Our One Mission, Two Parishes Theme or Focus

for 2023 is:

Being the Good News

by Promoting God's Hospitality!

and so it gives me great pleasure to welcome YOU
to our Parish Website ...

• St. Timothy and his Church
  
• Saints in Rome & Beyond!: St Timothy
  
• The Catholic Travel Guide
  
• Wikipedia
  
• and our ACBC 2016 Parish Social Profile

Fr Gerard
Parish Priest

Saint Timothy’s Final resting place … Termoli Cathedral is a Roman Catholic cathedral in Termoli, in the province of Campobasso, central Italy. The dedication is to the Purification of the Virgin Mary, but is commonly ascribed to Saints Bassus and Timothy, patrons of the city. It is the seat of the Bishop of Termoli-Larino.

Born at Lystra, Lycaenia, Timothy was the son of a Greek father and Eunice, a converted Jewess. He joined St. Paul when Paul preached at Lystra replacing Barnabas, and became Paul’s close friend and confidant. Paul allowed him to be circumcised to placate the Jews, since he was the son of a Jewess, and he then accompanied Paul on his second missionary journey. When Paul was forced to flee Berea because of the enmity of the Jews there, Timothy remained, but after a time was sent to Thessalonica to report on the condition of the Christians there and to encourage them under persecution, a report that led to Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians when he joined Timothy at Corinth. Timothy and Erastus were sent to Macedonia in 58, went to Corinth to remind the Corinthians of Paul’s teaching, and then accompanied Paul into Macedonia and Achaia. Timothy was probably with Paul when the Apostle was imprisoned at Caesarea and then Rome, and was himself imprisoned but then freed. According to tradition, he went to Ephesus, became its first bishop, and was stoned to death there when he opposed the pagan festival of Katagogian in honor of Diana. Paul wrote two letters to Timothy, one written about 65 from Macedonia and the second from Rome while he was in prison awaiting execution. His feast day is January 26.

The Missionary Nature of the Church: “The Person who has trust and participates in the faith of the Church wants to believe with the Church. This seems like our life-long pilgrimage: to arrive with our entire life at the communion of faith. We can offer this to everyone, so that little by little one can identify and especially take this step over and over again to trust in the faith of the Church, to insert themselves in this pilgrimage of faith, so as to receive the light of faith ... The essence of Christianity is not an idea but a Person. Great theologians have tried to describe the essential ideas that make up Christianity. But in the end, the Christianity they constructed was not convincing, because Christianity is in first place an Event, a Person. And thus in the Person we discover the richness of what is contained ... How can one's personal authenticity be discovered if in reality, in the depths of our hearts, there is the expectation of Jesus, and the genuine authenticity of each person is found exactly in communion with Christ and not without Christ? If we have found the Lord and if he is the light and joy of our lives, are we sure that for someone else who has not found Chirst they are not lacking something essential and that it is our duty to offer them this essential reality? ... If we are convinced and we have experienced the fact that without Christ life is incomplete, is missing a reality, the fundamental reality, we must also be convinced that we do harm to no one if we show them Christ and we offer them in this way too the possibility to discover, the joy of having discovered life.
(Benedict XVI ‘Benedictus’).

CELEBRATING SUNDAY: ‘Christians are Sunday People. What does that mean? Before we ask ourselves how we "observe Sunday," we have to consider what we Christians actually celebrate on Sunday. The real and first reason for celebrating Sunday lies in the fact that on this day Christ rose from the dead. In doing so, he inaugurated a new age. For the first time someone returns from the dead and will not die again. For the first time someone has broken the bonds of time that hold us all in captivity. But Jesus did not pass quickly into heaven. He did not simply shed time as one might shed a worn-out garment; on the contrary, he remains with us. He has returned and will never leave us again. The feast of Sunday is, therefore, above all a profession of faith in the Resurrection. It is a profession of faith that life is good. Very early in the history of the Church Christians asked themselves: “Why did the Lord choose this day? What meaning did he intend to convey thereby?” According to Jewish reckoning, Sunday was the first day of the week. It was therefore the day on which God created the world. It was the day on which God ended his rest and spoke: “Let there be light” (Gen. 1:3). Sunday is the first day of the week, the day of creation. That means, then, that Sunday is also the day on which we give thanks for creation … Creation has been given us by God as our living space, as the scene of our labour and our leisure, in which we find both the necessities and the superfluities of life, the beauty of images and sounds, which we need precisely as much as we need food and clothing.’ (Benedict XVI 'Benedictus')

Journeying together in daily life ...

1 October 2023

This week we celebrate the Twenty-sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time. “In every life there is a struggle between obedience and disobedience, and this struggle takes various twists and turns. At times we are willing to conform to regulations set from the outside, and at times we are not. We are invited to choose in favour of the reign of God, or we are free to ignore the invitation. Those who are fundamentally righteous sometimes fall from grace, and people considered evil to the core sometimes reform their lives. What ultimately counts are not the promises made, but the actions taken.

October 2023

What are the Pope's Intentions for the Month of October?

For the Synod: Oct. 4–29 in the Vatican
We pray for the Church, that she may adopt listening and dialogue as a lifestyle at every level, and allow herself to be guided by the Holy Spirit towards the peripheries of the world.

25 - 27 August 2023: EPISCOPAL VISITATION: ST LUKE THE EVANGELIST, BLACKBURN SOUTH & ST TIMOTHY’S, FOREST HILL

Welcome to our Archbishop ... who is visiting and accompanying us this weekend. May his presence in our One Mission Two Parishes be a blessing for all of us.

So we continue ‘Journeying Together In Daily Life - From Structures To Relationships - From Delegation To Involvement’. It is therefore necessary to reawaken in every local reality the awareness that we are the people of God, responsible for incarnating the Gospel in our different contexts and in all daily situations. This involves stepping outside the logic of delegation, which so greatly conditions pastoral action.