Religious Education
Marylene Douglas
All students attending St Louis de Montfort's Aspendale have the right to feel safe. The care, safety and wellbeing of children and young people is a fundamental responsibility of all within our school.
Ash Wednesday (Wed 5th March) marks the beginning of a special time called Lent in the Church. On this day, we put ashes on our foreheads to show our commitment of faith and humility as we prepare for Easter. The colour for Lent is purple. Purple symbolises preparation and penance.
Lent is a time for prayer, fasting and almsgiving.
• Prayer helps us to get closer to God and remember the promises made at our baptism.
• Fasting is where we give something up to show our love for God and to be more aware of those living in poverty.
• Almsgiving means giving to others to show we care about justice and are thankful for what God has given us.
This is a wonderful season. We are called to give more of our time to prayer, fasting and to doing good deeds for others. In other words, to focus less on ourselves and focus more on God and how we should treat others.
During this season of Lent, our loving God asks us to look closely at our lives so that we can see how to lift up others and bring them hope.
Ashes are dark in colour. This is where we start our Lenten story, it is a special period that calls us to journey towards the celebration of the death and resurrection of Jesus at Easter. Easter symbols, like the Easter candle, are full of light. Lent is a journey from darkness to light, from being alone to being together, from being lost to being found, and from being closed off to being open.
Lent gets us ready for Easter, the most important time in the Church when we remember Jesus’s death and resurrection, when he rose to heaven and showed us the promise of New Life. Jesus brought that promise of hope to all people so that we may, “have life and have it to the full”. In this Year of Jubilee, let us be Pilgrims of Hope as we come together to unite against poverty and isolation with love and hope.
This coming week your children will be bringing home a Project Compassion Donation Box. We are invited to unite against poverty and take action to make a lasting difference. By raising much needed funds, we can bring God's hope to those less fortunate and try to create a fairer world.
You donations will go towards helping those most vulnerable in our world.
A big thank- you to all our wonderful families who braved the heat and joined us to celebrate the Prep Welcome Mass in the school hall. An especially big SHOUT OUT to those Year 6 students and their families who came to support and pray with their buddies. It really was a heartwarming celebration!