St Josephs Parish, Upper Hutt, celebrated the first two years of its Catholics Returning Home programme last month in which parishioners have accompanied 25 Catholics on their return to the Church. The CRH team put on afternoon tea on 20 May in the foyer of the church and invited all who had been involved with the programme in the Northern Hutt Valley Pastoral Area to meet those on the journey back to their faith roots.
Staff members from Holy Cross School, Miramar, and Wellington Catholic Education Centre were among the many graduates of the Mauri Ora Programme offered through the Porirua campus of Te Wananga o Aotearoa.
The uniforms were immaculate, the nerves were raw and the tension palpable among the staff and parents. The 61st O’Shea Shield was in full swing. Students from the 17 colleges of the Palmerston North and Wellington dioceses gathered over the weekend of 5 and 6 May.
I left for the Spirit of Adventure on 28 February. Ten days, 40 people I had never met before, cramped living space and no showers until the last day – it was amazing. The Spirit experience was one I will never forget.
Members of religious orders living in the community draw little attention today but in the early 1970s this practice was a novelty and sometimes frowned on in the Church. A trailblazer in this practice, Jacq Dromgool, has spoken for the first time of her experiences as part of a group of four Sisters of the Sacred Heart who moved out of their convent in Island Bay to live in the old Newtown fire station.
Two new lay appointments have been made as the archdiocese continues to break new ground in its administration and pastoral care. A third lay pastoral leader and a senior chaplain have been appointed as well-qualified people move into formal leadership positions in the archdiocese.
A parent’s quest for something to amuse her four-year-old has led to a fellowship in Washington DC for a St Mary’s College student. Anne Kim has been selected to participate in the Kennedy Center/National Symphony Orchestra National Trustees’ Summer Music Institute next month (July). Anne was also recently awarded a prize for the best Shakespearean comedy actress at the Sheilah Winn Festival for her portrayal of the character of Portia in The Merchant of Venice.
Funky fit food for healthy teenagers was the brief and last month the year 9 technology students at St Mary’s College invited local MP Marian Hobbs and others to breakfast to sample the results. This year the college has embraced the Ministry of Health’s theme of ‘healthy eating healthy action’ which pervades the different strands of the school’s technology programme.
6 June 2007 St Mary of the Angels welcomed home its restored pipe organ at the end of April with a concert that some in the audience have described as an ‘amazing thing’. ‘The church has its organ back and all of Wellington is the richer for it.’ The organ had been out of action […]
Breath is life. A parishioner collapsed during a recent Sunday Mass in Newtown. A nurse in the congregation pinched his nose and breathed into his mouth while another nurse pushed up and down on his chest. We saw life return. It all happened during the Creed when we were about to pray, ‘We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life.’