From Fr Greg's Desk: Sunday 26th Ocober, 2025

Hi everyone!
Catholic Mission Appeal Next Week 1st & 2nd November, 2025
Our annual Catholic Missions Appeal will be made next weekend. Irene Eaik from Catholic Missions will be speaking at all next weekend's Masses to promote their invaluable mission work on our behalf. This year the focus is on their missions in Zambia (see the info box on the opposite page). Please make her welcome and contribute best as you can with the work of Catholic Missions.

Toiletry Drive for St. Merkorious Charity for This Year's Street Fest.
Every year the Archdiocese of Sydney partners with St. Merkorious with St. Vincent de Paul and to run their annual "Street Fest", to serve a meal to the homeless of the Inner City and provide a bit of light entertainment. This is happening on Friday 14th Nov, in the forecourt of St. Mary's Cathedral. The Archdiocese provides a very large marquee, tables and chairs, and the homeless are served a wonderful meal. St. Merkorious are making toiletry packs to give out on the day, and they could use donations from us of personal toiletry items (such as in the info box on the opposite page). How about giving us a hand with donations of this type? You can leave them in the baskets provided at the doors of our Churches over the weekend, and outside the Parish Office in the corridor there. Thanks in advance for all your help!

Food Collection Volunteers needed alongside Lions' Club for our Poor
As part of our Parish's service to the local poor, which we call "Our Lady's Kitchen', we regularly partner with our local Lions Club team to collect items of non-perishable goods and toiletries outside Woolworths West Ryde. We have a four hour time slot to fill on Saturday 13th December, 2025 from 12 pm to 4 pm. We only need a few volunteers to help out, in two-hour slots, but it would be good to get some new volunteers working in this area of our outreach. Please get in touch with me if you are 'ready, willing and able' to help with this little 'corporal work of mercy'.

All Souls Day Mass Saturday 1 November and November Mass Envelopes
Just a reminder that next Saturday we have our 'All Souls Memorial Mass' at Our Lady Queen of Peace Gladesville Saturday 1 November at 10.30 am. This is for all our deceased loved ones, including those from many years ago. It is always a good thing to pray for our deceased loved ones and for this reason we will have our usual 'Honour Roll' for their names. However, to make things run more smoothly, we ask that you please fill in one of our 'November Mass Offerings' envelopes beforehand (available near the Church doors) with the names of your deceased relatives - please limit these to four people per envelope. If there are many names of deceased members of particular families, please put just names of those families instead of many individual names.,i.e.; "Deceased members of the Morgan family". It would be good to get these envelopes and names to the Parish Office during the week so that the 'Honour Roll' be prepared beforehand, for as many names as is possible. You can also put the envelopes into the weekly collections at all the Masses.

Mass of Remembrance for the Recently Deceased Tuesday 11 November 2025.
Apart from the All Souls' Day Memorial Mass, we have our annual 'Mass of Remembrance for recently deceased loved ones on Tuesday 11th November, 2025 at 7.30 pm. We will need to limit the persons for whom this Mass is offered to only those who are recently deceased - be that here in the Parish or elsewhere - since the Memorial Mass of November, 2023. A special 'Remembrance Candle' will be given for each and every recently deceased loved one registered with us, and a single "Offertory" will be taken up during the Mass for these loved ones on the night. This is a very special and moving event and we hope it will serve to help ease the sense of loss of someone close to you who has recently passed away into the Lord's hands.

Beware Scammers!
Finally, it was brought to my attention twice over the last few weeks that parishioners have been receiving texts to their phones 'as if from me', asking for 'a favour'. This happened last year even to one of my own Brother missionaries. They were also asked to respond 'only via text', for whatever reason - principally because you would all know my voice, and that would give the game away immediately! They might ask for a gift card to be bought - like we do for Vinnies at Christmas - except that they only want 'eCards', not the physical ones. I only found out because the parishioner in question happened to ring me to ask what it was that I needed (!!) ... and it was then that I could stop the scam from succeeding. It has also even happened to one of our missionaries, innocently believing it was me who sent the email in question...

These 'scammers' are getting more sophisticated. Please check with me personally if you or anyone you know has received texts or emails like these. Check the number or email address with me; it will be different to the ones I normally use. Then 'block' the number (if you don't know how to do this, ask someone else who does), eliminate the message and don't respond to them. Sorry that this is happening, but it has actually become pretty common of late, in other parishes across the Archdiocese.

An Update on our Ongoing Lawn Repair Work….
Many truckloads of soil have now been extended over our lawns at SCB Church to rejuvenate the grass and fill in the many divits and undulations. Hopefully - inside of a month or so - the lawns will once again be resplendently green! Many thanks for your patience with us as we do this necessary lawn maintenance work and please keep helping us to keep 'little feet' off the dirt - be they of either the two-legged or four-legged kind (!!)- until the grass grows through once again.

And that's about it for now. God bless you all in the meantime!!

Fr. Greg