Dear Parishioners,
On Tuesday the top years of St Mary’s Sabden and St Michael and St John’s will join the pupils of Thorneyholme (St Hubert’s) school for a joint celebration of Mass to mark the opening of the new academic year. Then at the beginning of the coming spring and summer terms there will be a similar celebration in Sabden and Clitheroe. This first Mass will be in honour of Our Blessed Lady, invoking her prayers for the three schools in our parish of Our Lady of the Valley. Later in the week our schools will publish Faith Friends, the first of a joint termly newsletter. Faith Friends will be available to parishioners next Sunday. To my mind the really exciting and encouraging feature of these ventures is that they are an initiative of the schools themselves, and bode well for the ongoing consolidation and cooperation of our three Catholic Communities in this northernmost reach of Salford Diocese.
The RCIA programme will resume on Thursday 24th of this month, the feast of Our Lady of Walsingham. As in past years it will meet most weeks, beginning at 8pm, after the Thursday 7.30pm evening Mass and will last for one hour only. The programme is geared to help those who feel drawn to joining the Catholic Church or who simply wish to dip their toe in the water. Catholics wishing to learn more about our faith will also benefit from the course. Please contact me for further information.
Letters will go out this week to parents of children in our schools who are eligible to make their First Holy Communion in June next year. We shall follow more or less the same programmes as last year, which proved to extremely successful and which probably benefited the parents more than the children.
Parents of children who do not attend any of our schools and who wish their children to make their first Holy Communion should contact me as soon as is possible and certainly before the end of this month.
There was a good attendance at this year’s cemetery Mass on Bank Holiday Monday and though the heavens didn’t quite smile on us, the rain stayed away!
Finally important dates for your diaries this month:
Wednesday, 16th, Parish Centre at 7.30pm, Parish Forum
Sunday, 20th, at 1pm Parish sponsored walk for HCPT
Sunday, 27th Parish Hall at 2pm Mass of Healing.
Fr John