2012-02-22 17:01:40

Journey and Conversations


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...

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"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...."







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