From the Deanery Co-ordinator

By the time that you receive this edition of Deanery Digest, we will have concluded the Easter season of the Church’s year. May we all draw courage, hope and joy from the celebration of the victory of Jesus over sin and death. May we all be enthused to be ‘signs of the resurrection’ through our efforts to promote the good and counteract the evil in our society and our world. This year of preparation for the Great Jubilee, 2000, gives us an ideal opportunity to continue to grow as ‘signs of resurrection’. In November 1998, the Deanery Leadership Team invited Sr Helen Duffy RSM to speak on the Jubilee to the priests, pastoral associates, secondary and primary school principals and religious education co-ordinators. In May, Sr Helen returned to the Deanery to brief some 50 parish representatives and other parishioners about the Jubilee. A number of these people will be speaking about the Jubilee at the Sunday Masses in our parishes in the coming weeks.

Sr Helen is a very gifted speaker and the part of her message that I latched onto was that Jubilee is more a spirituality for life than additional tasks to be done. This spirituality has five prongs, with plenty of scope for development:

Hopefully as a deanery we will work in our parishes this year to promote the Jubilee spirituality.

I am pleased to announce the appointment of Mrs Denise James as the new Deanery Resource Co-ordinator. Her chief role will be to offer assistance to parishes on Jubilee. Denise can be reached on 5229 0926. This is the same number as previously for the Deanery Resource Co-ordinator, but she will be based at the Parish House of St Peter and Pauls, Geelong West.

A warm welcome to the Geelong Deanery also to Fr Leo Saleeba as parish priest at East Geelong, Sisters Mary Brady and Helen Lynch as pastoral associates at Corio/Lara, Scott Bowman, replacing Agnes Morel as co-ordinator of Voyage, and Mrs Helen Edmonds who replaces George Francis as Deakin Chaplain.

The Deanery Leadership Team has new members in Rhonda Boyd, Dirk Stobbe and Terry McShannag. I thank them for accepting to be part of the team and I look forward to being guided by their wisdom.

Let us use 1999 well to prepare for the celebration of 2000 years of Christianity.