December 2018 – Issue 19 AIM HIGH OSSORY ADULT FAITH DEVELOPMENT Diocese of Ossory OSSORY TIMES PARISH MINISTRY PROGRAMME FOR YOUNG PEOPLE Sharing the life of our Diocese The Aim High Parish Ministry Programme was developed to encourage young people to take an active part in their Church, parish and community. Aim High is open to all young people, 16 years and over. The Award is flexible, non-competitive and requires an ongoing commitment. The programme is coordinated through the Parish, in conjunction with parish organisations, secondary schools and youth clubs. DEAR YOUNG PEOPLE, THE CHURCH EXPECTS GREAT THINGS OF YOU AND YOUR GENEROSITY, AIM HIGH DON’T BE AFRAID TO Contact us 086-3404730 Email: [email protected] DIOCESE OF OSSORY AIM HIGH Pope Francis Retreats & Parish Evenings • PARISH GROUPS • FIRST COMMUNION & CONFIRMATION PARENTS • NURSING HOMES • AND MUCH MORE... ... a chance to take time to come to pray together. A time ofTo bookstillness please contactand reflection Ossory Adult Faith Development Office 056-7753624 or email [email protected] DECEMBER 2018 OSSORY TIMES Editorial Welcome to the latest edition of the Ossory Times. inthisissue Gaudete Sunday, which we celebrated in our Editorial ........................................................ 1 preparation for Christmas, reminds us that our Christmas 2018 Reflection.......................... 2 faith gives us reason to rejoice. The readings of The Word was made Flesh ......................... 4 that Sunday tell us that our faith should bring us life and happiness: the first reading began “Shout Our Church .................................................. 6 for Joy daughter of Zion...”, and the response to Northern Deanary Pilgrimage ................... 9 the Psalm echoed this saying “sing and shout for Christmas in Urlingford and Galmoy ...... 10 Joy for great in your midst is the Holy one of Israel” before the second reading reminded us “I want Clara Aim High ......................................... 12 you to be happy, always happy in the Lord; I Safeguarding Newsletter ......................... 14 repeat what I want is your happiness”. Christmas, CBS 65 Years Ago ..................................... 16 then, is a time when this joy, happiness and Good News is seen most clearly in our Christian story. Morality Matters ........................................ 18 The arrival of our infant Lord, the one we have AFD Holy Land Pilgrimage 2018 .............. 20 awaited, is a reason for pure joy. In him, after all, Bishop Laurence Forristal RIP ................... 26 new life begins. St John’s Parish celebrate Thankfully, these pages too show that the faith Church Bicentenaries ............................ 28 we profess here in Ossory is alive with that energy, Conference of Laity and Priests of the that hope and that joy which is so much a part of our Christian message. Here we recount Diocese of Ossory 2018.......................... 33 celebrations had to mark two bicentenaries in St Quiz Pages ................................................ 39 John’s Parish, pilgrimages taken nearby and far away, ongoing formation for those involved in ministry in our parishes, some topical reflections and so much more. In AFD Holy Land Pilgrimage 2018 a special way this edition also documents Page 20 the ongoing conversations which are taking place throughout the Diocese on the future of our parishes and how best we can continue to serve them. It is in preparing for this future that we will ensure that the story we tell, the faith we profess, and the happiness it brings us, will be gifted too for future generations. I would like to wish you and your family a very blessed and peaceful Christmas and New Year. As always we hope you enjoy this publication. Comments, suggestions and contributions are most welcome for future editions. Articles or advertisements for upcoming events or of recent events, St John's Parish celebrate Church Bicentenaries Page 28 can be sent to: OSSORY ADULT FAITH DEVELOPMENT St Kieran's College, College Road, Kilkenny Tel 056 7753624 Email [email protected] Web www.ossory.ie PAGE 1 OSSORY TIMES DECEMBER 2018 Christmas 2018 Reflection: Christmas is a call to trust in God “[t]onight God comes forth in a gush of making God visible and vulnerable for us water and blood for us. The Infant cry of and to us. Christmas reminds us that God is real - that our salvation is accomplished by One of Since the stories of the birth of Jesus were us, the Christ who is born” (Child in Winter, written down many years after he had Thomas Hoffman, p97). God became been crucified and had risen from the human, the Word made flesh; the Word dead, they are coloured by what his death was with God and that God has made his and resurrection mean. The message of the dwelling among us. Jesus was born, we are incarnation does not begin on Christmas told, in the days of Caesar Augustus, “while morning and end on Good Friday. The Quirinius was governor of Syria.” History Christ event – the incarnation, life, death, becomes the decisive place in which God and resurrection of Jesus is one act of manifests himself. On the first Christmas, God. Christianity finds its deepest meaning God joined us in a most remarkable way. in its deepest mystery: the Resurrection. He is Emmanuel, God with us in the fragile The Christian way always points beyond and sometimes messy fullness of our suffering and into new life. The third Preface humanity. Among us, with us, in us: the flesh at the Mass for Christmas expresses it well: that God took is our human flesh; in some “For through him the holy exchange that genuine sense it is my flesh, it is your flesh, restores our life has shone forth today in it is the flesh of every human being born – splendour: when our frailty is assumed by and dying – in this world. If the Word of God your Word not only does human mortality indeed became human and took on our receive unending honour but by this condition, then it was for the good of all, wondrous union we, too, are made eternal.” out of enduring love for a universal human community. What strikes me about the great mystery of the incarnation is the gentleness, the At Christmas the crib eclipses the cross, silence, the humility of his coming among even if the cross does not fully disappear. us. “Today in the town of David a saviour The parallelism with the cross in John’s has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord. Gospel can be seen clearly in the opening And here is a sign for you: you will find a quotation: “one of the soldiers pierced his baby wrapped in swaddling clothes and side with a spear, and at once there came lying in a manger” (Luke 2:11-12). out blood and water” (Jn.19:34). In taking on our humanity, God, through Jesus, Pope Benedict XVI has written incisively experienced both the joy and the sorrow of about the simplicity of the announcement of human life. The baby at Bethlehem shows the angel of the Lord: “Nothing miraculous, just how far the divine love would go in nothing extraordinary, nothing magnificent PAGE 2 DECEMBER 2018 OSSORY TIMES is given to the shepherds as a sign. All they We live in a time of darkness and shadow. will see is a child wrapped in swaddling Homelessness in Ireland is increasing at clothes, one who, like all children, needs the rate of 15 people per day, many of a mother’s care; a child born in a stable, them children. Such a figure, however, who therefore lies not in a cradle but in a does not convey the personal trauma manger. God’s sign is the child in need of that homelessness can bring. Today, it is help and in poverty. Only in their hearts surely not an impossible dream to hope will the shepherds be able to see that that no person, particularly no child, in this this child fulfils the promise of the prophet country would be left homeless or go to Isaiah…: ‘For to us a child is born, to us a bed hungry. I am thinking not only of those son is given; and the government will be in hotel rooms, but also of our immigrants upon his shoulders.’ Exactly the same sign in detention centres and direct provision has been given to us. We too are invited by - every one of them precious to God (see the angel of God, through the message of Jonah 4:11). the Gospel, to set out in our hearts to see the child lying in the manger. Others have also experienced times of darkness and shadow: we think of those God’s sign is simplicity. God’s sign is the who live through war and famine, the child. God’s sign is that he makes himself migrants and the refugees. May the Lord small for us. This is how he reigns. He does not open our eyes to see the image of God in come with power and outward splendour. every person, at every stage of their lives. He comes as a child - defenceless and in need of our help” (Christmas Homily, 24th What is happening in our land and across December 2006). the Western world is something that is real and significant; there is a darkness in the Christmas is a call to trust in the God who land and in our society, and a deep shadow comes to us in this way. Our God is a God of over and within our Church, a shadow we trust - a God of trust is a God of risk. God risks have always acknowledged as a fact of asking the young woman Mary in Nazareth; human frailty. May we never doubt the light God entrusts his plan to her answer.