Community Liturgy

Our next community celebration of the Eucharist – the first in the season of Easter – will be Friday 6 April. The Mass will be prepared by students from Year 7, and families of Year 7 students are especially welcome.

When: Fridays in Term Time

Time: 8:00-8:30am

Where: College Chapel

If you have any queries about Community Liturgy, please contact Mary-Anne Lumley:

Lumley.mary-anne@johnxxiii.edu.au or 9383 0513.

Easter in Parishes

The three-day feast of Easter is the highlight of our Church year, and in parishes around the world people will gather in prayer, song and ritual in celebration of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection.

Some of our local parishes have kindly supplied details of their Easter liturgies, which you can find on the College website:

Sacrament program

Do you have a child in Year 3, 4 or 6?

Is your child already enrolled in a Parish Sacrament program in your own ‘home’ parish for Reconciliation, Eucharist or Confirmation?

Need help with this?

Contact your Parish Priest or Sacrament Coordinator.
Contact Mary-Anne Lumley, Parish Liaison lumley.mary-anne@johnxxiii.edu.au or 9383 0513.
Locate information from your parish on the archdiocesan website:
Use the College website to find information, including diary dates, supplied by some local parishes

Updates from local parishes

Holy Spirit, City Beach

Registration forms are available from Cathy Gawen, delattrecn@yahoo.fr

Alternatively phone Parish Priest, Fr Emmanual-tv Dimobi, 93413131.

Saint Thomas Apostle, Claremont

Registration forms are available from silvia.kinder@cewa.edu.au

Star of the Sea, Cottesloe

Further information: cottesloe@perthcatholic.org.au

Saint Cecilia, Floreat

Further information: Prue Pupazzoni, floreat@perthcatholic.org.au

St Joseph, Subiaco

Applications for Eucharist and Reconciliation will be invited in Terms 2 and 3 respectively.

Further information: sacraments@stjosephssubiaco.org.au

GOOD NEWS for Easter

Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified, has risen (Mark 16).

The reflection from Easter is from Jesuit priest, Fr Andy Hamilton, and is printed here with kind permission. Father Andy is a Jesuit, a theologian, a writer and, among his many other roles, the Media Officer for Jesuit Social Services.

The stories of Easter are like the stories of Jesus’ birth. Both stories focus on a small place: a manger and a tomb. They are also full of extraordinary events: the guiding star, the stone mysteriously rolled away from the tomb, and Jesus’ habit of passing through locked doors. Both stories, too, are richly peopled by angels busily delivering messages to the chief players.

The heart of both stories, however, is wrapped in mystery. We are told that the Holy Spirit overshadows Mary in Jesus’ conception, but do not know how. We are told also that Jesus rises from the dead, but we are not told how. All we have is a birth in a field and an empty tomb together with mysterious appearances. In both stories, of course, there are angels, but their role is to shroud the events in mystery.

In fact different observers will see in both Christmas and Easter evidence for the absence of God as well as the presence of God. It takes faith to see God as present in Jesus. For Mary, whom the angel had promised the birth of the Messiah as the climax of God’s plan for us, the process leading to the birth was of one forced absence after another – absence from family and home when travelling heavily pregnant to Bethlehem, absence of the relative comfort of a roof over her head in an inn, of a birthing place worthy of God in a feeding place trodden by animals, and absence of the company of angels among disreputable shepherds. It would take faith to see in all this God’s presence and not God’s absence.

Similarly at Easter the disciples have to grapple with an absence: a tomb that is empty, and a Jesus who comes and goes, who is seen by some and not by others. It takes faith to see this as a sign of God’s presence rather than a sign that someone has taken away the body or that people were seeing things that were not real. Above all, too, the disciples had to grapple with the absence of hope that they had experienced in Jesus’ death. They had hoped that he would set Israel free, but had seen him taken, tortured, dead and buried. It was natural that they, like Thomas, should see only absence when told of visions of his presence.

Yet they found Christ present when he appeared to them, when they heard the stories, and when they saw the effect that Jesus’ rising had on those drawn into it. They recognised that God’s presence and love were found even in the hardest events and the places that seemed derelict – in fields and tombs, the places of no hope. Angels could appear in the most desperate of places. And so it is in our lives.

We all need to deal with the apparent absence of God in the events of our own lives or of those of others, near and far. At Jesuit Social Services we need the strength to keep hoping in the face of the despair of many of the young people with whom we work and the cruelty which they so often meet in society. We need Easter.

© Andrew Hamilton SJ

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