Faith and Mission

As we bring the 2025 school year to a close, we would like to express our sincere gratitude to everyone in our community for their tremendous support of our Faith and Mission fundraising initiatives. This year holds special significance as we celebrate the Jubilee Year of Hope, a time inviting us to renew our commitment to compassion, generosity, and solidarity with others. 

Your generosity and engagement have made a real difference, enabling us to stand in solidarity with those in need and live out the Gospel call to love and service. The Jubilee Year of Hope encourages us all to be beacons of hope in our everyday actions, reaffirming our shared responsibility to care for one another. 

This year, through your kindness, we have supported several organisations: 

• Caritas Australia: Addressing global poverty and injustice. 
• Jesuit Mission: Empowering communities through education and development. 
• Mary Ward International: Advocating for women’s empowerment and social justice. 
• Shopfront’s 1000 Meals Project: Providing meals for the vulnerable. 
• LifeLink: Helping those in need in the Perth Diocese. 
• St Vincent de Paul Society: Assisting families experiencing hardship. 

• CARAD (Coalition for Asylum Seekers, Refugees and Detainees): Supporting displaced individuals in rebuilding their lives. 

   

Our support for these agencies is a powerful witness to our ongoing concern for our neighbour and our commitment to upholding the dignity of all people. 

As we journey through Advent, let us prepare our hearts for Christ’s coming with hope and compassion. Advent reminds us to focus on the true meaning of Christmas: God’s boundless love for humanity. May this season, and the spirit of the Jubilee, inspire us to share that love and hope in our homes and in our wider community.

Wishing you and your families a blessed Advent, a joyful Christmas, and a year filled with hope. 

Janeen Murphy

Deputy Principal Faith and Mission

Community Mass

Community Mass resumes in February. If you have any questions, please contact Mary-Anne Lumley: mary-anne.lumley@johnxxiii.edu.au

Community Mass details

• College Chapel
• Fridays in term time
• Starts at 8:00am concludes at 8:30am.

Sacraments

Do you have a child in Years 2, 3 or 5?

Closing dates for enrolment in some parishes will be in the second week of February, so parents are encouraged to enrol their child at the earliest opportunity. 

Students will be preparing for the sacraments of Reconciliation in Year 3, First Holy Communion in Year 4 and Confirmation in Year 6. 

Preparing for the sacraments is now a three-way collaboration of family, parish and school. This means that parents exercise their right in choosing to enrol their child in the parish; the school provides the learning experiences to prepare the children, and the parish arranges the celebration of the sacrament. 

The College website has links to sacrament program information from some of our local parishes. 

Parents often have questions about the Sacrament program, so please don’t hesitate to ask. Below are some useful points of contact: 

• The priest or sacrament coordinator in your local parish
• John XXIII College website
• The Archdiocesan website: Parishes & Mass Times

• Mary-Anne Lumley: mary-anne.lumley@johnxxiii.edu.au  or via phone on 

  08 9383 0513

Around the Parishes

During Advent and Christmas many families choose to include parish-based liturgies and reflections in their seasonal festivities. 

On Sunday the parish of St Thomas the Apostle in Claremont is hosting the annual ‘Road to Bethlehem’ a celebration of Scripture, choral music and reflection. Please see the attached poster for additional details. 

Follow these links for Christmas Masses in some of our other local parishes:

Good News for Advent

For the whole College Mass, today, the Gospel of the final week of Advent was proclaimed, from Matthew 1:18-24: Matthew 1:18-24 CEV - The Birth of Jesus -(Luke 2.1-7) This - Bible Gateway  Father Michael Tate offers this reflection on making time to ‘dream’ in the busy Advent season. He also highlights the generosity of spirit shown by Joesph, sometimes overlooked in the Christmas story. 

… Mary was in a shame-full situation, so far as Nazareth was concerned. She had fallen pregnant before she was taken by Joseph as his wife in the fullest sense. Under Jewish law, she could be stoned to death. This is where the extraordinary character of Joseph comes through.

We have to get the sequence in our heads.

Before Joseph had a clue about divine intervention in Mary’s pregnancy, he decided upon a merciful and compassionate course of action: to break the marriage contract quietly and discreetly and to allow Mary to get on with her life as best she could. Joseph did not ignore the situation, but he had an exceptional large-heartedness, so that he preserved a future for Mary even though she had apparently wronged him.

Joseph did that, and then something extraordinary happened. What happened?

Joseph slept that night in a way which allowed God to reach into his dreaming state. If he had gone to sleep that night in the turmoil of a vengeful frame of mind, such that Mary would get ‘her just desserts’, that ‘the punishment would fit the crime’ against his honour, he would not have been ready to have the deepest levels of his consciousness stirred in the way God wanted.

In the deep sleep of a just and good man, Joseph was enlightened as to the divine dimension of Mary’s pregnancy. Of course, there are many aspects to that dimension, but the one which this Gospel passage helps us focus on is that God was breaking through the patriarchal structures of that society and had acted as creatively as on the first day of creation. The old cycle of human history, literally generation after generation, was being broken. Something utterly new had happened.

Joseph received that intuition in his deep sleep.

We all know that in our waking hours we are so focussed, so blinkered, so frenetic that our minds are rarely receptive to God’s prompting. The windows of perception are opened when the eyes are closed in sleep. You and I are just as likely to receive an intuition as to God’s plan for us in the depths of sleep (or even day dreaming): who we really are, who we are destined to be, where we ‘fit in’ to God’s plan for transforming the whole of creation.

We have to prepare ourselves by not going to sleep with vengeful hearts, especially not to defend an artificial sense of one's own honour. Then we have a chance of receiving those divinely inspired insights. When we get them, these instructive moments in our sleep, what can we do when we wake up? We can dismiss them as the fantasy of slumber. Or we can do what Joseph did: get up and do what is needed to fulfil the message. [In his case, to take care of Mary as his wife and to make sure the baby was called ‘Jesus’.]

So, Mary had great cause to thank Joseph for being such a large-hearted man. We have cause to thank Joseph for showing what dreams can be made of. 

From a homily for Fourth Sunday in Advent. Rev. Prof. Michael Tate. Michael Tate was a Senator for Tasmania from 1978-93 and Ambassador to The Hague and the Holy See from 1993-96. He is a priest in the Archdiocese of Hobart and is an Honorary Professor of

Law at the University of Tasmania ,where he lectures in International Humanitarian Law.