Parish Day It was reported recently that the great Swiss theologian Hans Kung had expressed grave reservations about the value of huge Church gatherings like World Youth Days. ‘They are the facade of the Church but the fact is that nothing changes in our parishes....’ The Parish Day at St. Peter’s Hazel Grove, held on the feast of St. Peter and St. Paul, while a grand gathering, was devised by Paddy Rylands and the parish priest, Fr. Peter Sharrocks, precisely to ensure that appropriate changes would take place in the parish in the next few months. The ground was stirred in the autumn of 2007 with five very varied presentations from Fr.Roberts, Fr. Cupitt, Joan Sharples, Paddy Rylands, and a group of parishioners from Middlewich. It was manifestly the case that the two great areas of problem for our parish were community and communication. The group that formed the Planning Committee met on numerous occasions in the period January 2008 until the event itself June 29. A history of the parish was put on display, as well as information sheets on the numerous activities that take place in St. Peter’s. A method of reading the Scriptures more intently and personally was printed in the Parish Bulletin each week, together with the Gospel reading for that Sunday. A prayer to St. Peter was constantly invoked that God’s Spirit might be with us on the great day itself. Parishioners were invited in advance of the Parish Day to indicate what they considered to be the parish joys and the parish concerns, as well as the joys and concerns of the area in which we lived. All the joys and concerns indicated were distributed to all parishioners. The Day itself saw a move from my personal joys and concerns, to our joys and concerns; a move from my parish as the local Church to our parish as part of a specific pastoral area, and as part of the universal Church. Probably no facet of any parish life did not come under scrutiny in the course of the day: (even the cakes played an important role) immense concern about the lack of engagement of young people in the Church; the ever diminishing number of clergy; the perennial conflict over differing expressions of liturgy; the lack of appropriate formation of Catholic adults; the role of the Catholic schools in the life of the parish. But priorities for action had to be established. At the end of the day, the following areas were identified for immediate action in the near future: formation, including adult catechesis, training for Eucharistic ministry, sacramental education for the young; communication, specifically, the creation of some form of Pastoral Council, and the extension and development of the ministry of welcome to new parishioners; consideration for the needy and marginalised, specifically a determination to set up a transport network for the housebound and the elderly. All in attendance at the Parish Day were invited to volunteer to contribute to one or other of these pastoral priorities. The Planning Committee undertook to ensure that appropriate actions would be taken to ensure these objectives were realised and evaluated in the weeks and months ahead. Throughout the day, attended by all age groups of the parish, there was the profound awareness that the parish does not exist in service of itself. Rather, like the Church itself, of which it is an expression, it exists in the service of others. Fr. Sharrocks appropriately paraphrased the words of Pope Paul VI: the world listens to witnesses, evangelists, before teachers; it listens to teachers only to the degree that they are evangelists. As Fr. Roberts had reminded us many months ago at the beginning of this process: change was, and always had been, a part of the life of the Church. St. Peter’s now has to embrace change. Let us pray that all changes will be in the service of all God’s people.
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