What is a School Feast Day?

On Thursday we will be celebrating our school Feast Day with mass at 9:15am and our Colour Run at 2pm. So what is a school feast day? Why do we celebrate it? And who is it about?

All Catholic schools in the Diocese are named after someone important in our faith. A school feast day is when we remember and celebrate whoever is the patron of our school . The word feast comes from the Latin festes, meaning ‘joy’ and symbolises a time of celebration.

Our school is named 'Our Lady Star of the Sea', this is one of the special names given to Mary, Jesus' mother. So on Thursday we will remember and celebrate Mary and think about why our school was named after her.

A reading from the holy Gospel according to Matthew (1:1-16. 18-23)

This is how Jesus Christ came to be born. His mother Mary was betrothed to Joseph; but before they came to live together she was found to be with child through the Holy Spirit. Her husband Joseph, being a man of honour and wanting to spare her publicity, decided to divorce her informally. He had made up his mind to do this when the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, ‘Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because she has conceived what is in her by the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son and you must name him Jesus, because he is the one who is to save his people from their sins.’ Now all this took place to fulfil the words spoken by the Lord through the prophet:

The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son

and they will call him Emmanuel,

a name which means ‘God-is-with-us’.

The Gospel of the Lord.

As Mary’s story clearly shows, life rarely goes the way we imagine it will go.

As we celebrate  Mary, it's an opportunity to remember that we are all called by God in ways that we may not have imagined.  We won't know how our next call may come but God invites us to listen and be open… Mary’s “yes” changed the world. What will our “yes” do?