Portsmouth Diocese e-News Issue 468
It was with great joy we heard the Holy Father, at the end of his Wednesday audience this last week, announce that the canonisations of Bl. Carlo Acutis and Bl. Pier Giorgio Frassati will take place during the Holy Year next year. Acutis will be canonised during the Jubilee for Teenagers in April, and Frassati during the Jubilee of Youth at the end of July. Our Diocese is organising a youth pilgrimage for the last week in July. These are two new saints in the making! Let us pray that these two new saints will inspire and pray for our young that their faith may be vibrant and on fire.
Welcome to e-News this week, the last week of the Church’s Liturgical Year before we enter the great season of Advent. Let us pray this Advent for peace throughout the world in these troubled times. Let us also pray this week for the defeat of the bill on assisted suicide: the vote takes place in the House of Commons on Friday.
[Image: Associazione Pier Giorgio Frassati]
The Deacon as a Minister of Hope
From the Bishop
This last weekend, our annual Deacons Conference took place, this time in Basingstoke, and many of our deacons and their wives from across the Diocese were present, along with Fr. Dominic Adeiza, the Director of the Diaconate, and his team. I joined the conference on Sunday for Mass and after lunch I gave a talk about the Deacon as a Minister of Hope. The documents of Vatican II speak of the Deacon as a Minister of Charity, but I invited everyone to think about the deacon and his wife as a minister of Hope, especially in these times when the news can seem so bleak. Hope is a gift of God that we should pray for: it is the joyful expectation that God is going to act in response to our prayers and that one day He will bring us to the happiness of heaven. Hope “transforms life and the world from within” (Benedict XVI Spe Salvi 6). I then spoke about the Holy Year of Jubilee next year, 2025, with the theme chosen by the Holy Father ”Pilgrims of Hope.” This is a real opportunity for every member of the Church to pray for a renewal of hope by going on a pilgrimage as a ‘pilgrim of hope,’ ideally to one of the six shrine churches designated for the Diocese: Jersey and Guernsey, the Cathedral, Sacred Heart Bournemouth, St. James’s Reading and St. Edmund’s Southampton. I then turned specifically to the deacon, especially his role in the Church’s liturgy, his teaching and preaching, and his care of the poor. I made some practical suggestions to help: that the deacon himself prays for the gift of hope in order to be a man of hope, that in preaching he should not neglect speaking about heaven and the life of the world to come, and that the people he should be closest to are those most need of hope: those who are suffering. The Holy Year 2025 is a great opportunity to put all this into practice more energetically.
You can read my talk in full by clicking here.
You can continue to read this issue in full here.
