Liverpool, in the north of England, is one of a dozen European cities leading a continent-wide
effort for new evangelisation during this Lenten season, in preparation for the Bishops’
Synod on that same theme in the Vatican in October. The cities of Barcelona, Budapest,
Brussels, Dublin, Frankfurt, Lisbon, Liverpool, Paris, Turin, Vienna, Warsaw and Zagreb
were selected by the Pontifical Council for New Evangelisation to take part in a pilot
project aimed at revitalising the Church in their cities in new and creative ways. To
find out more, Philippa Hitchen spoke with the Catholic Archbishop of Liverpool, Patrick
Kelly about the project and about his choice of the theme 'Journey and Conversations...
Listen:
"I was quite
surprised when we were invited because we seem such a small city compared with other
enormous cities across Europe but it has really been a catalyst to enable all sorts
of initiatives to be taken…
Each Friday night ...I give lectures about Holy
Week ....The other thing, which is very much to do with evangelisation, I’ve chosen
the shrine of Blessed Dominic Barberi, who received Blessed John Henry Newman into
full communion, as a place where every Saturday night at 9pm we come together for
the office of readings which will be sung, followed by the canticles, the Gospel and
a homily…."
"It always seems to me that the Lenten journey is, above all, to
enable us to walk the 8 days of Holy Week with Our Lord: it is the journey of Palm
Sunday, then the time in the Upper room which then leads to the journey to Gethsemane,
it’s then the journey to Calvary, but then it’s the journey described in the Apostles’
Creed as ‘the descent into hell’, the hours between the time we end our pondering
on Good Friday until we gather for the vigil – then the ultimate journey, of course,
is Our Lord’s ascending….
The second element, conversations - I always been
grateful for the words of St Thomas Aquinas in his great hymn ‘Pange Lingua’ where
he describes the whole of Our Lord’s ministry among us as ‘et in mundo conversatus’,
having had a conversation in the world …for me the word ‘conversation’ is the best
way I find to describe simply what we mean by evangelisation...."