Many attend pastoral info meetings

Some two score people attended the two information meetings held by the Steering Group for the proposed Parish Pastoral Council yesterday.



The meetings were led by the parish priest, Fr Michael Murphy, and provided those who came with a background to the need for more lay leadership in various aspects of parish work.

He said the move towards a Parish Council was a 'very significant, important, and even momentous step' in the history of the parish.



The Diary was unable to remain at the meeting pictured here, but will explore the issues in future articles and interviews.

However, the reflection with which Fr Murphy began each meeting is worth reproducing here, as food for pastoral thought.

What is a Parish for?

The parish is not principally a structure,
a territory, or a building,
but rather the family of God,
a fellowship afire with a unifying Spirit,
a familial and welcoming home,
the community of the faithful.
It is a Eucharistic community,
a people well suited for celebrating the Eucharist

The parish is the church
situated in the neighbourhoods of humanity.
Its way is to be deeply inserted in human society
and intimately bound up with people's aspirations
and with the dramatic events of their lives.

Life today can be disintegrated and dehumanised.
The individual may be lost or disoriented.
But there always remains in the human heart
the desire to experience and cultivate
caring and personal relationships.

The parish can respond to this desire
when its people participate
in its essential mission and calling
which is to be a place in the world
for the community of believers to gather together,
to be a house of welcome to all
and a place of service to all --
to be 'the village fountain'
to which all would have recourse in their thirst.

(John Paul II)

Brian Byrne.