http://civilwarbummer.com/webb-gettysburg-hero-or-the-rest-of-his-story/ Today Mass 12 (Saturday) Dunsop Bridge
Mass 5pm (Saturday) Clitheroe
Mass 9.30am Clitheroe
Mass 11am Sabden
Monday Mass 10am Clitheroe
Tuesday Mass 10am Clitheroe
Wednesday Mass 10am Clitheroe
Thursday Mass 10am Clitheroe
Friday Mass 10am Clitheroe http://cakebysadiesmith.co.uk/tag/cooking-with-kids/ The Sacred Heart of Jesus
Sunday (Eleventh Sunday in Ordinary Time)
Mass 12 noon (Saturday) Dunsop Bridge
Mass 5pm (Saturday) Clitheroe
Mass 9.30am Clitheroe
Mass 11am Sabden
MASSES RECEIVED THIS WEEK:
Katie Collins, Rita & Frank Donbavand, Bernard & Ronnie Higgins,
For successful operation, Thanks for safe delivery, Special Intentions x 3,
Millicent Driver, Theresa Pinch, Edmund Carus, Win Hargreaves
LATELY DEAD
Theresa Pinch, Edmund Carus, Win Hargreaves
ANNIVERSARIES
Millicent Driver
Laudato Si Week 2021
Please take the time to watch:
Critical Opportunities in 2021 to create change: call for an integral path. | Laudato Si Week Day 1
https://youtu.be/uDxeC13iQSo
LADIES GROUP
I hope you have kept safe and well these past months and that you are now enjoying the opportunity to reconnect with family and friends as the national restrictions begin to ease up. Spring has always been my favourite season but this year’s sense of renewal, anticipation and air of optimism as we look forward to a post-pandemic world is second to none – I hope you feel that too. I am still not sure when we will be able to meet again, but you can be sure we will meet again depending on the Government’s guidelines. Meanwhile make the best of the summer weather we are having at the moment.
Carol Riley. (Chair).
PARISH BUDDY SYSTEM
It has been hard for many people during the Covid restrictions to keep in touch with what is happening in the Parish and I’m sure that some people are feeling isolated. The Communications and Media Group has been discussing ways of reaching out to people and we came up with the idea of a Buddy System which we agreed at the last Parish Forum.
Please let us know of anybody (with their permission of course) who would welcome the odd ‘phone call to talk about Parish matters and have someone to contact for information.
We are also seeking names and contact details for people who would be prepared to act as the “Buddy”.
Please contact Anthony Brown on abrown.boggarts@googlemail.com or Janet Clegg on smsj@btinternet.com with your name and contact details if you would like to be part of this scheme and we will get back to you.
ONLINE CHRISTIAN RETREATS VIA ZOOM
Offering a space for Christians to explore and deepen faith…
Seek ‘life in all its fullness’
CREATED & LED BY DONNA WORTHINGTON, all retreats are an invitation to be rejuvenated and affirmed in faith, to know Christ better and to open up sacred space in order to listen to the Holy Spirit and experience a living spirituality that consoles, challenges and inspires. Varied methods enable Christians to deepen their own discipleship and travel on in their faith journeys (presentation, theological discussion, stillness, prayer, creative sessions, images, music etc).
Courses and training are also offered so individuals and groups can explore Scripture, prayer and faith’s themes and feel equipped to become prayer leaders in their own communities.
All retreats cost £20, unless otherwise stated. For bookings, please see the website or contact Donna Worthington:
drworthington@live.co.uk
https://christianretreats.live
2021 – June – July
PETER, A DEEPLY HUMAN CHARACTER : We became alert to the spiritual dynamic in his journey in order to explore this path
Sat 12th June 2-5pm OR Mon 14th June 10am – 1pm
If people wish to, they may attend Part 2 of this retreat on Peter on Sunday 27th June 2 – 5pm
(REPEAT) THE PROBLEM OF EVIL: This issue has caused many to question their faith. We explore this from various angles in order to think the whole subject through, understand various approaches and see how this does not need to be an obstacle to faith.
Sat 23rd June 6.30pm – 9pm
THE HANDLESS WOMAN : Through the depths of an ancient story ‘The Handless Woman’, we will explore the wisdom which speaks to our heroic journeying.
Sat 24th July 10am – 1pm
CCP – CLITHEROE CHRISTIANS IN PARTNERSHIP
The CCP prayer theme has now been published on the Love Clitheroe Website. This month the focus is on homelessness…
Listen to God and let Him teach us how to love the most marginalised in society
“All the different things I’ve done God has guided me. He is the only power that I’ve got.” Sally Trench said these words in an interview with the Tablet in 2018.
It’s a sad reflection on the modern world that homelessness is increasing. After the war it was our returning soldiers unable to adjust who finished up drinking themselves to death on meths, boot polish and gasoline. These men didn’t last long and homeless World War II veterans disappeared from the streets. Homelessness today is more the result of poverty, addiction and sometimes simply circumstance and misfortune.
Recently we have seen a number of destitute and homeless men in Clitheroe. These men aren’t anything like the men Sally Trench knew. We can help these men and by the grace of God that is what we are trying to do in Clitheroe.
But this month’s theme isn’t really about homelessness and it certainly isn’t about homelessness in Clitheroe. It’s about God reaching out to us via inspirational people, and learning that if we can’t emulate those people we can at least support them in some small way, perhaps a little hands-on help or donations and prayer.
In the 1960s Sally Trench was just a young girl mixing and caring for destitute people on the streets of London. Her first book Bury Me in My Boots was published in 1967. The book tells how Sally had spent the previous five years sleeping rough with some of the most marginalised people in the world. It is a tale of lived-out faith. “I was living in this world on the bomb-sites,” she recalls, “with the rats, and the dossers. That is what I was there for, to help them die when they needed to die, or to keep them alive when they needed to keep alive.” As one of them neared his end he said; “bury me in my boots, Sally”. Sometimes without sleep or without food for days she lived amongst those men, experienced what they experienced, and as someone who felt a failure and a reject too, she identified with them.
Sally was a difficult kid from an early age. She came from an upper middle class family and was sent off to a Roman Catholic boarding school at the age of five. She was expelled when she was fifteen. A year or so later, walking across London at about 11:30 pm she counted eighty-seven dirty, drunk, flea-ridden old men lying on the benches, under the benches, newspaper their mattress and newspaper their cover. Her initial reaction of disgust and evasion turned to something quite different – a recollection of her Christian roots and a realisation of what that meant. She turned back. In her pearls and evening dress she sat between two of the dirtiest men. Repelled by the smell of gasoline and urine and nausea but recognising these people were utterly homeless, utterly unwanted, uncared for, and nowhere to go, she went home and prayed. She thanked God for her parents and her home and made a pledge that she would do something about these people because God had made her aware of them.
She got a job and spent her income on food, coffee, cigarettes, clothing, and started a night vigil at two o’clock every morning. Climbing down the drainpipe she got on her bicycle and cycled six miles across London. She gave out the food, the coffee, the cigarettes, and the blankets and at three o’clock she returned home and went to bed again. She did this for a year. No one knew.
At the end of that year she walked out of her home after a row with her father and didn’t return and it was then that she spent five years sleeping rough with the men. She wrote Bury me in my Boots on toilet paper with pens provided by the station master at Waterloo Station and kept what she wrote in Left Luggage.
One day, she encountered a young woman who had used a knitting needle to try to abort her pregnancy and was bleeding to death. She summoned a local priest to give her the last rites. It was the start of a friendship with the Jesuit Hugh Thwaites that would inspire him to retrieve the diary from Left Luggage, type it up and send it to a publisher friend.
At the age of 22 she was interviewed by Studs Terkel. With her public school education and sophisticated voice, she doesn’t sound a failure or a reject; she sounds affected, naïve, and over confident. Was living with the Meths Men just a teenage rebellion and a short phase in her life? According to an article in The Tablet written in 2018, absolutely not. Sally prefers to be called Sparky and it is that spark that is the most obvious outward thread that connects the work she described in Bury Me in My Boots, and her subsequent missions. First, she ran a successful referral school for 700 “delinquent children” in London. Next, in the 1990s, she rescued children from the civil war in Bosnia and gave them a home in Britain. Until April 2017, she spent a decade living in the Western Cape in South Africa working with 7,000 children in squatter camps.
All these ventures came under the auspices of Project Spark, the charity she established with the royalties from her first book. Her remarkable life goes back to a pact with God on her seventh birthday when, troubled about the Catholic convent teaching on mortal sin, she describes a sort of revelation: “I just felt this sort of amazing feeling of a voice, saying, ‘Hey, you’re not in mortal sin, let’s make a pact.’ And so I made this pact with God. I said, ‘You died for me, so I will live for you,’ and God said, ‘That’s a stunning pact. I agree with that one.’ And that was it. I’ve stayed with Him forever. We are a team. I can do nothing without Him.”
There is a message here for all of us. Whenever we are reminded of how little will power we seem to have and reflect on the impossible things that remarkable people do, let’s think of those words of Sally Trench and pray that we will hear God’s personal message to us, whatever that might be.
PRAYER
Let us pray for love, that we can put base emotions out of our hearts and learn to love even those who are the most difficult to love.
Let us try and love as Jesus loves for whoever Jesus loves, we must, in the best way we can, learn to love them too.
Let us pray that, with love, God will also give us the strength to act.
And let us pray that little by little we can gain in strength to do more and eventually perhaps do what for the moment seems impossible.
FROM THE ARCHIVES:
Priest pulls new club’s first pint
This week we go back to when our Parish Centre opened on Wednesday May 11th 1977. It shows Fr Willoughby pulling the first pint accompanied by parishioners most of whom sadly are no longer with us.
The Ceremonial pulling of the first pint by Parish Priest Fr E.X.Willoughby marked the opening of the new £15,000 community centre at SS Michael and John’s Church, Clitheroe.
But Fr Willoughby didn’t drink the first glass of ale. Instead it was bottled and sent to social centre secretary Mr Tony Thornber who had to miss the opening because of a spell in hospital.
“Tony had done a lot of hard work and we felt the honour of the first drink should go to him,” Fr Willoughby explained.
“Putting the finishing touches to the centre, he fell down some steps and tore ligaments in his knee. I took the bottle to him in hospital and even though he is on a strict diet I suspect he will have had a little tipple.”
The community centre was officially opened with a special Mass in the lounge area – the site where the town’s Roman Catholics met before the church was built.
The Mass was concelebrated by Fr Willoughby and Fr Bernard Dobson and attended by more than 300 parishioners – most of whom stayed behind to sample the delights of the centre.
These included a luxurious lounge, bar facilities and a games room complete with a full-size billiard table, pool table and darts board. Work on the hall, which should provide one of the largest dance areas in the town, will be completed by late autumn and a regular programme of social events will be arranged.
The centre will be very familiar to most of the town’s Catholics, the former infant school buildings and the church hall having been converted during the past six months, mainly through voluntary effort, to provide a proper meeting place for the parish.
“Celebrating the Mass and pulling the first pint were marvellous moments for me,” said Fr Willoughby. “It was the culmination of months of hard work and planning by a lot of people in the parish.
Another highlight of the evening was the presentation of life membership certificates to Mr Jim Holmes and his wife, Bernadine, for the work they had done at the centre.
Manned by volunteers, the centre will be open each week night as well as Sunday lunchtime. Membership already exceeds 300 and Fr Willoughby expects the final number will be far higher.