Altar servers have been a part of Church history since the second century, with those male faithful who were deemed worthy of assisting the priest while he said the Mass. For most of the Church’s history this service has been provided with reverence and dedication by youth and men in the interest of vocations to the priesthood. In much later times, up to the reforms of Vatican II, which changed the language of the Mass from Latin to English, the role of the altar boy became a solemn duty of dedicated youth to serve before the altar of God before reaching adulthood and marriage.  The duties were serious and involved lots of study. If you think that altar serving is a chore today, the 1950’s and 1960’s was even more so. First, all boys who made their first communion were expected to become altar boys.  Parents expected that their boys would go to the altar.  On Sundays, you saw only girls with their parents in the pews.  The boys always served if they attended Mass.

Altar boys were expected to serve from the age of 7 or 8 up to the age of 19.  In this way, each church had consistently 20-30 altar boys on duty.  When older boys went to college or got married, new ones were always there to take their place. You just didn’t show up and expect to serve that Sunday.  First, there came summer school.  There, the boys studied Latin and woe to the altar boy who could not learn his Latin responses, he would have to come before the pastor and recite them from memory over and over again!

In 1994, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops implemented the Holy See’s decision to permit women and girls to serve at the altar.

What does it mean to become an altar server today?

One of the things I am often asked by people is why I made the decision to become an altar server. Firstly serving on the altar is not a chore but a privilege and honour. In nearly 20 years of service to the Church, one might argue that it is a chore because of the commitment required and doing the same things, week in, week out. All too often is it easy for one to comment upon how laborious being an altar server actually is however we need to remind ourselves of what it is they actually do and what they actually represent.  Becoming an altar server is a commitment from that person to God, a commitment that is also made to the Parish Priest and to the congregation as a whole.  Father Chris depends on us and needs to know that we will be there on time as he needs to know that we are prepared. With our help, Father can ensure mass goes smoothly. The congregation also count on us to be present at Mass as we form an important part of prayer leadership. We have been called to serve and it is important that we recognise that call and respond appropriately and willingly. I think one of the dangers is seeing altar servers as just being ‘there’ when it is actually much more than that. Wearing the cassocks and ensuring they are clean is important, but the person who actually wears it should not do so out of pride, but out of humility in recognition of the role they have been asked to partake in.

The future of altar servers at St Bernadette’s

As with anything in life, there are times when one looks back at their service within the Church and steps to one side to let the younger generation take up the challenge which I went through all those years ago. It is refreshing to see so many young children embracing this particular role and playing an active role in the life of the Church. We as a Church need to encourage this more often as the older generation might not be around for that long! The role of the altar server is both challenging and rewarding but it does not seem that long ago that I first wore the cassock as a child. How time has flown by!

Friedrich McCarthy

W e recently launched the latest edition of our parish  magazine for the spring. It is my intention to share with you some of the articles submitted by our parishioners for the web page. The first two are of a lighter and humourous nature, which I hope you will also enjoy. Here they are.

ALWAYS THINK TWICE BEFORE USING A SAT-NAV! (A TRUE AND CAUTIONARY TALE)

It was cold, wet, Saturday morning as preparations were being made for our big day out. We would meet once every 4 weeks and on each occasion we always aim to visit a place of interest within reasonable travelling distance. Today was by no means an exception. We had decided beforehand to visit the newly built Gloucester Quays and were really looking forward to having a great day out. The four of us met at a friends house as we set out on our journey at 8.30 in the morning on a journey not expected to take more than an hour. As none of us knew exactly where Gloucester Quays was, we took a Sat- Nav and programmed our destination in knowing full well we would arrive at our destination without any problems.

How wrong could we be! Putting our trust in the Sat- Nav, my friend listened intently to all the instructions being given: turn left, exit right etc while the rest of us were chatting in the back seats, completely oblivious as to whether we were heading in the right direction or not. A considerable amount of time had passed when we began to wonder how close we were to our destination as one of us realised we were heading in the  completely wrong direction! In fact what should have ended up as a trip to Gloucester, ended up as a trip down the wrong side of the motorway, the M4 in fact, as we were closer to Reading when we had realised the mistake we made! At one point we ended up in a farm in the middle of nowhere, full of mud and animals, when the Sat- Nav said ‘turn left’ How on earth were able to turn left in a farm? My friend, who surprisingly did not react in the way that I had expected, calmly turned the car around and headed in the right direction, with the rest of us looking at each other for a reaction to see if someone would erupt with laughter!

As we were on the motorway for some time, we made the decision to stop at a service station for a drink where we all discussed how we managed to go in the completely wrong direction. We all laughed and concluded that it was the Sat- Nav’s fault rather than blaming any other individual! We left the service station and eventually arrived at our destination at 15.30 somewhat exhausted but relieved that we eventually got there.

And what is the moral of this story? Don’t be prepared to put too much trust in a Sat Nav as  we found out!

Martine McCarthy (and friends)

And…………………………………………………………

TWO TRUE AMUSING TALES (from a ‘parishioner’)

Our son’s Mother – in Law went to visit her sister to tell her that she and her husband had decided they ere going to move house. On enquiring where they were planning to go, she was told to Brazil.

‘What ever do you want to go so far away?’ her sister asked.

Realising that her sister had misunderstood, she replied. ‘Not Brazil! Bris- Hill (Brislington Hill!)

A short while ago we visited our Grandchildren’s school where our youngest grandson was acting at an assembly. They were showing the art of baking bread. Afterwards we were invited to go into their classrooms and view their other work. Noticing displayed on the walls were French words I asked my grandson if he knew what the French was for bread, his immediate response was ‘Oh I’ll introduce to you my teacher’. ‘Miss’ he said . ‘This is my Granny who used to be French!’ Amused the teacher commented . ‘Oh,  you used to be  French!’

This is I think an outstanding poem that was featured in the last edition of the Parish Magazine by one of the pupils from our primary school. I hope you too agree.

A CREATION PSALM

You made the grass

You give me love

You made my family

You give me love

You made my friends

You give me love

You made the birds

You give me love

You made the trees

You give me love

You made the animals

You give me love

You made my body

You give me love

By Leah Holland

A pupil at St Bernadette’s Primary School

The room was full, the atmosphere buoyant and it was clear that the group was positive and passionate about our faith and our parish. Father McAndrew’s first reflection took as its starting point the recently published diocesan guidelines, Called to be a People of Hope. Intended to be encouraging and inspirational rather than restrictive, it asks ‘is what we do deepening prayer, enabling communion and strengthening mission?’ With that in mind, we looked more closely at one of the main sources used in the guidelines: At the beginning of the New Millennium by John Paul II, which addresses the ‘work of pastoral revitalization.’

Now before you groan, he has guessed what you’re thinking. He writes, ‘It is not … a matter of inventing a ‘new programme’. The programme already exists: it is the plan found in the Gospel and in the living Tradition, it is the same as ever… but it must be translated into pastoral initiatives adapted to the circumstances of each community.’ In order to do that we must have certain pastoral priorities, which John Paul II named as Holiness Prayer The Sunday Eucharist The sacrament of reconciliation The primacy of Grace Listening to the Word of God Proclaiming the Word We discussed these in small groups; exploring what we need to do to make the late Pope’s vision a reality.

When we were invited to feed back from our discussions, there was a desire to recognise the vast amount of good that is being done quietly by the people of the parish and the wider community. We recognised that after God’s Grace has awoken in us a desire to know, love and serve Him, the other priorities seem to flow into each other. We did wonder, however, how we are to go about becoming holy. We think of canonized saints as holy people but by dint of our Christian baptism, we are all called to holiness.

It is God who makes us holy; all we need do is let Him in and not let anything get in the way. We recognised that holiness in others is attractive and that fact is evident through the clusters of saints we find throughout history. Fr. McAndrew cited St Thérèse of Lisieux as and example: her parents are on their way to canonization and perhaps her whole family and many in her community could also be. In short, holiness is obtainable; holiness is contagious. Prayer is one of the three main principles of the Diocesan guidelines, ‘Each parish and community should be a school of prayer and we should become experts in prayer’.

Here Fr. McAndrew referred to Jesus’ teaching on prayer – But when you pray, go to your inner room, close the door, and pray to your Father in secret. And your Father, who sees all that is done in secret, will reward you This ‘room’ is the ‘inner store room’ of our hearts, that place where we are alone with God no matter what chaos we are enduring in our physical environment. There, God himself teaches us to pray. As a group, though, we felt that we are not experts in prayer. Fr. McAndrew encouraged us not to worry about being ‘good’ at it but just to concentrate on being faithful to giving the time to prayer. ‘Just get on and do it’, I think he said. In many ways, it’s phenomenally easy; we just need to be aware of being in God’s presence and let Him lead us. One could feel a craving for God in that room: alongside a yearning to deepen our prayer lives, there was a desire to rediscover the sacrament of reconciliation. Yet there was also the same reticence. It was said that the celebration of the sacrament seems to have changed, and we have changed and now we don’t know where we are with it anymore. Again, Fr. McAndrew encouraged us not to worry about making a ‘good’ confession but just to go to confession.

Again the message was, ‘just get on and do it’. Whatever we do, one group summed up, we do it for the Glory of God. There we ended the morning session and, after midday prayer, enjoyed a rather tasty lunch. The second reflection took for its focus the Sunday Eucharist; celebrating the sacrament of hope. Fr. McAndrew told us that above the door between sacristy and sanctuary where he was celebrating Mass in Avila was a sign reminding the celebrant to celebrate this Mass as though it were his first, his last, his only Mass. His point was that we must always be careful to enter fully into the Mass and not to let it become mechanical nor let it lose its vitality for us.

After all, without the Mass, we could not exist as a Church. During the discussion that followed, we were asked to reflect on how we may foster a greater awareness of the Eucharist as the heart of Sunday and the heart of the Christian life. During feedback, we indicated that while, personally, we would say that the Sunday Eucharist is certainly at the heart of our Sundays; we know there are many people who no longer come to Mass.

We recognised that the distractions and demands of secular life (working, shopping, sport etc) place great pressure on people in contemporary society where, not many years ago, there was no work, no shopping and no sport on a Sunday morning. How, then, do we communicate the importance of Sunday Mass to others? We acknowledged that we couldn’t force our love of God on others. We ourselves need to be strong witnesses, then, to the holiness of Sunday and ‘always have your answer ready for people who ask you the reason for the hope that you have’ (1 Peter 3:15). There was some regret among the group that we don’t always go to Mass as a whole family on a Sunday morning and let the rest of our lives revolve around that. Rather, with the convenience of a Saturday vigil and other Masses in other places, we sometimes fit our Sunday Mass in around whatever else we’re doing, even if that means different family members going to different Masses. Yes, the Sunday obligation is fulfilled, but is that enabling communion and strengthening family unity? We must have the courage to regain a sense of the holiness of Sunday. We then turned out attention to newcomers. Do they feel welcome? We like to think so but we must remember that ‘if the joy of the Lord is in your heart, please inform your face’! We appreciate that many people work hard to ensure our liturgy is always beautiful, dignified and, we hope, attractive to visitors.

It was suggested that young families whose children have been baptised or made their first communion at St. Bernadette’s might come to the church more regularly if the support they received through formal catechesis continues and perhaps becomes more social. We had come to the Day of Reflection through faith; we travelled in hope, that we might become a community more perfectly formed in charity. The day became a perfect example of how Christian hope (which is open-ended, for ‘the spirit blows where will’) can guide and direct us in ways we would not have imagined.

We explored how we can set about deepening prayer, enabling communion and strengthening mission and found ourselves saturated (in a good way!) with what we had listened to and thought of during the day. Now we need time to let those seeds germinate within us and later we will see what shoots have sprung up as a result. The original schedule had ‘resolutions and commitment’ at the end of the day. That will now be done sometime when the whole parish has the opportunity to commit to taking an active role in parochial life, because, as it said at the bottom of the invitation, ‘your parish needs you.’ Called to be a People of Hope http://www.cliftondiocese.com/called-to-be-a-people-of-hope At the beginning of a new millennium http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/apost_letters/documents/hf_jp-ii_apl_20010106_novo-millennio-ineunte_en.html

CAFOD Normandy to Northern Spain Bike Ride. An Experience Shared.

Why cycle? A handbook I read many years ago stated that cycling embraces the Puritan virtues of humility, hard work and thrift. Whilst found wanting in the first two of these virtues being a Yorkshireman I was born with the thrift gene.

This together with a sense of freedom, recapturing a bit of youth, the physical challenge and your senses attuned to all around you are good enough reasons for cycling.Why choose to cycle through France into Spain? The route chosen roughly followed a 900-year-old pilgrimage route and both countries respect cyclists, so the choice spoke for itself. Within minutes of arriving in France with nephew Alex on 13th June we crossed the Pegasus Bridge North of Caen on our way to our overnight stop.

It was very poignant to read the memorials and wreaths laid the previous week in commemoration of the D-day landing. The next day we covered 74 miles in warm sunshine and finished in Alencon, the birthplace of St. Therese of Lisieux. A beautiful town but full of ageing Jeremy Clarksons! How were we to know the nearby 24-hour Le Mans race had just finished? We set off in heavy rain the next morning, took the wrong road out of Le Mans and finished the day at the lovely town of La Chartre sur le Loir.

The only hotel in the town closes Sundays and Mondays but we were fortunate to find the Le Grand Moulin, a chambre d’hote, for the night, which we highly recommend, although Alex had to sleep in the nursery! After a brief visit to the cathedral in Tours the next morning and our first encounter with pilgrims on the Route de St. Jacques we cycled past miles and miles of fields full of wheat, barley, oats and sunflowers to reach our next overnight stop at Chatellerault.

The next day riding around the Poitiers ring road in hot sunshine we had a refuelling stop before rejoining the pilgrim route along quieter roads through the pretty villages of Lusignan and Chenay with beautiful light sandstone Romanesque churches. We finished the day with a torn tyre at Melle. Accommodation was yet again a problem and we eventually found a chambre d’hote run by an architect and his wife. With a patched up tyre we reached the town of Aulnay the next morning and were able to buy a new tyre, cold drinks and sandwiches. Cognac was our next refuelling stop and the heat was melting the tarmac when we left.

Our destination for the night was Jonzac and we arrived in time to find a chambre d’hote in what was intended to be an antique shop and was fully stocked for the purpose including fully dressed mannequins in the bedrooms. The first stop the following morning was the town of Montendre. Unable to find a food shop I went into the tourist information and asked in my best French if anyone spoke English only to be told by the woman behind the desk “Aye, I’m from Barnsley”. Later we crossed the Dordogne at Libourne and spent the night at a motel in Creon. From Creon we crossed the Garonne and spent the day cycling through 70 miles of forests and what seemed deserted villages on quiet, flat roads to Mont de Marsan. This is Basque country and is reflected in the lively nature of the place.

That evening we enjoyed a choral concert of sacred and secular music in the local church. After Mont de Marsan the foothills of the Pyrenees start and we spent 78 miles in hot sunshine before we arrived at the first available place to stay at St. Jean Pied de Port (St. John at the foot of the pass). St Jean is a popular resort and pilgrim staging point.

In the late evening we climbed the cobbled streets to the Citadelle to watch the sunset over the Pyrenees. Leaving St. Jean the next morning I quickly realised why cycles are called pushbikes and spent four hours on foot up the mountains. Alex stayed in the saddle the whole day and reached Pamplona two and a half hours ahead of me. As arranged we met up outside the Plaza de Toros (the Bullring) which had been our starting point in 2007.We spent the next two days relaxing and sightseeing before our return ferry from Santander to Plymouth. Seeing me safely home Alex was glad to report “mission accomplished” to Linda.

Gordon Hodgson

It was an inspiring talk and I asked Father McAndrew if he would kindly share further his inspiration with the wider parish audience for our parish magazine for those who were unable to attend that evening. He  thankfully responded. What follows is his thoughts and experience.  To those who read on, I hope it   may be of inspiration to you also.

Bernard Price Editor

In the autumn of 1978 I went to Seminary and one the gifts I was given before I went was a little CTS pamphlet with excerpts of the writings of Therese. Sadly I do not remember who gave me that little booklet.  It was one of those almost unnoticed events that became crucial for my life.  I read that little book of the sayings of Therese and was immediately captivated.  After that first encounter with Therese I immediately read her autobiography, then the ‘Last conversations,’ and her Letters – in fact I read anything about her I could lay my hands on. What was it that captivated me and has continued to inspire me these past 30 years?

In the Story of a Soul I read of her ‘complete conversion’ after Midnight Mass in 1886 and how she discovered ‘an absolute confidence in the mercy of Jesus’.  She writes there of how ‘God was able in a very short time to extricate me from the very narrow circle in which I was turning without being able to come out’.  Quite simply, Therese demonstrated to me that the way forward was to entrust oneself entirely to the mercy of God, that to be a disciple of Christ is not to place our faith in our own abilities or in anything we can achieve.  She teaches that the way of the Gospel is to place our faith in God and all that he does for us.

If we are to stop ‘turning in circles’ we must place all our trust in him and allow the Lord to do for us all that he wishes to do. She wrote to her sister Marie What pleases God is that he sees me loving my littleness and my poverty, the blind hope I have in his mercy…That is my only treasure…. why would this treasure not be yours?’[1] Therese taught me the central truth of the Gospel, that we must entrust ourselves to the Lord.  If we abandon ourselves into his arms then he will do everything for our salvation.   We do not have to earn our salvation, as Jesus says in St Matthews Gospel ‘it has pleased the Father to give you the Kingdom’. As a Seminarian and a young priest she taught me also to accept myself.  Without her guidance I could so easily have become discouraged by my failings.

Reading the two volumes of her letters I discovered that even the coarsest of sins were not an obstacle to vocation but the raw material of real growth. In the same letter to her sister Marie she writes ‘The weaker one is, without desires or virtues, the more suited one is for the workings of his consuming and transforming Love.’ There is also the beautiful correspondence between Therese and the young Seminarian Maurice Belliere.  When Maurice writes to Therese about his own ‘wretchedness’ and the ‘grief’ he has caused Jesus she responds: ‘For those who love Him, and after each fault come to ask pardon by throwing themselves into his arms, Jesus trembles with joy’[2] The heart of Jesus trembles with joy when we throw ourselves into his arms Therese taught me that we need to accept ourselves as God accepts us.

In 1997, on the centenary of her death, Pope John Paul II made Therese a Doctor of the Church, that is a teacher of the Church.  She is only the 3^rd woman to be given this title in the history of the Church.  This is telling us that her way of following the Gospel is a sure guide for us. Since that time her relics have been travelling the world.  So far they have been to more than 40 countries and millions of people have been to venerate them and to make a deeper connection with God.

In 2006 the Bishops of England and Wales asked the Carmelites in Lisieux if Therese relics could come to our country.  Since then I have been a part of the committee that has been preparing for this visit.   As I write the relics have just visited our city where more than 6000 people visited the Church of Teresa’s in Filton.  This was the first Church in England to be dedicated in honour of St Therese and so a fitting venue for the visit May the celebrations in honour of St Therese bring many graces to our Diocese and lead more people to know and love Christ our Saviour

Fr Michael McAndrew

[1] Therese to her sister Marie of the Sacred Heart September 17^th 1896 Collected Letters Vol II ICS Publications page 999 [2] Patrick Aherne: Maurice and Therese. Doubleday 1998 page 189