ohio for a holiday. I thank you all for your unfailing encouragement, inspiration, patience.

    And don’t forget: a prayer for smooth flights. Amsterdam to Mexico is rather long.

    Yours devotedly in Christ,
    Patrick Kelly,
    Archbishop of Liverpool

• 05/08/03 MEXICO CITY CONFERENCE RECEIVES VATICAN MESSAGE
  

  • The Mexico City conference being held by the International Catholic Foundation at the Service of Deaf People (ICF) from 2-7 August 2003 has received a message from the Vatican. The message, signed by Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, was addressed to the Most Reverend Patrick Kelly, Archbishop of Liverpool and President of the ICF, who is attending the conference.

    In the message Pope John Paul II sends his ‘prayerful best wishes’ to all the delegates at the Conference. He goes on to encourage those who are deaf and affirms them as ‘cherished members of the Church’.

    The Opening Mass of the Conference was celebrated last Sunday (3 August) in the Church of San Hippolito in Mexico City. The Celebrant was Cardinal Norberto Rivera, Archbishop of Mexico City with Archbishop Kelly concelebrating. Archbishop Kelly will today (Tuesday) be celebrating Mass for conference delegates at the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadeloupe at 12.00 noon local time.

    The full text of the message from the Vatican reads as follows:

    ‘Your Grace,

    ‘The Holy Father was pleased to be informed that from 2-7 August the International Catholic Foundation at the Service of Deaf People will celebrate its Annual Conference in Mexico City. He sends his prayerful best wishes to all those taking part.

    ‘His Holiness appreciates the meritorious work of the Foundation, which helps Catholic communities in their mission of assisting and accompanying the deaf. He is confident that under the guidance of the Holy spirit, who is calling the whole Church to a renewed commitment to her essential mission of preaching the Good News, the participants at the meeting will be strengthened in their efforts to explore new and effective methods of evangelization.

    ‘In a special way the Holy Father encourages those members of the Foundation who themselves are deaf. In thanking God for the joyful and distinctive witness to the Gospel borne by them and so many other members of the deaf community, His Holiness reminds them that they are cherished members of the Church, for they offer to the suffering Christ their hearing limitations while seeking to perceive him in the silence of their hearts.

    ‘In this year of the Rosary, His Holiness entrusts the work of the Foundation to the maternal protection of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Patroness of Mexico and the Americas, and as a pledge of joy in our Lord Jesus Christ he imparts his Apostolic Blessing.

    ‘With fraternal good wishes, I remain

    Yours sincerely in Christ,
    +Angelo Cardinal Sodano
    Secretary of State.’

• 05/08/03 HOMILY PREACHED BY ARCHBISHOP KELLY DURING THE ICF CONFERENCE
  

  • Homily preached by the Most Reverend Patrick Kelly, Archbishop of Liverpool and President of the International Catholic Federation at the service of Deaf People, at Mass during the ICF Conference in Mexico City. The Shrine of Our Lady of Guadeloupe on the Feast of Our Lady of the Snows, Tuesday 5 August 2003 at 12.00 Noon.

    Today in Rome, 1,500 years ago, snow fell. In August it is very hot in Rome. Then the name of the Pope was: Liberius. He held the crook of a Bishop: he drew in the snow a plan for a Church. 1500 years ago. The first Church of Mary, the Mother of Jesus, in Rome.

    Last year the Pope of today, John Paul II gave a gift to all of us: five new ways to pray the Rosary. He called them: the luminous ways: the showing ways.

    Now, take the Rosary of Mexico: notice, in the middle of the cross a window, a light: in the light Mary, the Mother of Jesus, Our Lord: Our Lady of Guadeloupe. The cross: the light, Mary, together. Light, beauty, peace, but through the cross. Mary our Queen, raised up to heaven, but Mary in the centre of the cross.

    The five new ways given to us by the Pope all point to the cross: light through the cross: the ways lead to the cross.

    The first way: Jesus is baptised. Watch, see: the Holy Spirit comes down and hovers over Jesus. The Father signs: ‘This is my Son.’ He is life, he is light, he is peace, he is good. But the Holy Spirit, a dove with wings outstretched is a cross. Jesus is the Son, the sign, the light of the Father: but see the cross.

    The second way: a fiesta in Cana, Mary is watching, there is no more wine. Mary is watching all of us: she sees no joy, no peace, no wine. She knows: My Son can give joy and peace. But Jesus says to her: ‘Mother, I can only give peace through my glory; and my glory is the cross’: peace, joy, light through the cross.

    The third way: Jesus proclaims: the kingdom of God is coming close: God is coming to forgive, to heal, to change, to make us holy. But God will do all this through the death of Jesus: mercy, forgiveness, holiness, life, light, through the cross.

    The fourth way: one day, Jesus went up a high mountain: his face shines like the sun; his clothes are changed into white as snow; the Father signs: ‘This is my Son; I love him: receive his signs.’ But Moses and Elijah come to the same mountain; Jesus and Moses and Elijah sign together; they sign the death of Jesus in Jerusalem: light, beauty, life, through the cross.

    The fifth way. At the last supper, before Jesus died, Jesus took bread: Jesus thanked you, Father; Jesus broke the bread; Jesus gave it to his friends and said: ‘Take this, all of you, and eat it, this is my body which will be given up for you’. The Body of Jesus gives us life; the body of Jesus gives us joy, peace, light. But Jesus signed: ‘My blood will be shed for you and for all so that sins may be forgiven.’ Peace, light through the death of Jesus. Life through the cross of Jesus. And we remember: next to the cross of Jesus, Mary, his Mother stood. Mary received the signs of God; Mary followed the way of God; Mary shows us the way to light. A window in a cross. This way will make all things new. This is the way to find the new Jerusalem: a new heaven, a new earth. God lives with us: we receive light, joy and peace. We have followed the way God has shown us: he has led us to Mary, to Guadeloupe: to a window in a cross. We have come together from east and west, from north and south. That is why, because we are one family, one church, we receive light, joy, peace for ever and ever.

• 06/08/03 CLERGY APPOINTMENTS
  
  • The following Clergy appointments are effective in the Archdiocese of Liverpool during 2003:
    
    

    Parish Priests
    Rev Graeme Dunne	To: St Anthony, Scotland Road, Liverpool From: Sacred Heart, Leigh
    Rev Joseph Feeley	To: St Andrew, Hunts Cross, Liverpool From: Administrator: St Andrew, Hunts Cross, Liverpool
    Rev Vincent McShane	To: Holy Family, Halewood From: St Joseph the Worker, Kirkby
    Rev Mark Moran	To: St Margaret Mary, Liverpool From: Wigan Hospital Chaplaincy
    Rev Conor Stainton-Polland	To: Sacred Heart, Leigh From: Study Leave
    Additional Responsibility
    Rev Peter Crowther - St Joseph, Chorley	Also: St Chad, Chorley
    Rev John Cullen - St Edmund of Canterbury, Waterloo	Also: St Thomas of Canterbury, Waterloo
    Rev John McLoughlin - St Wilfrid, Ashton-in-Makerfield	Also: Holy Family, Platt Bridge
    Rev Patrick Sexton - St Monica, Bootle	Also: St Richard, Bootle
    Rev Nicholas Wilde - St Laurence, Kirkby	Also: St Joseph the Worker, Kirkby
    Assistant Priests
    Rev John Finch	To: Skelmersdale From: St Paul and St Timothy, Liverpool
    Rev Sean Kirwin	To: St Paul and St Timothy, Liverpool From: Alder Hey Hospital Chaplaincy
    Rev Philip Reece	To: St Bede, Widnes From: Recent Ordination
    Retirement
    Rev Philip Barrett	From: Holy Family, Platt Bridge
    Rev Alexander Fleming	From: St Chad, Chorley
    Rev Albert Shaw	From: St Helen, Crosby
    Other Appointments
    Rev Paul Glover	To: Spiritual Director: St Alban’s College, Valladolid From: Holy Family, Halewood
    Rev Jonathan Jones	To: Further Studies From: Skelmersdale
    Rev Michael McCormick	To: Administrator: St Mary, Euxton From: Leave
    Rev Gerald Proctor	To: Leave From: St Margaret Mary, Liverpool
    Rev Hubert Strowbridge	To: Administrator: St Helen, Crosby From: Sacred Heart, St Helens
    Chaplaincies
    Rev Leo Cooper	To: Wigan Hospital Chaplaincy From: Metropolitan Cathedral, Liverpool
    Rev Matthew Nunes	To: Alder Hey Hospital Chaplaincy From: St Bede, Widnes

• 11/08/03 New Church Sponsored City Academy for Kensington
  

  • Church and community leaders today welcomed the announcement of the Government’s final approval for the building of a new City Academy in the Kensington/Fairfield area of Liverpool. The announcement was by Deputy Prime Minister the Rt Hon John Prescott during a visit to Liverpool today.

    The new Academy will accommodate up to 900 secondary aged pupils drawn from across the whole community. It is planned to open in September 2005 on the site of the current council environmental depot next to Newsham Park.

    This is the first City Academy on Merseyside, and also the first in the country to be jointly sponsored by the Church of England and Roman Catholic Church. It is supported strongly by Kensington Regeneration and represents very clearly the wishes of the local community for a new secondary school in the area. The new Academy will incorporate the existing Our Lady’s Catholic High School.

    In addition to providing a faith based education, the Academy will specialise in the environment. This theme will be reflected in its design and construction as an environmentally friendly building using traditional materials and innovative strategies to minimise energy usage.

    Welcoming the Secretary of State’s decision, the Anglican Bishop of Liverpool, the Rt Revd James Jones, said: ‘I warmly welcome the opportunity that the new Academy will provide for offering to young people in the area a radically different form of education and the chance to flourish. I believe that this will contribute significantly to the regeneration of Kensington and its surrounding area, as education is a vital part of the renewal of any community. The Academy will be a visible sign of the churches working with local people to help meet their aspirations.’

    Endorsing the sentiments of Bishop James, Fr Michael O’Dowd, Episcopal Vicar for Schools and Colleges in the Archdiocese of Liverpool, said: ‘This is very exciting news for the young people of the area and tangible proof of the Anglican and Catholic Churches listening to their people and supporting their communities’ needs and ambitions. Local families will now see their children enjoying remarkable High School opportunities offered in a superb setting and backed with all the experience and reputation of the Churches for outstanding, distinctive education.’

    The announcement was also welcomed by Liverpool City Council. Ann Melville, assistant executive Director for Education in the city, said: ‘I am extremely pleased at today's decision. The creation of a new City Academy in Kensington and Fairfield will play an important part in our drive to raise standards and expand the range of education opportunities available for all the children in the area.

    A new Academy will improve the quality of education, provide first class facilities and a greater choice of both education and vocational subjects. It will also help speed up the wider regeneration of this area of the city.’

    Chief Executive of Kensington Regeneration, Stephen Boyle, said: ‘I believe the City Academy is the single most important development for the regeneration of Kensington; it is the first secondary school for the area and it is a huge boost for the whole community. This isn't just a new school - it is an academy which will draw together private and public sector support to create a unique environment for learning and leisure for all residents.’

• 05/09/03 A SNAPSHOT OF LOCAL CULTURE
  

  • Competition to capture social traditions at the
    ‘Heart of the Community’

    As the City of Liverpool prepares to be Capital of Culture in 2008 the Club Management Services of the Archdiocese of Liverpool, are holding Heart of the Community, a major initiative open to all photographers, amateur and professional, irrespective of denomination. The competition is aimed at describing, through photographs, both old and new, the buildings, events and people of over one hundred Archdiocesan parish centres throughout the region.

    Heart of the Community will bring together past, present and future and will look at people, key characters, events, social activities and cultural diversity within our local communities. It will also create a rich pictorial archive documenting daily life and customs for many in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. As well as being an historical resource it will also provide valuable information as to how the Parish Centres can best serve local communities in the future.

    ‘This exciting competition will reflect the social traditions of our time’, says Ricky Davies of the Parish Centres Management Team, ‘many people will have the opportunity to look back and reminisce on past events and characters before taking a fresh look at our centres that have seen so much modernisation and improvement in recent years’.

    The competition runs until 17 October 2003 and has first prizes of £1,000 (adult section; eighteen and over) and £250 (youth section; seventeen and under). Key cash contributions to the adult prize fund have been made by the drinks brand Smirnoff who say: ‘we are pleased to be associated with a competition that focuses on the importance of the parish centres to the local community’. Kodak Cameras have also demonstrated their support by supplying special Camera Gift Packs for the Youth prize section.

    Images can be entered into each of four main categories, (details attached). As well as receiving awards, all prize-winning images will also be used in promotional material such as posters and postcards and on the Archdiocesan website. A selection of images will also feature in a touring exhibition, which will travel across the region later in 2003.

    Image Categories -

    A Day in the Life of a Centre - how does the community use it? What types of activities go on there? Meetings, sporting events, light entertainment, or just acting as the social hub of the community.

    The Outer Image - creative external shots of the parish centre - they could be traditional pictures or unusual images – how does your building appear to you?

    Narrative & Archive Photographs - do you have an image that tells a story of either a key character in the centre’s life or perhaps records an important event in its history? Many parish centres have been around for a while and have seen a lot of life and activity. Entries in this category must be accompanied with text describing the event or individual portrayed (not more than 100 words).

    Building Bridges - Does your building act as a centre for events that builds bridges between people of different ages, abilities and cultural groups? Does it bring people from different backgrounds together? Send in your images of any type of event that shows how your parish centre is working to bring the community together.

    For further information contact:

    Ricky Davies (Parish Centres Management Team) Tel: 07973 838818

    Richard Evans (Competition co-ordinator) Tel: 07801 351912
    email photocomp@hotmail.com

    Or visit www.archdiocese-of-liverpool.co.uk/photo

• 12/09/03 ARCHBISHOP KELLY'S HOMILY - FUNERAL OF MR GEORGE EVERY
  

  • Introduction to Mass and Homily preached by the Most Reverend Patrick Kelly, Archbishop of Liverpool, at the Funeral Mass of Mr George Every. St Mary’s College, Oscott, Birmingham on Friday 12 September 2003.

    Introduction to Mass:

    What we have come to is this: - ‘to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the first-born who are enrolled in heaven, and to a judge who is God of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks more graciously than the blood of Abel’. (Hebrews 12:22-24.) Only such words from the letter to the Hebrews suffice if we would appreciate the Mass as it was appreciated by George Every: only such words enable us fittingly to pray for someone whose life was inseparable from walking among those gone before us, in familiarity, but never losing sight of Purgatory, Lough Derg, serious penitence even beyond death. Fittingly to pray this coming hour, we seriously repent.

    Homily:

    Father David McGough had just completed a fine lecture on the Eucharist in the writings of Saint Paul. It was one of those lectures in the Northcote Hall enriched by the fact that besides students for whom it was part of their prescribed course, other students, members of staff and visitors too were attentively present. At the end George Every turned to me and said: ‘But of course: the main issue is: how big was the home of Stephanas?’ One of many occasions when something very inadequately described as lateral thinking on George’s part demanded a whole re-reading, sometimes of seismic proportions.

    He may have written one book whose title at least promised tidy lines, clear structure, neat understanding: Basic liturgy. But his book ‘The Mass’ nourishes, opens up, requires what we do today: we do ‘The Mass’.

    Against what had become the fashion George felt compelled to write about ‘The Mass’ not the Eucharist. Eucharist might be a more scriptural word: but he was clear: what we are doing here and now has echoes older and wider than at least the New Testament, and is the fruit of complex history: here, as in all discipleship myth, cultures, poetry, the very prosaic are sources of light and challenge and blessing. A warning, as he once said, not to reduce the Mass to the politeness of afternoon tea. It is in that conviction that it seemed right and fitting not to select readings for this Mass but to stay with those which, again in very human ways have come to be proclaimed on this day across the world. I must be honest: I see nothing of George in: ‘I used to be a blasphemer and did all I could to injure and discredit the Faith’. Indeed I do not think he had much time for dramatic conversions. He once said: It’s better if students don’t learn Latin or they might start reading Augustine. He once said of a fervent person: they’ll be all right when they repent of repenting. His own story, and we wisely acknowledge the part played by Peter Hockan and Frank Thomas in this, was to be carried by the gale of the Pentecostal Renewal to full conversion with the Roman Catholic Church and to Oscott. But we will ponder communion, repentance, dealing with whatever in our eye clouds vision by this next step.

    On the day of Frank Thomas’ funeral he said: ‘I knew you would use my poem.’ I use it again today: curiously I have been driven to use it over and over again: most recently at such contrasting places as a conference on the environment and while pondering the image of our Lady of Guadeloupe in Mexico. I invite you to receive it now: its title: ‘The Shroud’.

    ‘Dying and rising are different
    and difficult. Nothing
    is automatic in resurrection
    To die is to participate
    in the flesh of the whole man,
    the old and the new Adam
    coagulated underground
    and shrouded to be shrined.

    On every winding sheet
    are flesh and blood in print
    as a kind of record.
    Dispersed abroad, unburied
    in years of pestilence,
    many without penitence,
    some bore in hands, feet, side
    marks of the crucified.

    How is this image made
    in us. We are afraid
    always to go further
    from father and mother
    into the wounded side,
    where ever to abide
    will always be to move
    and to be moved by love.’

    To move and to be moved by love: to allow his image to be made in us. This is inseparable from penitence, from asceticism, from discipline. Kelham, Canon Kelly, T.S.Eliot were not forgotten. One small, challenging, humbling sign. Whenever George was planning to be away, for example with his brother Edward, the O’Reilly’s and the Hamiltons whose friendship mattered so much, he would preface the information by addressing me as: Father Rector: community: at the assured service of the community by visible early and late and generous presence in this chapel in prayer: the asceticism of life in community: the discipline of entrusting liberty to another. But only so as to be free to move and to be moved by love.

    George in this place not least with all its history our grateful, and mindful of penitence, prayers is that of St Paul for Timothy:

    ‘Grace, mercy and peace from God the Father and from Christ Jesus our Lord.’

• 16/09/03 CLERGY APPOINTMENTS
  
  • The following Clergy appointments are effective in the Archdiocese of Liverpool during 2003:
    
    

    Chaplaincies:
    Rev Christopher McCoy	To: National Co-ordinator Higher Education Chaplaincies From: University Chaplaincies, Liverpool
    Rev Ian McParland	To: University Chaplaincies, Liverpool From: St Aidan of Lindisfarne, Huyton
    Rev David Potter	To: Royal Liverpool Hospital Chaplaincy Metropolitan Cathedral, Liverpool From: St Austin, Thatto Heath
    Additional Responsibility:
    Rev John Ealey	St Aloysius, Roby Also: St Aidan of Lindisfarne, Huyton

• 24/09/03 ARCHBISHOP KELLY'S ADDRESS AT PEOPLE FOR PEOPLE
  

  • Address given by the Most Reverend Patrick Kelly, Archbishop of Liverpool, at ‘People for People’ the Annual General Meeting of United Trusts. Wednesday 24 September 2003 at 3.30 pm in Senate House, Liverpool.

    Some weeks ago now, I was rebuked about a sermon: the reason: I had referred to J.R.R.Tolkien’s ‘Lord of the Rings’ and had thereby encouraged young people to become engaged in something not far removed from the dark arts, dangerous superstition and worship of idols. Strong stuff. I am afraid I am unrepentant and am unashamedly looking forward to the third film: ‘The Return of the King’.

    I do this with greater confidence because I was once privileged to read a letter from J.R.R.Tolkien to a priest about the way his writings were enriched by his fidelity to Jesus Christ. So I use Tolkien at our Annual General Meeting today.

    The first reference: from ‘The Fellowship of the Ring’: Gandalf says: ‘Always after a defeat and a respite, the Shadow takes another shape and grows again,’ ‘I wish it need not have happened in my time,’ said Frodo. ‘So do I,’ said Gandalf, ‘and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with time that is given us.’ (p.60)

    ‘... those who live to see such times’: from ‘People for People’, our report: ‘A grant was requested for a single parent with four children, whose partner walked out on her when he discovered she was expecting twins. This lady was having difficulty coping with the three youngest children, a child of three years and the ten-month old twins, who had recently begun to crawl. The twins had been sharing a cot but they were now much too big and disturbed each other in the night.’ ‘All we have to do is decide what to do with the time that is given us.’ A cot, amount £150.00.

    But thirty-two pages describing such times as these and decisions what to do with the time given us, are only the tip of an iceberg. Surely, it is too little, too late; we should leave today’s meeting with feelings of guilt and gloom, and not rejoice as we share simple refreshments. So my second passage from the Lord of the Rings, this time from the third volume, ‘The Return of the King’ and the chapter ‘The Last Debate.’ Again it is Gandalf who is speaking: ‘Other evils there are that may come; for Sauron is himself but a servant or emissary. Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.’

    For me it is a privilege to be associated with so many people willing to uproot evils in the fields we know so that there may be clean earth to till. I just wonder how many, perhaps not very articulate prayers of thanks arise on many a night for those who made possible a cot, a cooker, a washing machine.

• 02/10/03 ARCHBISHOP'S ADDRESS TO THE NUGENT CARE SOCIETY
  

  • ‘Justice, and more than Justice: care to heal Society.’ Address given by the Most Reverend Patrick Kelly, Archbishop of Liverpool and Chair of the Governing Body of the Nugent Care Society at the Annual General Meeting of the Nugent Care Society: Thursday 2 October 2003 at 2.00 pm in the Town Hall, Liverpool.

    ‘Welcome. And congratulations. I am delighted you could make it. Getting here wasn’t easy, I know. In fact I suspect it was a little tougher than you realise.’ With those words Bill Bryson begins his book: ‘A short history of nearly Everything.’ It is about how we went from nothing at all being there to us sitting here in Liverpool’s Town Hall today.

    I want to explore what has happened to bring us to this Annual General Meeting and in particular to appreciate what was our big bang, or better who he was. This reflection will assist us to appreciate what is specific about us: what is the attitude, the frame of mind, the quality of spirit, the feelings which explain us. And everyone who is invited to approach, to enter the life of others in the name of the Nugent Care Society, must have, since we are an equal opportunities employer, equal opportunity to understand that attitude, enter into that frame of mind, recognise that quality of spirit, and be open to share those feelings.

    Father Nugent was a priest and it must be as a priest that I must interpret my role in the Society today. And to appreciate what that implies I will use words from J.R.R.Tolkien’s ‘Lord of the Rings’; but whether these words will find their way into Peter Jenkins amazing film, I do not know. I use these words, because they capture the implication of that deed of Jesus of Nazareth which is the core of the life, service, decisions of any priest. I mean his deed on the cross. We need something like these words to understand with what feelings, in what spirit, the Lord Jesus comes to us in our most dark, fearful, alienated state. This is how Tolkien describes Aragorn healing Faramir, who has been touched by the breath of darkness, shadow, death: ‘Now Aragorn knelt beside Faramir, and held a hand upon his brow. And those that watched felt that some great struggle was grind out. For Aragorn’s face grew grey with weariness; and ever and anon he called his name of Faramir, but each time more faintly to their hearing, as if Aragorn himself was removed from them, and walked afar in some dark vale, calling for the one that was lost.’

    It is here that we glimpse something of the challenge we accept when we agree to be caught up in an enterprise which with good reason is named after a priest. Still more if we realise: the only motto a priest can have is to say: ‘He, that is Jesus, must increase, I must decrease.’ It must be the ways of the Lord Jesus that must be ever more faithfully reflected. It is the way of coming, approaching others, in selflessness, empty of self-ambition. Ready for compassion. And the deepest challenge may be in this. I use the example of the person with a bad back. The advice is: never tell someone who has a bad back about your bad back; all they will talk about is their own. It is an example of a sophism, that is apparent wisdom, but in fact folly, to say: sinners understand sinners; those with problems understand those of other people. Sin means: to be locked to a lesser or great degree in oneself, in one’s own world and to see, interpret, judge, evaluate everything form our own narrow perspective. It has long been true that the ones to whom sinners go for understanding and compassion are the saints. The holy ones have the space, the imagination, the time, the broadness of heart, to enter into the world and heart of someone else.

    How right was the description given by George Eliot of the depth of darkness of Hetty Sorrell, in Adam Bede. ‘Poor wandering Hetty, with the rounded childish face and the hard unloving, despairing soul looking our of it – with the narrow heart and narrow thoughts, no room in them for any sorrows but her own, and tasting that sorrow with the more intense bitterness! My heart bleeds for her as I see her toiling along on her weary feet, or seated in a cart, with her eyes fixed vacantly on the road before he, never thinking or caring whither it tends, till hunger comes and makes here desire that a village maybe near. What will be the end, the end of her objectless wandering, apart from all love and caring for human beings only through her pride, clinging to life only as the hunted wounded brute clings to it? God preserve you and me from being the beginners of such misery.’ But, interestingly, she is on her way to find Dinah Morris, the Methodist woman, and whose story seems to me the best introduction to counselling you could ever find. Her heart is large enough and selfless enough to understand everyone, from querulous aunts, to the child murderer, to confused wounded Adam Bede and his brother.

    It is this capacity to love that heals society; it is light years away from do-gooders; it knows the cost of sympathy. As a personal discipline I try never to use a card to express sympathy; that does not cost enough; paper, pen, imagining, choice of words, choice of memory, they are all the price of true sympathy.

    In his book ‘Method In Theology’ Bernard Lonergan analyses decline in society as such and finds its roots in competition, in self-seeking, in bias, in prejudice. He notes: religion that promotes self-transcendence not merely to the point of justice, but self-sacrificing love will have a redemptive, healing role in society.

    But we are among those who at least for themselves have found that that love in the end flows from the one whose heart was pierced by the cost of loving the unlovely, forgiving the unforgiving; and all those who are born into that new life, born of the Spirit, are like the wind: we do not know where it, or they come from; we do not know where it or they are going; but we cannot pretend they re not there, are not different. Because a name of a priest is part of our big bang, these are reflections which we may not and will not avoid.

• 02/10/03 ARCHBISHOP KELLY - A LECTURE FOR HOPE THEOLOGICAL SOCIETY
  

  • ‘The Word became flesh: a new wine breaking the old language wine skins: an exploration of the strains caused in the language of both the Jews and the Greeks.’

    A lecture for Hope Theological Society, Hope University College, Liverpool, given by the Most Reverend Patrick Kelly, Archbishop of Liverpool. Thursday 2 October 2003 at 5.00 pm.

    Introduction:

    a. A more general example of what I will explore: J.Bronowski: ‘The Ascent of Man’ and Bill Bryson: ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything’. The story is not only about a new known; it is about new ways of examining, understanding, describing; it is not only the known, but it is the knower as someone who knows who changes. And as far as I can tell, one effect is that the language needed by the scientist draws closer to metaphor, symbol, poetry. There is not a gap between the humanities and the sciences. And science as the pure unrestricted desire to know is close to thinking discipleship, searching Christian living, theology. Technology, which harnesses knowledge for purposes good or ill can part company with reflecting, deciding, acting Christians. It might also be noted that in so far as this development of the knower is central, there is a clue about how a curriculum should be devised; it should focus on those aspects of the discipline which required a change in the way of assessing, interpreting, judging and deciding. It is light years away from a narrow: education is to prepare people for tomorrow’s world of work. It is also why I rejoice in Professor Pilay’s insistence on the importance of research as integral to any authentic teaching, forming, developing of minds.

    b. My next step: three examples of books which by their very style, rather than any particular factual statement prove the occurrence of all but incredible facts.

    Norman Mailer: ‘Fire on the Moon’
    Christy Nolan: ‘Under the Eye of the Clock’
    Brian Keenan: ‘An Evil Cradling’

    A brief comment on each: since we still live with the possibility, technically, of MAD: Mutually Assured Destruction, I invite you to allow the thought of the collapse of our ways of living, communicating. I ask you to allow some hundreds of years to go by, until, as happened more than once in the past, time a space are found beyond mere survival, and again as so often in the past, strangely intact libraries are found. Mobility is now back to oxen carts; social services are non-existent, those with any form of special need are left to subsist, international relationships are utterly basics. What would convince our successors that in fact someone once went to the moon; that a paraplegic wrote a book, that someone was held hostage for years? More important than any bald statement would be the books I have mentioned.

    What sort of book is ‘Fire on the Moon’? Do we put it in the technology section or the poetry section? It would be the very mixture of styles, the combination of detailed technology, plus poetry, coping with for the human being the utterly new perspective inherent in the journey to the moon, that would most make someone say, from the most basic current situation: however unlikely someone must somehow have been to the moon. The style of literature itself would be the convincing reality.

    Again, ‘Under the eye of the clock’; in a society where such people are merely seen subsisting, it would be the utterly unique style of writing, relating, describing, feeling that would convince someone: a paraplegic, impelled to allow words and images to revolve round and round in frustrated silence, must have somehow written this book. It can only be the fruit of an experience unique. It has created a new language. And not least the title: ‘Evil’ and ‘Cradling’ held in one breath, but then that same nonsensical tension running through the whole impetus, imagery, emotion of the book, that would be the convincing argument: someone was held hostage for years and was newly formed by what had come to pass for him.

    c. And the collection of writings we call the New Testament are one long example of the wine skin of one language being torn apart to cope with a meeting utterly new. And I think it is fair to say each one reveals someone who was forced to be left confronting the question: ‘But you, who do you say that I am?’ Forced to accept that any answer they choose to give will be questioned, refined, reformed over and over again. And each book is then written in such a way that by its very style it leaves the reader, or better the ones who hear it read, confronted by the same question: ‘But you, who do you say that I am?’ More than any particular statement, it is where the language breaks down in the New Testament that we are confronted by the conviction: Jesus of Nazareth is both utterly brother, but utterly other too. But, we are wise also to notice: while I was often told to make sure I took account of similar literature from the early Christian era, I was never shown where to find anything truly the same. Where would you put a Gospel in your library of the year 100? Where would you put the letters of Saint Paul? Still more disturbing where would you put the Book of Revelation. The trouble is, the meetings to which they bear witness defied any existing categories.

    Allow me to give just five examples of the wine-skin of language breaking down:

    1. ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ (John 1:1) I presume to suggest that what most of us received when I read that verse was: ‘In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, the Father, and the Word was divine.’ But it does not say that. We have the same personal word used twice: with God and was God. The addition of one small letter ‘i’ to the second God in the Greek was to take away all problems. But the author has been confronted with such an intimacy between Jesus of Nazareth and the utterly other God, that the impetus to use one personal noun is irresistible. We might want to say: make up your mind: is Jesus with this one, or is he this one? But by this choice of nonsense language a door is for ever closed: let us try to get above, behind, the Jesus of Calvary and find the really godlike god.

    2. My second example: we meet in the letters of Saint Paul someone deeply immersed in the ways of God as received and lived by the Jewish people. He was someone rooted in: ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; and you shall love the lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ (Deuteronomy 6:4) That was and abides as the great call to unity for the Lord’s people. But when, and it was a frequent occurrence, Paul was faced with division among those to whom he proclaimed the way of Jesus, he takes the nonsensical step of appealing not the one Lord God, but to a threesome Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It would have been more logical and safer to appeal to the one Lord God; but something, someone has so shattered his understanding, his fidelity, his language that he must always in one breath speak of the three. I give one example: ‘There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were all called to the one hope that belongs to you call, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all who is above all and through all and in all.’ (Ephesians 4:4) I said this was dangerous: in my forty years as a priest I have more than once seen division precisely in terms of which of the three you prefer: the silent, wordless adoration of the immortal, invisible, holy, Father; the close at hand, politically revolutionary Jesus; the joyful, singing charismatic Spirit. But there has been such an eruption into the world of the one God that there must never be a deviation from the three as the only adequate reason for us to be one.

    3. Then there are lists that are messy and beak the usual mould: once upon a time it was easy: on one side stood such characters as Joshua, Jeremiah, Moses, Saul, Peter; and on the other the Lord God. But now it has all broken down: ‘Paul, Silvanus and Timothy. To the church of the Thessalonians in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.’ (1 Thessalonians 1:1) Jesus, or Joshua, should be with Paul and Silvanus and Timothy; but he is all mixed up with God and Lord; and Lord should be with God and he is all mixed up with Jesus of Nazareth, the pale of which they used to say: ‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth?’ (1 John 46) What has happened to break down the comfortable, typical barriers? Why is someone not following the agreed rules of titles and names?

    4. And then, instead of leaving people at peace with their own language, someone feels bound not only to hand on the meaning of what someone said in another language, but handing on the very sounds they made and insisting that people of another language use the same sounds themselves. ‘And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying “Abba! Father!”’ (Galatians 4:6) Who started this ‘Abba’ talk, and what sort of difference did he somehow make for us, to us, that we use the Abba talk as well?

    5. And the last example for today: what in the world made someone allege that the same person used the word of utter intimacy: ‘Abba, Father’ (Mark 14:36) and utter distance and desertedness: ‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?’ (Mark 15:34) Who is this who has taken his journey into a far country, (Luke 15:13), indeed into the farthest country possible from the Father’s house? Very, very strange things have been bursting into hearts and minds. No one has written like this before. And each example in the end forces the question: ‘Who do you say that I am?’ (Mark 8:27-30) The very fact we are left with a question is a sign that no ready made answer will do.

    d. I give just one example of when the language and ways of thinking of the Greeks was broken down. I could give others, but that must wait of another day, perhaps, if I am allowed back. For a complex set of reasons, questions rose about whether in Jesus it is the real, ultimate God we meet, or is there beyond and behind Jesus, a more godly deity, a more authentic godhead, a more sublime majesty. And just as in the very first line of Saint John’s Gospel, the small letter ‘i’ became significant. Some suggested: why not be content to say that the Word is as like the Father as it is possible to be; in Greek the word chosen for this was: homoioousion. But eventually it was decided: that is not strong enough. To be even an infinitesimally small distance less than the ultimate God is a distance infinitely too great. And so another word was chosen, with one less ‘i’: homoousion. But at once something happened. At the very moment the word was used, it changed its meaning. In a world where there would have been no problem saying there are two Gods or indeed three, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, there was, what I must call, a divinely sustained conviction that there is one God. So that word chosen which could be used of two pound coins and mean they are exactly the same in weight, decoration, value, but they are two coins, or used of , let us say, Peter and Paul, and mean neither is more nor less human than the other, but they are two men; but when applied to the Father and Son, the word ‘consubstantial’ means, not only are they made of utterly the same weight, shape, quality of stuff; it is more than that, they are of one being, made out of, as it were, exactly the same piece of stuff. Now that is nonsense; but they could say nothing less. And, I discovered a blessing and challenge long ago: while I could draw a perfect illustration of the position rejected, I cannot draw the conviction eventually recognised as necessary to be faithful to the wonder who is Jesus of Nazareth and his relationship with the Father and with us. He broke open, and breaks open, the wine skins of every language, way of thinking, way of understanding, and ultimately way of loving. He saves our observing, our understanding our judging, our doing. He saves us in all those actions which are essential to our humanity and all that means. It is much richer than saving souls.

    e. And I end with one enormous example of that from a later age: Bernard Lonergan’s Verbum Word and idea in Aquinas. That book, which then broke forth into a wealth of ground-breaking reflections on what it means to know, who is Jesus, what is theology, is a study of one word, namely word, in one great author, Thomas Aquinas. But it is precisely of how Thomas, in order to be faithful to that Word who is the Word of God had to go beyond any previous understanding of what is a word, what is it so to know that we accomplish a word. I pray that theology here at Hope will continue this same adventure, so confronting the one who is Son of God and Son of Mary, that feelings are enriched, observation is heightened, understanding is deepened, judgments more authentic, actions wholesome, healing, part of the Lord’s saving deed on the cross.

• 16/10/03 LIVERPOOL BISHOPS MEET POPE
  

  • Pope John Paul recalls his visit to Liverpool on the eve of his Jubilee

    The Most Reverend Patrick Kelly, Archbishop of Liverpool, together with Auxiliary Bishops, Vincent Malone and Thomas Williams, met with Pope John Paul II yesterday evening (Wednesday) during a visit to Rome. The meeting took place during the Bishops’ ‘ad limina’ visit to the Vatican and on the eve of the silver Jubilee of the Pope’s election.

    Archbishop Kelly described the Pope as being ‘tired’ after a long day of engagements which had included a two hour general audience with several thousand pilgrims in Rome. He continued: ‘although frail the Holy Father showed a remarkable resilience and determination to remain among the people gathered in Rome.’

    During the meeting Pope John Paul and the Bishops reflected on his visit to Liverpool in 1982 and in particular the ecumenical spirit in the City and the way in which he was greeted by young people outside the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King. Pope John Paul affirmed the work of the Roman Catholic Church in Liverpool, urged the Bishops to continue that work and spoke of Liverpool as a ‘great Archdiocese’.

    Archbishop Kelly said: ‘It is a wonderful blessing that as Archbishop of the city which so welcomed Pope John Paul in 1982 I was able to recall the visit with him on the eve of his silver jubilee and hear him speak of Liverpool as a great Archdiocese.’

    Bishop Thomas Williams, who was ordained Bishop in May of this year and who is making his first ad limina visit said: ‘It was a great honour and privilege to be with Pope John Paul especially on such a great occasion as the eve of his silver jubilee.’

    The Bishops of England and Wales are at present in Rome for a visit known as ‘Ad Limina Apostolorum’ (‘To the Threshold of the Apostles’) which is made every five years and during which a report is given on the progress made in the local Catholic Church.

• 24/10/03 CATHEDRAL VISITOR CENTRE TO OPEN
  

  • Restaurant, history, information and gifts available at Liverpool’s Metropolitan Cathedral

    The new Visitor and Information Centre at the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King, Liverpool, is to open to the public at 10.00 am on Monday 27 October 2003. The Centre, which adjoins the new Ceremonial entrance, is set to become a gateway to the Cathedral for visitors to the City from throughout the world providing hands on insights into the history and architecture of the building and the work of the Roman Catholic Church in the region. A remote live camera link to the Lantern Tower of the Cathedral will allow visitors to take a preview tour before using the new entrance to take in the building as a whole. Within the Centre there is also ‘The Piazza’ contemporary Café Bar and Gift Shop. The scheme also includes improved access to the Cathedral for disabled visitors and a landscaped roof garden.

    The Cathedral is also delighted to be the first to collaborate with Mersey Partnership’s Tourist Information Centre to provide a direct dial facility, helping visitors plan the rest of their stay.

    The project is a major part of regeneration work in an area surrounded by the Universities and other businesses and one that will attract visitors to a building which forms a major part of the heritage of the City. Eryl Parry, Manager of the Centre, says: ‘I am very proud of the City in which I grew up. It’s a privilege to be part of this exciting and significant development which comes in the run up to the important landmark of Capital of Culture in 2008.’

    The Ceremonial entrance and Visitor Centre has been created with funding from the European Regional Development Fund and the North West Regional Development Agency, with the Archdiocese of Liverpool being responsible for the interior of the Visitor Centre. The project brings to completion the original dream of Sir Frederick Gibberd, architect of the thirty-six year old Cathedral. Gibberd’s 1962 plans had envisaged a grand entrance opening directly on to Hope Street, but this was never built due to a lack of funds and the position of a building then on the site.

    The completion of the project marks the end of a restoration programme which has been taking place at the Metropolitan Cathedral for over ten years and which is to be marked with a week of celebrations leading up to the Feast of Christ the King on Sunday 23 November 2003, the patronal feast of the Cathedral. Friday 14 November will see a Dinner Dance with a Gala Concert the following evening and throughout the next week an exhibition of the history and life of the Cathedral is to be held. On the afternoon of Saturday 22 November choirs from throughout the Archdiocese will gather to take part in a Thanksgiving Mass and on the feast itself, 23 November, the Archbishop of Liverpool, the Most Reverend Patrick Kelly, will celebrate Mass to give thanks for the completion of the work on the building and to dedicate the new entrance and Visitor Centre.

    Archbishop Kelly Says: ‘The new Ceremonial entrance and Visitor Centre will enhance the Cathedral’s setting as a truly unique experience for all those who come whether to visit or worship and I look forward immensely to giving thanks on the feast of the Cathedral, Christ the King, for all the work and efforts of so many in this development.’

    Monsignor Peter Cookson, the Cathedral Dean, has been present throughout the years of restoration, he says: ‘We are delighted at the completion of our new Visitor Centre with its splendid facilities. The project is a major part of our strategy to open the Metropolitan Cathedral to a wider public and with our excellent position at the heart of the City and University life we hope it will encourage many people to drop in to learn something about the Archdiocese and the Cathedral and what they have to offer, and above all to climb the new steps and visit the Cathedral.’

©2004 Archdiocese of Liverpool