CORPUS CHRISTI:

This weekend, with the Feast of Corpus Christi, we have the perfect opportunity to offer thanks to God for the many blessings that have been ours in recent weeks with so many of our children having just received their First Holy Communion and a good number of our young people the Sacrament of Confirmation. An atmosphere of joy radiated through the congregations during the Confirmation ceremonies at Christ the King and St Anthony’s last Wednesday and Thursday and Archbishop John was clearly heartened by the whole experience. The Eucharist is “the source and summit of our Christian lives” and it is what has bound us together as a community from the very beginning.

 As more and more people around the world take note of the importance of Pope Leo’s encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas”, it seems to me to be an opportune moment to remind ourselves that as Christians we can make an enormous difference. Catholics alone make up 1.4 billion of the earth’s population and Christians all together number something between 2.3 and 2.6 billion, which means that we make up well over a quarter of all the people on earth. We are being called to protect the dignity of every human being and pursue the truth, which the Lord said “will set us free”: let’s renew our commitment to do all we can to respond to what is surely a renewed prompting from God’s Holy Spirit.