Co-ordinator: Anne Litherland
13/09/2020: Season of Creation Family Harvest Celebration
Thank you to everybody who attended our Harvest Celebration!
We had a fantastic day and it was so lovely to see so many families coming out to enjoy the day! Here are a selection of photographs – please send any of your own to webmaster@holyapostlesandmartyrs.org if you’d like them included!
(01/07/2020) Update
We are delighted to share our Live Simply Action plan: a result of suggestions from the Global Healing showings, and input from our steering group, Wirral Climate Change Strategy (link) and Faiths4Change (link). The full version can be seen here and the abridged version here. We urge you to read, and share the plan with your friends, family, and parish groups you belong to so we can all work together to care for Our Common Home.
There are 10 actions for us to complete in our first year under the themes, Living Simply, live Sustainably and Live in Solidarity with the Poor. When we are ready, we will be assessed by CAFOD and then continue our journey caring for creation. This is a particularly important time when we can assess our relationship with creation and what actions we can take to make a fairer, green future.
For more information, or to comment or ask for help with your group, please contact our Mission co-ordinator, Mick Brown. . One part of our plan is the Environmental Actions which go in the newsletter each week. The full list of actions with supporting material can be found here.
(10/05/2020) Laudato Si’ Celebration
Pope Francis has written an encyclical or letter to everyone asking us to ‘Care for Our Common Home’. This month we celebrate the 5th birthday of this letter by asking all in Holy Apostles and Martyrs parish to get involved and share our actions in a special video.
We are invited to “see nature as a magnificent book in which God speaks to us and grants us a glimpse of his infinite beauty and goodness.”
This is our parish celebration of Laudato Si’, produced during the Covid-19 lockdown in May 2020. Please view the video here. Alternatively, if you’d like to request a DVD, please contact us.
Read Laudato Si’ – which can be downloaded here.
Find out about how climate change affects us in Wirral, by viewing the local action plan, Cool 2.
CAFOD have also published a video, aimed at children and young people, explaining Laudato Si’, which can be viewed here.
(05/05/2020) CAFOD Live Simply – Parish Update 05/05/2020:
We are very pleased to announce that we have received official confirmation endorsed by Bishop Declan Lang, of CAFOD confirming that our LiveSimply award journey has started.
Please view the blog post here for more information
Actions so far:
In Wallasey, Holy Apostles and Martyrs parish have followed up ‘The Time is Now’ campaign and lobby of parliament on 26th June 2019 with two events for parishioners showing the ‘Global Healing’ DVD after specially themed masses and collected 181 signatures for CAFOD petition to Government on climate change. Another showing of Global Healing was given to a parish UCM group.
“It is our profound conviction that the future of the human family depends also on how we safeguard the gift of creation that Our Creator has entrusted to us”
pope francis
The parish newsletter includes a seasonal environmental tip each week, with additional tips suggested during the UCM meeting. We marked Pope Francis’s Day of Prayer for Creation at all Sunday masses and also copied the prayer in the newsletter for all to take home.
As our parish is on the seaside, at the Sunday 11am mass on 27th October 2019, the children took up items of rubbish to place on a beach on the altar of the church during the penitential prayers to show how our environment is polluted. The globe behind the sea depicted the Pacific Ocean and reminded us that so much of our planet Earth is water. One of the children, Sadie, wrote the penitential prayers while the congregation sang the Kyrie in response. It was very moving. We used the CAFOD bidding prayers and the offertory procession included gifts of soil, water, local produce and bread in addition to the wine and communion hosts.
After a shared meal we watched the DVD and discussed how we experience the gift of creation, how we feel about the state of our planet and what challenges we face in our faith and what sacrifices we could make to help heal the planet. The call of Pope Francis, in Laudato Si, is to all humanity and it is well expressed and explained by various theologians and laity in the DVD. We looked at ways our parish community could act and took home pledges for our individual actions.
“When it comes to the care of our common home, we are living at a critical moment of history”
Pope francis
On 10th November the church gardening group showed how we care for the church grounds and invited suggestions. On 25th January we worked together with Claremount Methodist Church, Wallasey Village URC and St Hilary’s church to hold an ‘eco-fair, called Message in a Bottle. It was a very thought provoking day with speakers, 17 different stalls holders and over 100 participants finding out about problems of plastic, how to reduce, re-use and recycle and our faith response to creation.
The parish now have a group comprising people of all ages, called Our Common Home, who are committed to making changes and we are meeting to make our action plan to work towards the CAFOD LiveSimply award thus working to save our planet, God’s gift of creation. It is awarded to communities who can show how they have been:
Living simply;
Living in solidarity with people in poverty;
Living sustainably with creation.
You can download a PDF copy of our environmental actions here, or alternatively, please visit our Environmental Actions pages.
These actions are on display at the back of church. Members of the Our Common Home group would be delighted to welcome anyone who wants to help in this group and to spread the message to the groups you belong to. Please contact Anne Litherland on 07910960316. There is more information on the CAFOD website https://cafod.org.uk/Campaign/How-to-Campaign/Livesimply-award
For our current fair-trade stall details, please click here.