Concert on Friday

"Cloths of Heaven": ANNUAL CONCERT Fri 30th April 2010, 7:30 pm

in the Church

Tickets £7 in advance, £10 on the door, including a glass of wine. Call 020.8451.4677

Patricia Rozario - Soprano Mark Troop - Piano Fr Jim Brand- Piano

St Joseph’s Hendon Pastoral Choir St Mary Magdalen’s Acclaimed School Choir

Accompanied under 16’s free (no under 7’s permitted) In aid of Church Organ restoration

4th Sunday of Easter–Year C – 25th April 2010

MAY FRIDAYS 7 PM Four Holy Hours in reparation for the sins of clergy which have deeply betrayed the significant trust of innocent children and deeply wounded them.

This has been requested by our Bishops in their recent statement, which is available in the porch on yellow A4 sheets. They make this important point concerning our shared responsibility: “Catholics are members of a single universal body. These terrible crimes, and the inadequate response by some church leaders […] are the personal sins of only a very few. But we are bound together in the Body of Christ and, therefore, their sins touch us all.”

Also in the porch is the latest version of our white A4 comment “Putting the media reports of ‘Cover-up’ in context.” Here are some recent comments by, sadly, a small minority of prominent writers.

Brendan O'Neill, the humanist, atheistic editor of Spiked Online, described the campaign against the Pope as "a secular Inquisition". He said it had acquired "a powerfully pathological, obsessive" character in which "scaremongering supersedes facts".

Mayor of New York, Ed Koch (who disagrees with Christian moral teaching), in Jerusalem Times: "I believe the continuing attacks by the media on the Roman Catholic Church and Pope Benedict XVI have become manifestations of anti-Catholicism. The procession of articles on the same events are, in my opinion, no longer intended to inform, but simply to castigate."

Peter Hitchens, Daily Mail columnist: “Nothing – especially facts and logic – seems to be able to stop the ill-informed frenzy of rage against the Roman Catholic Church (to which I don’t be-long) […] is this all just a pretext to attack one of the last remaining strongholds of Christianity?”

Atheistic Dominic Lawson in Daily Mail: “Why is the unashamed child abuser Polanski lauded while the repentant Pope is vilified?”

David Quinn in the Irish Independent: If this was “about uncovering child abuse [...] then every organisation with a history of child abuse in its ranks would be pursued with equal vigour. [...]
A more honest media would relentlessly hunt down child abuse wherever it is to be found. “

George Weigel, an American Catholic author, claimed that the "scandal-mongering had now metastasised into a full-scale assault on Catholicism itself".

Austen Ivereigh, co-ordinator of Catholic Voices, “The media have merged with the mob.”
Please also fast for this intention on May Fridays.

PLACING THE REPORT OF COVER-UP IN CONTEXT

PLACING THE REPORTS OF “COVER-UP” IN CONTEXT
BBC Radio 4 planned to interview Deacon Michael and some parishioners on the media coverage of the “abuse scandal” for broadcast today. But in the end the BBC decided not to. We have produced a white triple A4 sheet explaining what we could have emphasised, copies of which are in the porch, including Archbishop Nichols Chrism Mass statement. Below are some key extracts from it.

Any case of priestly sex abuse and episcopal cover-up is indeed shameful [...] We accept the role of the media in calling us to account concerning our protection and care for innocent children, [and] episcopal dereliction of duty [...] We need repentance and renewal.

However, the media have avoided presenting the fact that child sex abuse and the mismanagement of its perpetrators is and has been a society-wide phenomenon. Rather they have been happy to create the impression that:
(i) the priesthood is fairly riddled with abusers,
(ii) there is an international culture of cover-up in the Church
(iii) which goes right to the top of the Church, and
(iv) that Catholic institutions such as celibacy and hierarchy are to blame – even that Catholic teaching of children about its sexual morality is a form of intellectual abuse of many children.
We would suggest that these latter four implications are ideologically-inspired calumny:
(i) In the first national research of its kind the Irish College of Surgeons 2002 SAVI report, widely acknowledged as authoritative, found that the gigantic number of 27% of under-17 year olds allege having been victims of sex abuse. 3.2 % of these allegations concerned priests. [...]In England & Wales over the last 40 years 0.4% of all priests have had allegations of such abuse against them.
(ii) In all the recent reporting there are no new proved cases of paedophilia (or of abuse in general). The “news” is of a greater specificity to what actually happened concerning Irish clerical abuse, but mainly of the bad management, in Ireland, of some proven or suspected abusers. [...] The evidence suggests that [this] is widespread in society [...] The Church, in its Canon Law, has always made clear that abuse of minors is a serious sin. [... whereas] prominent contemporary political figures such as Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt were leaders of the 1970s Civil Liberties Union which was affiliated to the Pedophile Information Exchange.
(iii) [...] The attempts to implicate the Pope and Archbishop Nichols have shown the media at its most blatantly unprofessional and irresponsible- and reveal the deeper agenda at work.
(iv) No objective evidence has been adduced to suggest that celibacy is the problem [...] The claims that our teaching of the truth about sex and love is an “intellectual abuse” are in one sense the extreme of the attacks. From another point of view they would seem to be a key motivation behind the unprofessional nature of the frenzied accusations, amidst what, in its foundations at least, was reasonable reporting about real Church failures.

Divine Mercy Sunday 2nd Sunday of Easter–Year C – 11th April 2010

Divine Mercy Sunday
Today we celebrate Divine Mercy Sunday. A Feast Day bequeathed to the Church by Pope John Paul II, and requested by Our Lord through a Polish Nun, Sr Faustina. Pope John Paul write:- “It was as if Christ wanted to reveal (through St Faustina) that the limit imposed on evil, of which man is both perpetrator and victim, is ultimately Divine Mercy. Christ crucified and risen is the supreme revelation of this truth. The Paschal Mystery confirms that good is ultimately victorious; that life conquers death and the love triumphs over hate.” There is a programme of prayer and adoration at 3:00pm this afternoon.

Forthcoming Events
Parish Pilgrimage to Lourdes
We are planning to join the Diocesan Pilgrimage to Lourdes 25th – 31st July, with Archbishop Vincent Nichols. If you are in any way interested then do come to a meeting next Saturday (17th April) at 11:00 am, here in the Annexe, at which the diocesan organiser (Gerald Daly) will talk to us and answer any questions that you may have. At this stage there is no commitment – just come and see.

Parish Concert: - Friday 30th April 7:30 pm – here in the Church
For the sixth year running Patricia Rozario OBE will, once again, head up a list of performers which will include other professional musicians, and our the Junior School choir and St Joseph’s Pastoral choir. The theme this year will be “Cloths of heaven’ from WB Yates poem.
Tickets are £7 in advance, £10 on the night, including a glass of wine with proceeds going towards the restoration of our ailing organ.

The Pioneer Annual Dance – Friday 7th May, 8pm to 11.30pm.
This is to help raise funds for St Mary Magdalen Special Needs Group. Tickets £ 5.00 will be on sale after all Masses this weekend and next.

This parish has a great reputation for supporting our functions. Even though we have two functions so close together, we hope that you can support both.