From Fr Greg's Desk: Sunday 6th August, 2023

Hi everyone!
RGCP 'Parish Feast Day(s)
Over the last few years, we have been searching - largely unsuccessfully - for an appropriate date for the celebration of a Feast day at OLQP Gladesville. We already have marked November 4th, the Feast of St. Charles Borromeo as a day for celebrating our being a Parish at Ryde, but as yet, we haven't settled on a particular day at OLQP Gladesville.

This has been complicated in past years by the fact that the official "Feast of Our Lady of Peace" from which "Our Lady Queen of Peace" gets its' name is normally held on July 9th each year in the universal Liturgical Calendar of the Catholic Church, but as we already celebrate "Our Lady of Terzito" at Gladesville in July, and with fairly elaborate liturgies and even a procession through the adjoining streets, it seems a bit much doing another in the same month and at the same Church.Hence the dilemma ... now that the two former Parishes have been combined (after a long consultative process in 2015), it is fitting to plan a yearly celebration at our neighbouring Church at Gladesville... but when should that be? That is the as yet unresolved question. In previous Bulletins, the plan had been devised to celebrate the Feast of RGCP on alternate Years on the first weekend of November. But that is still a symbolic date for SCB Ryde, but not for OLQP Gladesville.

Recently a suggestion was made to perhaps celebrate our being one combined Parish at each of our two

Churches, but on an alternate date each year, and much better spaced out in the Parish Calendar. The Foundation Stone of OLQP Church, which is clearly visible at the Victoria Road end of the Church, states that it was blessed by Rev M. Kelly, Archbishop of Sydney on the 1st March, 1925.

And so, I propose the following suggestion, which has been ratified at the last meeting of the Parish Pastoral Council held last Wednesday night: we should have a celebration at OLQP Church on or near the 1st of March each year, with another celebration at SCB Church on or near the 4th of November.

Would that not be a fitting alternate date for a yearly celebration at OLQP Church? The date the Foundation Stone was laid? I would love to hear your thoughts on this. In any case, it is highly significant that the 1st of Marsh 2024 will be the 99th anniversary of this foundational event at OLQP. Might we not use that date as an opening salvo in a celebration of its 100th year of existence as distinct from SCB Church (from which it was initially separated) as a unique entity in that year? Could we not form a committee to get this year of celebrations up and running, and make it a big event for OLQP’s 100th Anniversary of Foundation.

Again, I would love to hear from you about this. It will certainly be the subject of our next Parish Pastoral Council meeting in September, so please make your suggestions via email or letter to help us.

Emails and Letters to the Parish Office or myself.
We at the Parish Office, will do our best to respond to your communications to the Parish, or to myself, but please be advised that, due to the sheer volume of correspondence received, your correspondence may not be attended to in the time frame you seek or, as has sometimes been the case, it may have been treated, regrettably, as ‘spam’ mail, and jettisoned. We have in past months been besieged by external 'bots' seeking to gain control of our emails and computers, and so our IT technicians have tightened the cyber security measures. Regrettably, however, even emails from Archdiocesan and other vital sources have gone astray in the recent past.

And so please don’t assume that, just because an email has been addressed either to me or anyone else at our Parish email addresses (ending with '@rgcp.org.au') that it has necessarily reached its intended recipient, or that, due to the sheer volume of emails we receive on a daily basis, it has registered with us for action. We, too, sometimes don’t get around to answering all emails. That’s just life!

Hence, please understand that it is also the responsibility of the person sending the email (or letter or after hours phone message) to follow them up with a courteous phone call, or even a personal visit to the office, to ensure that your communications and concerns may be taken into consideration.

If you happen to feel that you are ‘too busy’ to do that, as several have pointed out to us in recent weeks, then please don’t be offended if we were also regrettably ‘too busy’ to respond to you initially.

And that's about it for now!!

May the Good bless you all abundantly in the upcoming week ahead.

Fr. Greg