The Fruits of ‘Towards Pentecost’
In the run up to Pentecost, this year the Agency held an online meeting entitled Towards Pentecost with Evangelisation Parish Leads and clergy from across the Archdiocese. It was a great gift to brainstorm ideas and to share and discuss various evangelisation initiatives, opportunities and programmes. The Parish Leads were then encouraged to go back to their parishes and speak with their Parish Priest to decide which ideas would best suit particular parishes in their own context.
As an Agency, we have previously provided materials ready for implementation but have sometimes found that they are not necessarily best suited for each parish context and do not foster a disposition of creativity, personal input or gifting. There is so much wisdom and experience within our Archdiocese so it was a great joy to be able to share this. We are blessed with an ever-growing volunteer missionary network of Deanery Mentors and Parish Leads across the diocese connecting and inspiring, praying and accompanying.
Come Holy Spirit
Here are a handful of testimonies from our parishes sharing some of the fruits! We always love to hear what is happening in your parish! Email aec@rcaos.org.uk and share your stories!
“For the prayer of dedication to the Holy Spirit, we invited people to come forward one by one, take hold of last year’s Easter candle and say the prayer. The plan had been that we would model what to do and then one of us would hold the prayer card for each person. However, the next person spontaneously took the card holding it for the next person and so on. It is hard to describe, but it brought such a feeling of unity. One of the RCIA team described it afterwards as ‘a beautiful sort of spiritual description of one helping the other in a fraternal embrace through the Spirit. One of the priests who was initially just going to lead the opening prayer and then depart, said to me today that he just couldn’t leave as he felt so drawn into the service.
Holy Cross, Carshalton
In Portuguese, and Ewe, in French and Tagalog and of course in English, we celebrated the great feast of Pentecost at our Sunday Morning Mass. The multilingual, multicultural liturgy was a wonderful event. We are a small parish, and for much of the time the various congregations who use the church do so with a limited appreciation of the cultural riches available to the parish as a whole. Sunday’s mass opened our eyes and ears to those riches. We had hymns in Malayalam and Hindi, readings in Spanish, Lithuanian and Italian, and an offertory procession featuring the music and dancing of Togo in west Africa.
This was all so appropriate for the birthday of the Church, when the first Christians were transformed by the gift of the Holy Spirit from people full of fear to confident preachers of the Good News. On that day people from far and wide understood the disciples’ message in their own languages. We remembered that multilingual event with our own multilingual event. To hear the Lord’s prayer spoken in the different native tongues of others as you say it in your own is to be reminded of the catholicity of our Church. Though we are many and diverse in language and culture, we are one in faith.
St Philip and St James, Herne Hill
We distributed the ‘Novena to the Holy Spirit’ produced by the Divine Mercy Apostolate and made them available for visitors and at our weekly 8-hour Adoration for any who missed out. They were also taken to the Housebound when taking the Holy Eucharist to them, the rest were in the entrance to the church and were available at our Confirmation Mass where we had many visitors coming to participate as 14 candidates received the Sacrament of Confirmation!
Regularly, one of our parishioners hosts a weekly Zoom Rosary followed by a quiet time for personal prayer. On Fridays we have an 8pm Mass, which caters for those who are unable to come to the 10am Mass due to work or family commitments. Confession is available before all weekday Masses. And of course regular meetings for sacramental preparation where we are hoping to establish with the parents a real personal relationship with Jesus.
St Simon Stock, Walderslade