All posts by 3 churches

Christ the King Bidding Prayers for the 30th Sunday of the year, 2019

bidding prayers, Christ the King

 Remembering the poor man in today’s readings we place our petitions before the Lord asking for the gift of His grace in our lives

The response is “ Lord be close in our times of trouble”

This week we listened with horror to the details of the deaths of the 39 people who died in the back of a lorry as they sought to find a new life in our country. We ask the Lord’s mercy for them and all who mourn them

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Lord be close in our times of need

Today a new initiative of Family Mass is being started in our Parish seeking to unite all of us  as we celebrate  our Family in The Lord We ask the Lord’s blessing for this important new start in our prayer life

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Lord be close in our times of need

We pray for the Church through the world but especially in the Middle East where to be a follower of Christ is to be target for atrocities of all kinds

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Lord be close in our times of need

Let us pray for all the deceased of our Three Churches remembering those who have died recently. May the Lord grant them eternal rest We ask also that He may comfort those who mourn

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Lord be close to us in our times of need

 

Let us ask Mary our mother to join us in our prayers saying Hail Mary…                 

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 For a few moments let us listen in our hearts the voice of our Beloved Father

Longer Pause 

Heavenly Father we ask these gifts through Jesus Your Son who lives in glory with You and the Holy Spirit forever

Amen.

 

 

Patsy and St Margaret Mary Feast 16th May

newsletter

A highlight of our recent September Pilgrimage was a visit to Paray-le-Monial. Margaret Mary Alacoque was born in 1647 in Burgundy. From early childhood, she showed intense love for the Blessed Sacrament. Rheumatic fever confined her to bed for four years, but having made a vow to the Blessed Virgin to consecrate herself to religious life, she was instantly restored to perfect health. It seems she also had visions of Jesus Christ, which she thought were a normal part of human experience. The death of her father plunged her family into poverty, and her only consolation was visits to the Blessed Sacrament in the local church. When she was 17, however, the family regained their fortune and her mother encouraged her to socialise, in the hopes of finding a suitable husband.
One night, after returning home from a ball, Margaret Mary experienced a vision of Christ. He reproached her for her forgetfulness of him, yet he also reassured her by demonstrating that his Heart was filled with love for her, because of the childhood promise she had made. As a result, she determined to fulfil her vow, and when she was 23 she entered the Visitation Convent at Paray-le-Monial in 1671, making her profession as a nun the next year.
Over 18 months from 27 December 1673 she received several private revelations of the Sacred Heart. The visions revealed to her details of devotion to the Sacred Heart, such as reception of Holy Communion on the first Friday of each month, Eucharistic Holy Hours on Thursdays, and the celebration of the Feast of the Sacred Heart. Margaret Mary claimed that Jesus had permitted her to rest her head upon his heart, and disclosed to her the wonders of his love. He told her that he wanted to make them known to all, and that he had chosen her for this work. Initially discouraged in her efforts, she eventually received the support of Claude de la Colombière, S.J., the community’s confessor. The monastery observed the Feast of the Sacred Heart privately from 1686, and St Margaret Mary died in October 1690.
Later, the devotion to the Sacred Heart was fostered by the Jesuits, but the practice was not officially recognised until 75 years later. She was canonised by Pope Benedict V in 1920, and her body rests in the Chapel of the Apparitions.
Finally in an encyclical Miserentissimus Redemptor, Pope Pius XI affirmed the Church’s position regarding the credibility of her visions of Jesus Christ by speaking of Jesus as having “manifested Himself” to Saint Margaret
Mary.


Fr Matthew

Newman to be canonised next Sunday

newsletter

Pope Francis will canonise Blessed John Henry Newman in St Peter’s Square next Sunday 13 October. This will make Newman the first English person who has lived after the 17th century to be officially recognised as a saint by the Catholic Church.

John Henry Newman (1801 – 1890) was ordained as a Church of England priest and soon became the leader of the Oxford Movement, but converted to Catholicism in 1845. He founded the Oratory in England and was later made a cardinal. He is widely considered to be one of the most significant figures of the 19th century. When he died at the age of 89, more than 15,000 people lined the streets of Birmingham for his funeral.

The cause for his sainthood was opened in 1958. Pope Benedict XVI declared him Blessed in Birmingham in 2010 on his visit to Britain. The canonisation was made possible by a second miracle attributed to the intercession of Blessed John Henry Newman, consisting in the medically inexplicable healing of a pregnant Chicago woman with life-threatening complications due to her pregnancy.

During the beatification ceremony in 2010, Pope Benedict said that Newman tells us that “our divine Master has assigned a specific task to each one of us, a ‘definite service’, committed uniquely to every single person. The definite service to which Blessed John Henry was called involved applying his keen intellect and his prolific pen to many of the most pressing subjects of the day. His insights into the relationship between faith and reason, into the vital place of revealed religion in civilised society, and into the need for a broadly-based and wide-ranging approach to education were not only of profound importance for Victorian England, but continue today to inspire and enlighten many all over the world.” Cardinal Vincent Nichols, Archbishop of Westminster, said John Henry Newman is known “for many great qualities, but we remember him particularly for the kindness and compassion of his ministry to the people of Birmingham. At his death they turned out in their thousands to salute a much loved priest on his funeral procession through the streets of Birmingham.”

Edited from www.newmancanonisation.com – a comprehensive website