Pentecost Novena

Each evening (except Thursday) at 7.30pm, between the feast of the Ascension and the feast of Pentecost (Sun 4 June), there will be a Novena to the Holy Spirit for the Renewal of the Church in Europe.

One of the parish groups will lead the Novena which will include a short reading from the sacred scriptures, five decades of the Rosary, and the Novena prayers to the Holy Spirit.

(On Thursday, the Novena prayers will form part of our service of Rosary and Benediction.)

Ascension Thursday

This Thursday (25 May) is the feast of the Ascension and is a Holyday of Obligation. This means that we must go to Mass on that day. Masses in the parish are at 9.30am, 4.15pm and 8pm.

The 4.15pm is especially scheduled for the convenience of children and young people to come to Mass on their way home from School or College. Parents are reminded of their duty to ensure that their children are able to attend Mass.

New Altar Servers' Practice

This Saturday, any children who have made their first Holy Communion are invited to begin learning how to serve Mass. They should come to the Church at 12noon for Benediction and stay afterwards until 1pm. There will be an information sheet and consent form for parents.

Congratulations to Sarah and Christopher

Congratulations to Christopher Le-Mon and Sarah Illsley who today celebrated the sacrament of matrimony at Our Lady of the Rosary.

New page on Controversies(including the Da Vinci Code)

Everyone is talking about the Da Vinci Code. As a Catholic you are asked all sorts of questions about it. How do you answer? Try our own parish website Controversies page.

At the Parents' Faith Group today, I gave out copies of Fr Wauck's excellent post The Da Vinci Code Catechism which is also very helpful.

The Controversies page also has links to material on "Richard Dawkins, Evolution and Atheism," and "AIDS, Condoms and the Catholic Church."

Excellent evening for engaged and married couples

Our evening for engaged and married couples was a delightful celebration of the goodness of marriage and the family. We reflected on the Holy Family and how Jesus, Mary and Joseph can help our families and our engaged couples. We prayed the Rosary and prayed for the engaged couples. The married couples said a prayer to renew the grace of the sacrament of marriage. After Benediction and the Novena, Fr Linus Clovis (pictured) gave a very informative talk on the encyclical Humanae Vitae in which Pope Paul VI spoke of the true meaning fo marriage and human life.

If you missed this one, don't miss the next one!

Parents' Faith Group

A group for parents to pray together, find out more about the Catholic faith and discuss moral and spiritual issues in a friendly and informal setting.

Meet this Friday 18 May at 2.45pm in the chapel of Our Lady of the Rosary School. Finish at 3.25pm in time to collect children at the end of the school day.

All pages validated

OK, that's done. All the pages are valid xhtml and the two css files are valid. Among other things, this means that the site is accessible to those using non-visual browsers. It also means that the pages should load reasonably quickly and come out sensibly in various browsers.

I use Firefox myself. The file size is very much smaller than Internet Explorer and it has some added features - most notably you can open pages in separate "tabs" rather than having to open several windows. I am also very much in favour of "open source" software which is available to everyone throughout the world free of charge.

(However, I have checked the website using Internet Explorer and it seems to work OK.)

Website - new look

I have just updated the website with the new minimialist "look and feel". This has mostly been achieved by changing the css and a few global "find & replace" operations but it was necessary also to edit the files to put the picture box within the main division. There may be one or two glitches. I will now check the pages to see that they are valid xhtml and valid css. That will iron out some problems; but if you spot any typos or strange behaviour of the pages, please let me know by email.

Engaged and Married Couples' Evening

This Thursday, (18 May) we have one of our regular evenings for engaged and married couples. The programme is as follows:

• 7pm onwards - refreshments available in the Small Hall
• 7.30pm - talk by Fr Finigan
• 8pm - Rosary and Benediction with renewal of marriage vows
• 8.45pm - Talk by Fr Linus Clovis
  The reasons for Church's teaching regarding birth control

Adoration and Confessions

My apologies to our regulars for not having our Adoration and Confessions for a couple of weeks. This is because of our first Holy Communion Masses. We will be back to our normal programme on Saturday 27 May:

• 10.30am - Mass at the Lady Altar
• 11am- 12noon Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament.
  Confessions available during this time
• 12noon - Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament

(There are, of course, confessions from 5-5.30pm every Saturday.)

First Communions and Wedding

This Saturday (20 May) sees the third of our first Holy Communion Masses at 10.30am. We also celebrate the marriage of Christopher Le-Mon and Sarah Illsley.

Please pray for fine weather.

New feature for Our Lady of the Rosary

This blog is set up in order to give parishioners and others updated news relating to the parish of Our Lady of the Rosary, Blackfen. The separation of the "news" element from the main website will enable the news to be updated more easily and the website to retain a consistent Homepage and navigation for users.

In the nature of the case, this blog is for announcements only. Therefore comments are generally disabled. This also saves me from having to police comments, delete spam etc.

Basic information for the parish of Our Lady of the Rosary is at the main parish website.

Fr Finigan's personal blog is The Hermeneutic of Continuity.