Chris McPhee MSC, turning 60

Provincial House, Treand House, celebrated Chris’s 60th birthday two days early. But it provided a photo opportunity for us to post.

Chris turns 60, Saturday. November 21st. He is seen complete with Donald Trump Card, Makes us wonder - is he an idol or an ideal?

a book of being an ordinary mystic

and a framed image of his favorite portrayal of The Sacred Heart. 

And those who work at Treand celebrating. L to R Maria, Bridget, Steve, Chris, Andrew and Meta.

 - With thanks to Peter Hendriks for the photos and captions - the comment on Donald Trump was not Peter's but editorial speculation.

A Travelling Nun tells Her Story: Sr Merrilyn Lee fdnsc

 With thanks to OLSH Parish Bulletin, Randwick

The Church and Parish of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart has had an important place in the life of Sr Merrilyn Lee, even from the time before she was born. Billie Banks and Kevin Lee, her parents, met at the Randwick Catholic Tennis Club and were married in this Church on a wet Saturday in 1942, just after the bombing of Darwin. Merrilyn was baptised there by Fr John Lee msc, her grand uncle. Our Lady of the Sacred Heart must have had her eyes on Merrilyn even then!

Merrilyn went to St Mary’s Primary School at Maroubra Bay and attended Our Lady of the Sacred Heart College, Kensington, for her secondary schooling instead of the Brigidine College at Randwick. It was at Kensington that Merilyn was introduced to the Spirituality of the Heart which ignited the desire within her to spread the Love of the Heart of Jesus everywhere. Every First Friday in those days was very special and Merrilyn remembers well the hymns and processions associated with these devotions.

After leaving Kensington in 1962 Merrilyn knew she was being called to join the Daughters of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart, but she was not too convinced that this was what she wanted to do but was prepared to give it a try. It was also a struggle for her parents; she had an older brother Terry and a very young brother and sister, John and Helen whom she had to leave behind.

Merrilyn went to the Novitiate at Hartzer Park Bowral in 1965 where she met young women from five different cultures and nations – Papua New Guinea, Kiribati, Philippines, Indigenous and Anglo Australian. It was through this diverse group of enthusiastic young women that Merrilyn felt the desire to go to the Missions. After teacher training at North Sydney she taught Kindergarten at St Therese Primary School Mascot for a year and following that spent 2 years at the OLSH Boys’ School Bowral.

 On 1 January 1974 Merrilyn flew to the British Colony of the Gilbert and Ellis Islands – now known as 2 countries, the Republics of Kiribati and of Tuvalu.

For the next 20 years Merrilyn was in the Pacific, working in Catholic primary schools, facilitating teacher training, catechist formation and at the Pacific Regional Seminary in Fiji. This time was very enriching with extraordinary life experiences which deepened Merrilyn’s faith. The people of Kiribati have a deep love of Our Lady. It was through their devotion to Mary before any priests arrived in the islands that Merrilyn learned to appreciate more deeply the place of Mary in her own life.

In 1994 Merrilyn returned to Australia which necessitated having to learn what it meant to be an Australian in the 1990s. So much had changed, she had so much to learn. 

It was at this time Merrilyn was able to complete a Bachelor of Theology degree where she was able to use credits from courses she had done in Rome in the 1980s. Merrilyn was then appointed to Hartzer Park Retreat Centre, another enriching experience.

In 2005 Merrilyn went to South Africa to help at St Brendan’s Catholic Secondary School near the Zimbabwe border. It was there that Merrilyn met the girls at Bakhita Village. These primary school orphan girls were grateful for the opportunity to get a good education in safety and security. Merrilyn enjoyed helping them in the afternoon with their homework and one experience she remembers well was one day when she was helping Phillipine, a 6 year old, and Phillipine fell asleep with her head on Merrilyn’s lap.  The little girl was so tired Merrilyn refused to wake her. The 3 km walk to school and then back again was quite a challenge for such small children. Phillipine is now at university doing law; this student’s success is one of the good stories! However, the future for her is very uncertain, as employment is hard to find, and now Covid-19 has made it more so.

After 9 years in South Africa it was time to return to Australia.  Now Merrilyn is back at Hartzer Park Conference Retreat Centre which, as this is being written, is currently in lockdown.

 We trust the future to the Lord, says Merrilyn, so wherever she is she  will continue to live our motto of being ‘On Earth the Heart of God’ – May the Sacred Heart of Jesus be Everywhere Loved.

Fr Bartha, Partholomai Paniadiai MSC, has been in Darwin, St Paul’s Nightcliff, for a year.

When he came to Australia, we invited Fr Bartha to tell us a little about himself and his ministry in Darwin.

"I am Parthalomai Paniadiai from India. We are seven members in my family, father, mother, three brothers and a sister. I am the fourth child in my family. This is my first first mission out from India. I am an assistant parish Priest in St. Pauls Nightcliff.

Being an assistant priest my ministries are, Administering all the sacrament, house visit and blessings, Administrator, part of council members, finance group, taking communion for the sick and honestly doing all the work with my Parish Priest Father Peter.

I am so happy to be here as a missionaries of the Sacred Heart to serve the people earnestly, as Jesus Said, I have come to this earth not to be served but to serve so I take up the same challenge of my master and lord Jesus to serve him and serve others faithfully following my vows Obedience Chastity and Poverty. May the Sacred Heart of Jesus be loved everywhere."

We visited the Parish Facebook page and found how the parish appreciates him and his ministry.

Fr Bartha preached on opportunities taken or lost this morning, and that it is often fear that can get in the way. Fear can run our lives, if we allow it to. He encouraged us to be aware of the Holy Spirit, always guiding us to take courage and move forward. And then... Fr Bartha went outside and climbed with the kids!

Recently, he celebrated his birthday. The Facebook entry: Happy Birthday to our wonderful priest Fr Bartha. We are blessed to have you with us, walking in faith and love. Thank you for your witness to Christ’s message of love, your words of reflection and wisdom, your humour and care. Fr Bartha is yet to choose an AFL side... it seems Fr Peter has a suggestion! (Insert Sydney Swans tshirt) Fr Bartha says he is yet to decide

December sees the second anniversary of Fr Bartha’s ordination.

Beethoven, his 250^th birthday, a Tribute. Catholic Music Tradition

Beethoven: Beset, besieged, but never beaten...

This year celebrates the 250^th anniversary of the birth of Ludwig van Beethoven -17^th November 1770. I have an admiration for him because he composed creatively through personal trials, self-doubt and the dawning reality of his gradual hearing loss that would lead to total deafness.

His deafness did not doom him as a composer. It energised him!  He would sit at the piano, put a pencil in his mouth and then by touching the other end of it to the soundboard of the instrument, he felt the vibration of the note. Imagine if Beethovan lived in today’s world of instagram, youtube and blogging - where he could promote, publish and perform instantly!!  Yet, he listened intently with an inner hearing mechanism - which for him then and for us today has a relevant message, as this is also the heart of all prayer.    

Beethoven was baptised into the Catholic Church. His Missa Solemnis is saturated with a distinctive Catholic faith. He called it ‘his crowning glory.’ At a recent concert to celebrate his birth, I read on the programme notes that it was time to ‘de-catholicise’ Beethoven. Such crass statements should not go unchallenged. What is it about tawdry revisionism today? Beethoven wrote at the top of his Missa Solemnis in 1824: FROM THE HEART - MAY IT RETURN TO THE HEART. It echoes the motto of Saint John Henry Newman( 1801-1890), HEART SPEAKS TO HEART - Cor ad cor loquitur. For Beethovan - his soulful music was his heartfelt prayer to God.

Beethovan died in 1827. His best known work, apart from Moonlight Sonata, is a melody that comes from his Ninth Symphony. This music was set to the 1785 lyrics - Ode to Joy - composed by the German poet, Friedrich von Schiller.                                                                                                                                                                                           

In 1972, the Council of Europe adopted Beethovan’s Ode to Joy as its anthem. In these Brexit days the melody is not heard in the United Kingdom - except in Scotland!  I will leave the last word to Beethovan:

“To play a wrong note is insignificant;  to play without passion is inexcusable.

Fr John Cullen, Diocese of Sligo, Ireland

A Letter in The Age

From The Age, Melbourne, Saturday, November 14, 2020.

“Though the evening of the Trump presidency is not playing out as fast as many would like, I suggest the president-elect and his supporters keep on singing, aBiden With Me, Fast Falls the Eventide.”

Paul Castley,

Kew.                

(And the sub- editor placed the heading, Keep Faith, Mr Biden)

The hymn which President-elect Joe Biden quoted in his address to the nation, November 7, was the Michael Joncas’ version of Eagles’ Wings, a favourite of his and of his family:

And He will raise you up on eagles' wings
Bear you on the breath of dawn
Make you to shine like the sun
And hold you in the palm of His hand

NAIDOC Week, 2020. A Tiwi Islands, MSC, culture story, John Fallon MSC

The rise of "no religion" as the most popular religious identifier in the 2016 Australian census attracted so much attention that few noticed Australia's most religious postcodes.

They were Yarrabah, the Tiwi Islands and Palm Island - each Aboriginal communities and former Christian missions - where over 90% of respondents claimed Christianity.

In some ways, the stories of how these communities converted are well known. The Tiwi Islands lie just off the coast to the north of Darwin and the Catholic mission to the Tiwi is famous for its "Bishop with 150 wives." Francis Xavier Gsell, the founder of the mission and self-styled polygamist priest, told of his dealings with the Tiwi people in his memoir of that name.

After landing on Bathurst Island in 1911, Gsell's strategy to win the Tiwi, he claimed, was to buy the rights to marry Tiwi girls. He paid their fiancees and fathers in cloth, flour and tobacco, bringing girls into the dormitory and later marrying them to a baptised Tiwi man of their choice. In doing so, the mission educated a generation of Tiwi women in the Catholic faith, a faith still held by Tiwi today.

But the Aboriginal side of the story is less known outside these communities. As an historian of missions, I went to the Tiwi wanting to learn their history of Christianity. I expected to hear that, despite the cultural arrogance of missionaries, they creatively fused their culture with the new faith.

Instead, Tiwi people insisted that the Church converted to embrace them.

Mutual Conversion

"You Catholic or you pagan?" The old Tiwi woman's question came as a shock to me, a white woman made uncomfortable by language loaded with what, to me, are colonial overtones. The categories of "Catholic" and "pagan" are important for an older generation of Tiwi people, raised on the mission. The old women are decidedly not pagan. As many explained, when missionary priests denigrated Tiwi ceremony, calling it pagan, they were mistaken.

Whenever I asked how Christianity and Tiwi culture fit together I was given a history lesson. It was a story of Father John Fallon, who worked on Bathurst Island from 1958 until 1970. "He said that this ceremony is a pagan ceremony, he said. But that's not true, that was in Tiwi, Tiwi law." The priest "thought we were all pagans, but we were baptised, we were Catholics." To explain their relationship to the church, Tiwi people told me of his dramatic conversion after a supernatural encounter at their Pukumani ceremony.

Some have claimed Aboriginal cosmology and Christian doctrine are such that Aboriginal people are unlikely ever to become Christians. But Aboriginal theologians have articulated ways their Dreaming fits in dynamic relationship with Christian ideas. Aboriginal people have created ways of being Christian and upholding their spiritual insights about time and place.

Anthropologists and historians are pointing to continuities with longstanding traditions embedded in Aboriginal Christian practices. Noel Loos describes Aboriginal people who were both "profoundly Christian" and believed "as profoundly in [their] Aboriginal belief system." Many Aboriginal people evangelised their kin, and some even sought to convert whites. In the 1920s, David Unaipon set out to explain his culture to whites, even as he preached Christianity. Later, Djiniyini Gondarra wrote of sharing the Aboriginal experience of revival: "Black preachers and evangelists have preached many years to convert the white church ... we want them to be free."

Meanwhile, missionaries around the world have long made accommodations to Indigenous cultures - sometimes deliberately, sometimes less so and often on a limited scale - translating their message into local forms in the hope that the gospel would be well received. Historians and anthropologists subsequently pointed out that Indigenous people creatively wove Christian ideas into their own traditions, translating the gospel for themselves, resulting in a "mutual conversion" of missionaries and Indigenous people alike.

Though the nature of this Indigenous "creative accommodation" of Christianity varied and sometimes even disturbed missionaries, it was, in fact, just what many missionaries hoped would happen through their efforts to cross cultures.

The author, Laura Rademaker is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Australian Catholic University's Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry, and author of Found in Translation: Many Meanings on a North Australian Mission.

Advent

Christmas

Ordinary Time

Lent

Peter Hearn, OLSH Randwick, Bulletin: 'The Back Page with Fr Peter'  (his last)

After 12 years, this is my final back page for our marvellous Parish Magazine. First up, a sincere word of thanks on behalf of all of us to Tony McNamara our editor, and Debbie Laurence for the professional lay out.

I have asked to have the photo on this page included here: it is taken at one of our Easter Vigils. It says so much to me of my life at OLSH. Every year to see 16-22 adults come through the RCIA is a huge achievement on the part of the parish and team. Our Mission Statement says that we are a parish gathered and nurtured by the Eucharist, and sent on mission ‘To Be on Earth the Heart of Jesus’. That we have so many desiring to be Catholics is a testament to the vitality of our parish. Thanks to all of you for your joy in being Catholics - no mean achievement in our sometimes torrid environment within and outside the Church - and especially your exceptional generosity to so many good causes and collections, petitions and so on. Generosity, joy and hospitality are central to the Heart of Jesus.

I am deeply indebted to the various, and too numerous to mention, committees and groups within the parish - all voluntary. Of central importance are the PPC and Finance Committees. They have achieved so much. As you know, I do have a particular love of music, and so the groups and, especially, the combined choirs, the AV producers that come together for our High Holy Days, have given me great happiness and uplifted our liturgies. Our liturgies are, after all, where not just ourselves, but non-Catholics or intermittent Catholics will mainly  interface with us.

Hence, we priests have also taken care in the preparation of Baptisms, Weddings and Funerals. Our teachers and catechists give of their very best to make our schools places of encounter with the values and life of Christ. They have been very welcoming of me and the priests and so easy to work with. Covid has clipped our wings dramatically, of course.

One would need to spend a day in the Parish Office to know the sheer variety of interactions that occur. I have greatly appreciated the dedication of Trish and Anita, Phyllis and other volunteers in the Office who keep the place from descending into chaos. A sense of humour is absolutely necessary for the office ministry – and it is a ministry where the sorrowful and the joyful mysteries, and sometimes the simply mysterious are encountered daily. THANKS!

Finally, to my MSC brethren: I could not live happily on my own. (I need others, if only to annoy them!) So many MSC have come and gone, some to their eternal reward. In particular the young priests from Vietnam, India and Indonesia have brought vibrancy, good humour and dedication to the life of the parish. I love our MSC life and pray vocations will continue to come from our parish. Blessings to you all and my thanks to the Sacred Heart, Our Lady of the Sacred Heart and St Joseph for their kindly care of me and all.

With thanks, as always, to Tony McNamara and Debbie Laurence for the articles and photos

Jim Littleton’s latest contribution to the history of the Province:

Love Seeking Truth, MSC Ministry at Daramalan College, 1962-2020

In his introduction, Jim writes:

Love Seeking Truth incorporates the basis for all MSC ministry which is love, while at the same time recognising that education is a search for truth and some styles of behaviour must be challenged in the search for truth.

 He adds:

 I was initially rather hesitant to compose a booklet on MSC ministry at Daramalan because much of the ministry there has been carried out by laypeople, particularly in the last 30 years. So I wish to acknowledge that, and state that the family atmosphere of the school and its strong pastoral care system of support for one another owes much to the splendid efforts of lay staff, while acknowledging that it was begun by professional MSC.

In composing this booklet I have approached the topic historically and have used aspects of the history of the College to structure the story. To enhance the narrative I have written small “Recollections” of some deceased MSC who worked at Daramalan for many years. I have also included “Memories” provided by a few volunteers.

3 Stories:  Kensington, Tapini, Henley Beach.

Kensington

After John O'Connor MSC made a speech for John Kelliher

On November 1^st, there was a handing over ceremony.  John Kelliher was farewelled as Community Leader of the Kensington campus. He will be parish priest in Nightcliff, NT. Steve Dives will complete his term as Deputy Provincial and will become Community leader in Kensington.

Tapini

A message from Brian Cahill from Tapini, PNG.

Casmiro with Tapini community

“With sadness I am advising that Fr Casmiro Kito msc passed away at the POM General Hospital.   Casmiro is known to many Australian MSC, and has been resident at Kensington Monastery in recent years while undergoing medical treatment in Australia.

Casmiro is from Tapini and joined the MSC in 1998 as a candidate at Channel College in Rabaul.  He was ordained by Bishop Rochus Tatamai mac at Tapini in 2011, and he was my assistant in the parish and chaplain to SHSS till the end of 2018, when health issues required him to transfer to POM.  

Casmiro had been in declining health over the last year following a second stroke which was brought on by failing kidneys and a heart condition.  At the end he died peacefully, with myself, Sr Gabriella OLSH and Sr Rosemary OLSH present.    

A much loved son, brother, MSC confrere and priest - a friend to many.   The People of Tapini and Goilala, in particular, are in mourning at the loss of this wonderful man, as are a great many others who knew him.   Funeral details are yet to be finalised by the MSC provincialate.”

Henley Beach

Pat Lo Presti

Noel Mansfield MSC has sent news of the ordination of Pasquale (Pat) Lo Presti for the archdiocese of Adelaide. He was brought up here and attended Star of the Sea School and Blackfriars College. When he moved to Sydney, he attended mass at Randwick. Fr Pat celebrated his Mass of thanksgiving here at Henley. Paul Cashen and I concelebrated with him.

Pat Lo Presti concelebration, Noel and Paul