Hi everyone!
Feast Day Celebrations (SCB this Sunday 5th Nov after 10 am Mass)
It's on for young and old this Sunday! I look forward to seeing you all after the 10 am Mass for our RGCP Feast Day celebration (and International Lunch offerings). Good food, great company and a lovely parish setting guaranteed (although not the weather, which could be a little unpredictable). It is being held, as usual, inside the grounds of our very own St. Charles Primary School. We hope it will be a lovely way of 'being Parish' and of catching up with others you might not regularly see,

We will have a jumping castle and a gladiator ring, live entertainment (care of SCB and OLQP Primary Schools), games from our Youth leaders, and copious amounts of Italian, South American, Mexican, Filipino, Thai, Lebanese food, traditional Aussie Hamburgers and a Sausage Sizzle. (Your friendly Verbum Dei Priests will be around for a chat, free of charge!!) Tickets are $10 for adults, $5 for kids ... all you can eat (and take home afterwards, if there are leftovers). If you find that a bit difficult financially, just let us know ... we wouldn't want anyone to stay away due to financial circumstances.

ACLS Audit during the Month of November
As previously discussed, our Parish will soon be audited on how well we are complying with the ten National Safeguarding Standards imposed on all child-related activities carried out at the Parish. Since children are usually present at most of our liturgies and events, that means just about all of our volunteers are required to respect and follow these guidelines. Failure to comply attracts hefty fines. We have been recently sent a checklist of hundreds of different documents we need to produce this month for the sake of the audit, which is going to require a lot of preparatory work from me and our Office staff. Please be aware how busy this month is going to be for me and my Office staff, we have seven First Holy Communion Masses, many weddings, funerals and baptisms and lets not forget Christmas preparations as well.

The Audit also requires us to finalise all details of volunteers, and so our weekly Rosters will no longer contain the names of anyone who is not up-to-date in their safeguarding compliance requirements. That includes a current 'Working with Children Check' up-to-date SALT training certificate, signed Volunteer's and Code of Conduct forms. If you are experiencing difficulty in meeting any of these requirements, please contact the office to assist you; as we need all the volunteers we can get. Thank you in advance for your understanding and cooperation in this matter. I assure you, we would not be asking this of our volunteers if it were not mandated.

Annual Memorial Mass - SCB Church Tues 14th November 2023
Don't forget that we have the Annual Memorial mass coming up on Tuesday 14th November at 7.30 PM (SCB Church). We have advised next-of-kin of people who were buried this year from this Parish, but there may be other 'recently deceased’ whom you might wish to nominate. Special Memorial Candles (courtesy of our friends at Candle Supply) are in limited supply, and will be available only for those who are recently deceased (in the past two years). Please submit the names of those people into the Parish Office (office@rgcp.org.au) before 3 pm Friday 10th November, 2023.

Memorial Honour List for November Masses
The month of November is our month for remembering deceased loved ones. We will once again be inscribing the names of all those for whom masses will be offered this month into a Memorial Honour List, which will be updated each week during the month. Please kindly only include the family name if you have a long list of deceased relatives from the one family. (I assure you, the Good Lord Jesus is keeping a tab of all of them!).

And that's about it for now. Happy Feast Day for the Feast of St. Charles Borromeo!

Your brother, in Christ's missionary service,

Fr. Greg