Rite of Christian Initiation for Youth

If you are in secondary school and wish to become a fully initiated member of the Church, we will be facilitating an RCIY program beginning in June. If you are interested please contact Carrolyn Watt [email protected] or call the parish office 5443 3488.  We keep in our prayers the adults currently on the RCIA journey.

Desperate

We are desperately looking for volunteers to be trained as sacristans – it sounds an onerous and demanding ministry, but really it is not.  Especially for funerals it is simply making sure that everything is open and set up and being a friendly and welcoming face in the midst of understandable loss and sorrow.  If you would like to discover more about this important ministry please contact Fr Peter or Fr Isaac directly.

Change of Date

Because we celebrated the Sacrament of Baptism last Thursday our monthly Baptismal preparation meeting, which usually takes place on the first Thursday of the month, had to be postponed by a week. The June Baptismal Preparation meeting will now take place at Stella Maris this Thursday, 13 June at 6.00pm. All parents with infant children to be baptised are invited to view the parish baptismal policy on our parish Baptism web page and make contact with the parish office to get a registration application before the meeting.

Speaking of Baptism!

Each weekend here in our Parish, we celebrate the baptisms of our young ones. We give thanks to God for the gift of life and welcome them into God’s family, the church.  At the Stella Maris Mass on Sunday, 7 July at 9.00am, we have sent an invitation to all the newly baptised babies and young children to come along to a special celebratory Mass – they can also bring their parents and families!!!    It is our chance to acknowledge and celebrate the start of their faith journey with them and to enjoy some light refreshments after Mass.

Vinnies plays a vital role in our wider community and is the visible sign of the church in action.

Each year, the Saint Gerard Majella Conference at Maroochydore and the Saint Peter’s Conference at Coolum provide a combined emergency assistance to over 4,200 vulnerable and struggling people in our local community. Cumulatively, last year this equates to $197,000 in assistance.  The support and generosity from the Parish is crucial to our good works and highly appreciated.  The Vinnies winter appeal will be held in our Parish on the weekend of  21/22 June.  Thanks always for your support.

NET Team Report 

Term 2 has certainly been keeping us busy!

At Siena College, we’ve begun running lunchtime sessions every Friday using “Life Essentials” videos created by Alpha Youth Australia. (You may remember the Parish running the Alpha series a few years back. Each video explores a relevant topic and brings Jesus into the discussion in an accessible way to the students. Our Life Essentials launch event a few Fridays back (with ping pong and free sausage rolls), attracted a huge crowd and we’ve been able to regularly draw about 25 students each week since (free food each week certainly is a draw-card)! We hope that these sessions give students an opportunity to think about how Jesus can be part of their lives and is relevant to them.

We’ve also been part of Year 9 Camp and Year 11 Camp, which both occurred in the past few weeks, as ways to build relationships and trust with the students. On Year 9 Camp, the students had the chance to grow in maturity and learn more about being young men and women. As part of this, we ran a session based around prayer and gratitude, which the students got a lot out of. The Year 11 students went to a campsite based around the ANZAC story and the courage and bravery of Australian World War soldiers. In keeping with the theme, we were waist-deep in mud with the students in several of the activities! We also ran a prayer session based around peace and the students’ learnings from camp, which they received and participated in really well!

We’ve also loved supporting the students’ netball and rugby games and cheering them on, as well as attending the Year 12 Benefit Ball (Formal). The students are always keen to see and chat to us at these events!

Parish life has kept us busy too: helping with the Confirmation workshops, running Children’s Church at St Catherine’s each Sunday morning (and we had a whopping 20 kids last Sunday!), getting involved with music at Mass (and other Mass roles), and running a Young Adults Group each Sunday night (all young aduklts welcome!) has been amazing and fruitful.

Expertise?

Travelling between our four vibrant communities is becoming more and more of a challenge and with all the youth activities it is continuing to put more and more strain on our generous parishioners who provide transport.  One of our communities has proposed applying for a grant to help purchase a 11 seater mini-mover and we are looking for help with the application – if you have any expertise or experience with grant applications please contact Lorraine Nolan.