MESSAGE FROM THE PARISH PRIEST

A healthy lifestyle depends more on imagination than it does on rationality. This might explain the massive incidence of mental and emotional distress in our culture, as we are besotted with the rational and the functional. Google the word “depression” and you will get more than 40 million hits. For all our sophistication, ours is not a good way to live.

The eminent psychiatrist, Rollo May, writes: “Gregory Bateson rightly reminds us that ‘mere purposive rationality unaided by such phenomena as art, religion, dream, and the like, is necessarily pathogenic and destructive of life’. As we have said earlier, our first reaction when the myths have not sufficed is mythoclasm; we attack the very concept of myth. The denial of myths, as we shall see later, is itself part of our refusal to confront our own reality and that of our society” (Rollo May, The Cry for Myth, W. W. Norton & Company, 25).

The liturgy, at its best, is healing. It opens up horizons of reality that remain closed to us for the most part. It does this by appealing to our imagination. Imagination can bring the fragmented bits of our lives together into a whole. There is no telling what good can come of an imagination open to the Eternal Presence.

The pandemic is not over! St Patrick’s is implementing the current State Government COVID Safety regulations:

• Masks are not mandatory in places of worship but recommended
• You have 2 options for signing in – a QR Code can be found in various places near the front entrance and there are sign-in sheets also at the front entrance.
• If you sign in manually, you must give your first name, your second name and your contact number. We keep this information in the church’s vault for 28 days before we destroy it.
• Congregational singing is now permitted.
• Our seating capacity is now 185.
• When receiving Holy Communion, approach via the right-hand aisle and return via the other aisle.  There will normally be two people distributing Holy Communion at the sanctuary. Maintain social distancing. In an instruction headed, “Directions for the Archdiocese of Sydney from 18 March 2020 until further notice”, the Archbishop wrote: “In the Ordinary Form of the Latin Rite, the Body of Christ should only be administered in the hand and the chalice should only be received by the celebrant ….” This instruction was reiterated in the Archbishop’s Seventh Pastoral Letter, 2 July 2020: “Receiving Holy Communion by ‘making a throne for the King with our hands’ (St Cyril of Jerusalem) remains normative in Australia in the ordinary form of the Latin Rite ….” St Patrick’s is adhering to the Archbishop’s instruction on the distribution and reception of Holy Communion.
• Please observe all the normal COVID Safety practices: sanitize your hands, keep 1.5 metres between you and the next person, do not mingle unnecessarily.
• We are not out of the woods – remember the common good!

God Bless us all

Fr Michael Whelan SM
Parish Priest

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St Patrick’s Covid Safety Plan here