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In anticipation of your diaries filling up with appointments for the coming year, please note the following dates for the Sacraments of Initiation in 2020:  

Please claim these dates in your diary now. Thank you in anticipation. Meanwhile, if you have any enquiries regarding these Sacraments please contact the Parish Office.

The Corona virus (COIVD-19) and the bushfires have starkly reminded us that we are all connected. So too today’s Gospel confirms that our behaviour, our morality impacts the common good. Jesus cites the Torah (the law) but then like the prophets of old offers an extended, even radical understanding. And so, to be reconciled with another "takes priority over the duty of worship" (Brendan Byrne SJ). Or again, the prohibition on adultery sees Jesus in a very contemporary manner ask whether a woman is an object of male lust "or is she a fellow being with whom dealings in any area, including the sexual, must be based upon equality of relationship, fidelity and consent? When the latter prevails, the old prohibition simply becomes unnecessary." Byrne notes that which draws the "pronouncements of Jesus together is a sense of human life as essentially relational: it flourishes where respect, faithfulness, and consideration of the other prevail." In view of Jesus’s expanded understanding of the letter of the Torah, last week’s release of Pope Francis’s apostolic exhortation Querida Amazonia (Beloved Amazonia) is timely and challenging. Archbishop Mark Coleridge, President of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, noted that "the Amazon is remote from us but the issues are not." Indigenous culture (cf. this week’s report to Parliament on closing the gap) and an integral understanding of ecology are moral issues that challenge us too. So too in view of the Plenary Council the need for all the baptised to play their role for the Church to be an effective witness to values which respect and build up each and all. Fr John