Liturgy
SACRAMENT PROGRAM
'Family focused, parish-based, Catholic school-supported'
"Your unique and indispensable role in your child's Catholic Christian formation is one that both school and parish endorse and support. It is your privilege and responsibility, which follows from your commitment when your child was baptised, to present your child for the sacraments."
John XXIII College prepares children for the various sacraments during the course of this year's religious education programs: Year 3 - Reconciliation, Year 4 - Eucharist, Year 6 - Confirmation.
Your family celebrates that sacrament in your home parish, the parish community in which you regularly participate.
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Emmaus Productions
Some of our local parishes have supplied the following information. Further details on the College website.
Nedlands Parish (Holy Rosary)
FIRST RECONCILIATION
Celebration of Sacrament: Saturday 17 October - 10:000am
CONFIRMATION
Celebration of Sacrament: Saturday 19 September - 6:00pm & Sunday 20 September - 8:45am
Parents' Adult Education Evening: Wednesday 2 September - 7:30-8:30pm (Parish Centre)
Claremont Parish (St Thomas Apostle)
FIRST RECONCILIATION
Celebration of Sacrament: Tuesday 20 & Wednesday 21 October - 3.30-4.30pm
CONFIRMATION
Celebration of Sacrament: Friday 4 September - 6.00pm
Don't see your parish here?
Like further information? Contact: Mary-Anne Lumley, Parish Liaison lumley.mary-anne@johnxxiii.edu.au
Alternatively go to the archdiocesan website:
http://www.perthcatholic.org.au/parishes-priests/index.cfm?loadref=16
'GOOD NEWS' for
21st SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME
The following is from Fr Richard Leonard's homily on this Sunday's gospel and is printed here, with his kind permission. Fr Richard Leonard SJ is the author of Preaching to the Converted, Paulist Press, New York, 2006
I have some sympathy for the response of the Jews to Jesus' hard teaching in today's Gospel! For a Jew to be asked to drink blood is as abhorrent as it gets. It is the same as demanding that an ultra Orthodox Jew eat pork!
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In almost all the stories in the Gospel of John there are insiders and outsiders, those who understand the message and those who take Jesus too literally and are offended or confused. The flesh and blood given for the life of the world is at one and the same time the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus celebrated in the Eucharist. Jesus was not, literally, offering his arm for his followers to chew! He was referring to the gift he was soon going to give his followers: the example of utter fidelity to God's Kingdom even unto death, and the meal of that Kingdom, the Eucharist. We are the recipients of both gifts and the commission to live them out. The Bread of Life and the Cup of Salvation is given to us for our mission in the world today and for our journey toward the World to come.
The other response in today's Gospel gives us great hope. In spite of being confused and deserted by his friends Peter hangs in there with Jesus. He holds on to faith when all the signs show that a hasty retreat may be a better course of action. We all know people who remain faithful in the most extraordinary of circumstances. Some of these we can understand - parents with sick children or spouses with ill partners. It's heroic, but understandable. But sometimes fidelity is heroic and inexplicable: when a spouse welcomes back his or her partner after an adulterous affair; when a foreign-born priest or religious will not abandon an oppressed community; when a person will fight a just cause and be persecuted all the way to the end. These are powerful signs of faithful love at work too. It's a fine line to know when fidelity is 'dying to self' not 'killing self'. We are called to the former and often seduced by the latter.
James Keenan in his excellent book, Virtues for ordinary Christians says that fidelity is the bottom line of the Christian life. He argues that the Church has spent too much time preaching about 'infidelities' and too little time teaching about those things that strengthen fidelity. 'Each person', he says, 'has two major moral goals in life: to be just and to be faithful'. Being faithful to his Father, and to us, sums up what Jesus does for our salvation and is exactly what He calls forth from the disciples in today's Gospel. Perhaps because we too easily think it is something difficult, we presume that being faithful to our friends is hardly a moral issue. Yet once we see that friendship is the key to the moral life then we can come to see that living the moral life is about the ordinary interactions of our day.
James Keenan writes, 'To this end we may need to make more calls, write more letters, cook more dinners, take more strolls, linger a little longer with a friend. We may also need to disengage ourselves from the habit of counting or measuring what the other does or does not do or say'.
© Richard Leonard SJ.
COMMUNITY MASS
Next Friday, 28 August, Year 12 students will prepare the celebration of the Eucharist. Families of Year 12 students are particularly welcome.
Our College community celebrates the Eucharist each Friday morning in term time. Don't wait to be invited to Friday Mass - everyone is always welcome to this joyous, 'user-friendly' celebration.
If you have any questions, please contact:
Lumley.mary-anne@johnxxiii.edu.au
Where: Chapel
Time: 8:000am - 8:30am
When: Fridays in term time.
SACRAMENT PROGRAM
In almost all the stories in the Gospel of John there are insiders and outsiders, those who understand the message and those who take Jesus too literally and are offended or confused. The flesh and blood given for the life of the world is at one and the same time the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus celebrated in the Eucharist. Jesus was not, literally, offering his arm for his followers to chew! He was referring to the gift he was soon going to give his followers: the example of utter fidelity to God's Kingdom even unto death, and the meal of that Kingdom, the Eucharist. We are the recipients of both gifts and the commission to live them out. The Bread of Life and the Cup of Salvation is given to us for our mission in the world today and for our journey toward the World to come.
