The Catholic Leader - 21 April 2019 - Issue 5548

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The Catholic Leader, April 21, 2019
Easter Messages
ARCHDIOCESAN
DEVELOPMENT
FUND
The Archdiocesan
Development Fund
wishes all our
customers a very
Happy and Holy
Easter
07 3324 3200 | |
Thank you for supporting the good
works of the Church and caring for our most
vulnerable neighbours.
May your Easter be
filled with the blessings
of the Risen Christ.
TOGETHER.
We can make a difference.
DON’T GIVE UP,
THERE’S HELP OUT THERE
- KEITH
Thanks to Vinnies and a supportive
local employer, Keith was able to
rebuild his life after a period of
homelessless.
To donate visit:
select QLD or call 13 18 12. Wishing you blessings
of hope, happiness
and peace this Easter.
ONE Saturday afternoon earlier in Lent I visited
people in two different aged care homes in
Cairns.
Maybe it is because I now am over 70 myself
– in the afternoon tea time of life – as an Eng-
lish writer quaintly described it, but I was never
more struck than on those visits by the frailty of
body and mind in old age.
And we are all now living so much longer.
The French philosopher, or perhaps more accurately described as
a popularist, Voltaire (1694-1778), when asked what age he was,
responded perceptively or poignantly – I have been dying for the
last seventy years.
Our lives can be a strange series of small deaths and minor resur-
rections.
We can be ill and then recover; we can be grief-stricken and then
restored.
The Lord Himself died and rose aged 33, which we consider to be
tragically young.
Yet for His time and place that was not necessarily so.
With then a much shorter average life expectancy, particularly for
males, He was at least in the mature years of life.
Many of us now alive may live three times as long – to 99, if we
do not quite make it to the 100 in time to receive the telegram (or
whatever you get now) from King William.
I am a few months older than Prince Charles, but consider myself
in rather better shape than he is.
I might yet beat him to the 100.
However, from those nursing home visits and from intimations
of my own mortality, the words spoken to Elijah take on a new
resonance:
“Get up and eat, or the journey will be too long for you.” (1 King:
19.7)
For ourselves, as Christians and hopefully becoming ever more
Christ-like, our food is Eucharist.
Each time we celebrate and receive we participate in His death
and His resurrection.
Bishop James Foley
of Cairns
IN many ways the world and
the church are passing through
dark times, and the question
is how to make sense of the
darkness.
We aren’t the first
to face that question.
It lies at the heart
of the Bible which
is a grand and com-
plex answer to the
question, What does
the darkness mean?
The Hebrew Bible came forth from
the darkness of the Babylonian Exile
when the religious world of ancient
Israel seemed to have collapsed.
The People of God sifted through
the embers of hopelessness and found a
spark of hope which eventually became
the great flame of Judaism.
The New Testament emerged from the
darkness of the destruction of Jerusalem
by the Romans and the persecution in
Rome under Nero.
To make sense of the darkness the
early Christians turned to the death of
Jesus. Calvary looked like the collapse
of hope: as the disciples on the road to
Emmaus say, “Our hope had been that
he would be the one to set Israel free”
(Luke 24:21).
Facing into the darkness of the world
and the church, we too turn to the Cross.
Evil is powerful and the darkness is real.
Finding hope in the midst of
what seems to be hopeless
Becoming Christ-like
But the greater power which raised
Jesus from the dead – we call it the love
of God – will bring good from evil, light
from darkness.
So when we kindle the new fire at
Easter we go to the very heart of bibli-
cal religion, finding fresh hope in the
midst of what seems to be hopelessness.
That’s why even now we will sing the
songs of joy.
The victory belongs to love.
Archbishop Mark Coleridge
of Brisbane
Victory over death: The Holy Face of Manoppello on display at the shrine in Man-
oppello, Italy. Photo: CNS