A leadership training course for anyone involved in Ministry was held in the Chancery chapel and the Cathedral hall on Saturday 24th January 2015. Attached is a PowerPoint presentation  on the second module Practical Skills for Leadership in Ministry. The four modules of leadership are: 1. Called to Mission; 2. Practical Skills for Leadership in Ministry; 3. Essentials of Leadership; 4. Child Protection Policy.

Practical Skills for Leaders

Attached is a pastoral letter from the SACBC (Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference) launching Human Trafficking Awareness Day, 8 February, Feast of St Josephine Bakhita. The text is available in English, Afrikaans and Xhosa.

[gview file=”http://adct.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/SACBC-PASTORAL-LETTER-ON-Launching-Human-Trafficking-Awareness-Day-8-February-Feast-of-St-Josephine-Bakhita-English-3.doc”] [gview file=”http://adct.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/SACBC-PASTORAL-LETTER-ON-Launching-Human-Trafficking-Awareness-Day-8-February-Feast-of-St-Josephine-Bakhita-Afrikaans.doc”]  [gview file=”http://adct.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/SACBC-PASTORAL-LETTER-ON-Launching-Human-Trafficking-Awareness-Day-8-February-Feast-of-St-Josephine-Bakhita-in-Xhosa-2.doc”]

Reflection Books and Facilitator Training available from CPD

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Attached are the Rite of Election forms for download

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Attached is the CPD Overview and Report for 2014.

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Fr Chris Clohessy

The recent terror attacks in France have highlighted a number of issues, all needing further discussion. One is the reality that it took an attack on European soil to provoke such a reaction – 1.6 million people marching in Paris, led by forty or more world leaders. But militant groups, under Islamic guise, have been slaughtering people for an extended period of time – in Nigeria, in Pakistan, in Syria and Iraq – in the last few weeks Boko Haram terrorists have killed over two thousand in Nigeria. The world reaction, compared to its reaction to Paris, has been negligible, suggesting an inconsistency in the way we value human life.

A second issue is whether free speech can legitimately include hate speech. The reason that I don’t walk down the street calling out racial or bigoted epithets at people of colour, or of a particular culture or religion, is because I am neither a racist nor prejudiced against people who are different, but also because such behaviour is profoundly wrong. In that sense, I quite rightly do not have complete freedom of speech: both the civil law and the moral law forbid speech that is hateful: leading one to ponder whether the now popular #jesuischarlie slogan believes that bigoted or hateful speech is a permissible part of free speech. Charlie Hebdo is an unpleasant publication: not satire, for satire is subtle and clever, but simply crude, bigoted and unfunny. Those who speak in its defence insist that religion is an idea, and that ideas can be attacked. But Muhammad, or Pope Benedict or Jesus of Nazareth are not ideas: they are people, and Charlie Hebdo attacks them brutally and regularly. In 1946 the judges at Nuremburg unanimously sentenced to death a Nazi named Julius Streicher. He had never killed anyone: but he did publish an appalling newspaper call Der Stürmer, which incited anti-Semitic feeling mostly by its cartoons caricaturing members of the Jewish faith. So, can free speech legitimately include hate speech? If not, then we don’t have freedom of speech: and who knows, maybe that’s not a bad thing after all.

But no cartoon could ever be as offensive as the taking of a single human life: the slaughter of men, women and children, young and old, armed and unarmed, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Yazidis and so many others in the last few months by men and women claiming to act in the name of Islam, remains the most pressing issue. It is not because these are educated Muslims living Qur’anic principles that the massacres are happening, but because they are uneducated people, Islamic only in name or in the slogans they carry, who consistently fail to read their sacred texts correctly. A sacred text cannot be read and then acted out: there is a middle step, that of authentic interpretation which, if bypassed, leads to all sorts of fundamentalisms. The issue with the Qur’an is not whether it exhorts to violence – at times it does – but whether or not those exhortations were for their time only, or whether they have a universal and timeless validity. As long as a portion of people read their text incorrectly, we will continue to experience behaviour in the name of religion which is destructive and  life-threatening.

*Fr Chris Clohessy is Parish Priest of Newlands/Claremont in the Archdiocese of Cape Town. He is South Africa’s leading Catholic Scholar in Islamic Studies and wrote this guest column for the Jesuit Institute.

Commissioning Sunday for Catechists is scheduled to take place in the parishes of the Archdiocese on Sunday 8 February 2015. At this celebration Catechists are commissioned to exercise their ministry in the coming year. Below are some ideas for a half day retreat, for Catechists, in preparation for their commissioning. There are also some ideas for the Rite of Commissioning to be celebrated during the liturgy on this Sunday

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by Annemarie Paulin-Campbell

Advent is a time of waiting…
Waiting to celebrate the birth of Jesus
Waiting for the Second Coming of Christ
Waiting for the end of the year and the chance to be with family and loved ones.

We are less and less skilled at waiting because, with so many things happening, we simply don’t need to wait anymore. We don’t wait for letters unlike Francis Xavier and St Ignatius who used to wait six months for a ship to deliver a letter! Replies to emails and what’s apps can be virtually instant. A new book arrives on our iPad or kindle within seconds of us clicking a button. But in the bigger picture of life waiting is still a key part of what it means to be human. How do we encounter God in the waiting?

The experience of waiting depends, to a large extent, on what one is waiting for.

There is the joyful expectancy of waiting for something that we long for – like seeing a close friend after a long absence. The anticipation and the imagining what it will be like to see the person and be with them, is part of the joy. Here the waiting can allow us to be in touch with our desires and to savour the gift that awaits us.

Then there is the more difficult waiting for exam results or for the results of medical tests. This waiting is hard because one does not know what to expect. It is especially hard when one is waiting for news that may be life-altering and where one has no control over the result.  Sometimes we are even called to wait for something we know is inevitable but which we wish would not happen. Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane waited in agony. He held the awareness that it was only a matter of time before he would be arrested. He did not know exactly how things would play out, but he did expect that he would suffer greatly and probably be put to death. Like any human being, he feared the physical, emotional and spiritual pain. We too face those moments – as we wait for a loved one who is dying, to die, or as we wait for a surgery we fear, or a move that we dread.

I wonder what it was like for Mary as she waited through nine months of pregnancy for the birth of Jesus. She had said ‘yes’ to God, and that yes came from the deepest part of herself. Yet, was there a part of her that was afraid, that wished she had not been the one chosen? What did she feel as her body changed? Did she fear the pain of labour so far from home and without the presence of her own mother? Did she wonder about the implications of having accepted something she did not ask for? I am guessing that she did. Yet the crux of both Mary’s “Yes” and Jesus’s “Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass me by but let it be as you, not I, would have it” are that God is first. Ultimately at the deepest level they both wanted what would best serve God’s plan for the world. Because they knew the depth of God’s love for them, agonising though their fears must have been in the waiting, they had the courage to trust that He would be with them every step of the way.

Follow the Annemarie Paulin-Campbell on twitter @annemariepc_c

If you want a weekly article like this for your parish bulletin click here and we will send it to you earlier in the week in time for publication. For more Jesuit Institute perspective go to www.jesuitinstitute.org.za.