Bulletin

Fr Stan Fortuna

Brigidine schools reunion

Other happenings at the Kllbride Centre

2007 Sacramental Dates

1st Eucharist - 17 June Classes for instruction in the Sacrament of Eucharist will begin on Wednesday 16 May, and will be held in the Emmaus room between 4.30 pm and 5.30 pm.

Confirmation - 26 August. Classes for instruction in the Sacrament of Confirmation will begin on Wednesday 18 July, and will be held in the Emmaus room between 4.30-5.30 pm.

For further information please do not hesitate to ring Sue Kidd on 9646 2686. Please leave a message.

Andrew Sibley's Lithographs

'The Artist as Prophet: Twelve Suggested New Saints for Downunder, by Andrew Sibley - a selection from that set' By Patrick Hutchings
'The Artist can be a prophet in two ways, the first is as one who foretells. Gustav WWI - of the whole culture of his lifetime. Mahler's great 9th Symphony, 1910, is about his own coming death and the death - in The artist can be 'the canary in the mine'. British and Welsh coal miners took canaries down in the cage with them, and when the air was about to become too foul for humans to breathe, the canaries fainted or died. The men got out, if they could. Mahler was such a foreteller: and his symphony has in it too traces of the 'harsh' music of Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Alban Berg, Prokofiev, Hindermith and other of the Twentieth Century 'Modems'. Fortune-tellers one mistrusts: Foretellers, one should listen to: they have the new tunes and the new spirit, first. Style comes out of historic 'necessity'.

'The Artist can also be a Prophet in the sense in which our Parish Priest Fr Bob Maguire A.M. constantly uses the word. The Artist can tell you what it's like now: and suggest what you can try to do about it. Sibley is very much a Prophet in this sense. His style owes something to Expressionism - his flattened-out human figures are influenced by this style - one which flourished - if that is the word - in the desperate time between WWI & WWII. But Sibley, whose recent work is often joyous, was always a 'genial Expressionist'. These lithographs are at once hopeful and sad. Expressionism is as proper - as we wait for WWIII (which God forbid) or total Corporatisation of life (which God forfend) - as it was in the 1930s.

St Luke is the Patron of Painters: and there is a tradition that he drew a portrait of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Some have claimed that the icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour in the Redemptorist Church in Rome is - or derives from - this portrait. Everyone has had a holy picture of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour in their prayer book. Sibley's Luke looks rather Gothic than Byzantine, and unlikely to have done an icon. But art, if it's not above style, is in other ways above time. We can learn to read any visual lingo: the past's, the past's represented, the future's.

'St Dorothea is the Patroness of gardens and gardeners: whether you live in St Vincent's Place, or cultivate a bit of scruffy backyard, she is with you.

'St Veronica of the Centre; half kneeling in front of the great and sacred Uluru, which insensitive tourists still climb, Veronica holds the famous towel with imprinted on it, as if in the image of the Suffering Christ, the sorrows of her people, deprived of their, land and their culture - of their identity itself. Fr Bob has rightly had the Stations of the Cross in Sts Peter & Paul annotated with small Aboriginal ritual designs in acknowledgement of the Wurrundjeri people on whose land we kneel and stand in Sts Peter & Paul's Church.

A Pensive Christ in Altona, can be a pensive Christ in South Melbourne, Port Melbourne [etc]. Christ asks Himself, 'If I came, suffered and died to bring the Kingdom, then, why are the poor shut up in Housing Commission flats (which are no longer nice places to be): and why do the rich lock themselves away from one another and the community in more luxurious spaces - but in the end ones all too like the - Flats?' This is the question to which Fr Bob Maguire addresses our attention, Sunday after Sunday. How do we get the rich and the poor to come together here - if only for a Sunday hour? Sibley's gift to us may help in this: the cultured and well-informed admire him very much. So should we all. He's 'the real thing'.
'The noble building of Sts Peter and Paul, in fine Gothic Revival style, and with very beautiful nineteenth-twentieth century stained glass windows, has been further enriched by Andrew Sibley's fine and prophetic lithographs. As the neo-Gothic spoke to the nineteenth century Irish poor who built the Church, and the windows answered to their time (and ours), so Sibley's works talk directly to us in an idiom perfectly understandable to people of the Third Millennium. They add a new layer to our history at Sts Peter & Paul. A history itself at once sad and hopeful. As life ever is.'
The Franciscan Suite - St Francis Downunder shows the Saint as painted on to a tile-work shrine, and surrounded by panels of Australian animals. We all know about St Francis preaching to the birds; the episode is included in a panel of St Francis' life in the Bardi Chapel in the Basilica Santa Croce, Florence. We do not know what the birds made of such holy eloquence. What we must recall is what St Francis really did. He was born Francesco Bernadone in 1182 (died 1226), son of a wealthy cloth merchant of Assisi, his mother was an aristocratic lady from Provence, Pica daughter of the Count of Boulement. Leaving his rich family he embraced Holy Poverty, preached the goodness of Creation, and did good works, and before he died he had attempted a reformation before the Reformation, (Martin Luther, 1483-1546), and a renascence before the Renascence. That is why there are Franciscans.
The Renascence is said to have its roots in the writings of Petrach (1304-1374) and begins in the early 1400s in the sculpture of Ghiberti and Donatello. In 1425 Masaccio (1401-1427/29) painted The Holy Trinity about a metre and a half above eye level on one of the walls of Sta Maria Novella, Florence. This work crystallizes the Renascence. The Worshipper and the Trinity occupy the same real + fictive space: Heaven came down to earth. St Francis had tried - and partly succeeded - in bringing the Church down to earth before he died: (1226).
Sid the Salvo - Sid the Salvo is a nineteenth to twenty-first century Franciscan - even if he isn't a Catholic in the tight sense. He serves universally, and Catholic simply means universal.
The splendid nineteenth century Catholic poet, and notable dropout, Francis Thompson, author of 'The Hound of Heaven' wrote warmly of the 'Salvos'. Thompson's essay 'In Darkest England' - after General Booth's book In Darkest England - a terrifying account of the lives of the London poor - compares William Booth, (1829-1912), and his Salvation Army to the spirit and work of St Francis and St Vincent de Paul. George Bernard Shaw, the genial Socialist, adds to the tribute in his own ironic way in Major Barbara, (1905).
In economic rationalist times such as ours - rationalist? - we must not forget St Francis, St Vincent de Paul, and General Booth - a man apt for canonization. His anthem has already been written by the American composer Charles Ives (1874-1954), 'General William Booth Enters Heaven', (1914, revised 1931). We must not ever forget the poor, now more and more with us. In Sibley's Lithograph they stand, ghostly, against the towers of Housing Commission flats; the underclass suffers: Sid serves.
The Lollypop Lady - The persons - mostly women - who watch over street crossings to keep children safe from the heedless traffic are paid little and perhaps enjoy their work: they deserve our respect. They are a kind of Fourth Order of St Francis. And Andrew Sibley has paid them the tribute of alluding - in the large lady - to Piero della Francesca's Mater Misericordia who shelters small grown-up sinners under her great mantle. (Piero della Francesca fl. 1439, obit. 1493). The Lollypop Lady looks a bit like Gulliver in his Travels: but adults look like this to children. This is not a funny image, it's just a very friendly one.
It is apt that this suite of lithographs is on the wall near the kitchen from which SS Peter & Paul's Parish serves its Sunday bun and cuppa. God's mercies are at both ends of the Church building. And very much in the sausage sizzle in the garden, and in the work of the Emerald Hill Mission. General Booth's Darkest England has not gone away Ð see The Bill, ABC TV, Tuesdays Ð it has only changed its glad/sad rags. Oz, the Lucky Country, may have just run out of its good fortune. If so, PLEASE HELP. St Francis and his band did. Join in, says Sibley through these works of art.
Patrick Hutchens, Sunday 28 September 2003

Emerald Hill Mission and our Open House

Emmaus Group

Prayer Group

Sunday Mass times

Regular prayers

Press masses to find mass times.

Monday to Friday Rosary: 9 am

Weekday masses: noon

Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament every Friday 11 am-12 noon

Emmaus Prayer Group: Tuesday afternoons after 12 pm Mass

Prayer Group: Friday evening: 7.00 pm

Open House at the presbytery is from 10 am to 3 pm weekdays (Call in for a cup of tea.)

Money or non-perishable food for Emerald Hill Mission is most welcome. Please bring them to church on Sundays or to the presbytery on weekdays between 10 am and 3 pm.