Welcome
A very warm welcome to all parishioners and visitors of Our Lady Help of Christians to our parish website. Fr Mario
Requiem Mass for the late Duke of Edinburgh
Archbishop John will celebrate a Requiem Mass for the late Duke of Edinburgh on Saturday 17th April at 11 am from St George’s Cathedral. A limited number of seats will be available in the Cathedral, in accordance with COVID guidelines. The service will also be livestreamed, please click here – https://youtu.be/h-ltNt5TS0E
Covid Restrictions – The gradual relaxing of restrictions does not apply to places of worship. To remain open, we must comply with 2-metre distancing, masks, hand sanitising and ventilation. Thank you for your co-operation.
Please find Southwark Parishes Live Mass Streaming here.
Please find Mass Sheet for 11 April 2021 here.
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The Legion of Mary Daily Prayers
Please join our daily 3pm prayers for those affected by Covid-19 and the eradication of the virus, saying the following prayers – Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be to the Father, Our Lady Help of Christians, pray for us, St Patrick, pray for us.
Gospel Reflections Download newsletter [John 20: 19-31]
Two aspects of this meeting of the disciples with Jesus are especially striking. This is the last scene of the gospel of John, for chapter 21 is an appendix added later. At the end of this gospel, before the concluding reflection, Thomas gives the only direct acclamation in the New Testament of Jesus as God. Nowhere else is Jesus directly hailed as ‘God’, though there are other ways in which readers come to recognise Jesus as God. So, in a way, this acclamation of the Risen Christ is the climax of the New Testament. Secondly, it is striking that Jesus’ final blessing is of peace and forgiveness. The mission of all Christians is to bring peace and forgiveness to a troubled world. Throughout the Bible God is a God of forgiveness. The Old Testament consists of a series of covenants of forgiveness, each in turn broken by God’s chosen people: the covenant with Noah after the Flood, the covenant with Abraham, the covenant with Moses after the worship of the Golden Calf, finally the new covenant promised by Jeremiah when unfaithful Israel is exiled to Babylon. Christianity is not for the perfect but for sinners. Forgiven sinners must bring forgiveness to all those around them.
How can you bring Jesus’ blessing of peace and forgiveness to the world around you?
Did you know?
Mary is the Eschatological Icon of the Church. Catechism of the Catholic Church explains:
When speaking of the Church, her origin, mission and destiny, we can find no better way to conclude than by looking to Mary.
In her we contemplate what the Church already is in her mystery on her own 'pilgrimage of faith', and what she will be in the homeland at the end of her journey. There, 'in the glory of the Most Holy and Undivided Trinity', 'in the communion of all the saints', the Church is awaited by the one she venerates as Mother of her Lord and as her own mother.
In the meantime the Mother of Jesus, in the glory which she possesses in body and soul in heaven, is the image and beginning of the Church as it is to be perfected in the world to come. Likewise she shines forth on earth, until the day of the Lord shall come, a sign of certain hope and comfort to the pilgrim People of God.
By pronouncing her 'fiat' at the Annunciation and giving her consent to the Incarnation, Mary was already collaborating with the whole work her Son was to accomplish. She is mother wherever he is Saviour and head of the Mystical Body. The Most Blessed Virgin Mary, when the course of her earthly life was completed, was taken up body and soul into the glory of heaven, where she already shares in the glory of her Son's Resurrection, anticipating the resurrection of all members of his Body.
We believe that the Holy Mother of God, the new Eve, Mother of the Church, continues in heaven to exercise her maternal role on behalf of the members of Christ. (Paul VI, CPG 15)
'All generations will call me blessed': "The Church's devotion to the Blessed Virgin is intrinsic to Christian worship'. The Church rightly honours 'the Blessed Virgin with special devotion. From the most ancient times the Blessed Virgin has been honoured with the title of "Mother of God", to whose protection the faithful fly in all their dangers and needs..... This very special devotion differs essentially from the adoration which is given to the incarnate Word and equally to the Father and the Holy Spirit, and greatly fosters this adoration.' The liturgical feasts dedicated to the Mother of God and Marian prayer, such as the rosary, an 'epitome of the whole gospel', express this devotion to the Virgin Mary.
The Angelus
During the year (outside of Paschal Season)
The Angel of the Lord declared unto Mary, R. And she conceived by the Holy Spirit. Hail Mary... Behold the handmaid of the Lord, R. Be it done unto me according to your word. Hail Mary... And the Word was made flesh, R. And dwelt among us. Hail Mary... Pray for us, O Holy Mother of God, R. That we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.
Let us pray: Pour forth, we beseech you, O Lord, your grace into our hearts: that we, to whom the incarnation of Christ your Son was made known by the message of an angel, may by his Passion and Cross be brought to the glory of his resurrection, through the same Christ our Lord. Amen.
That seven heads of the Beast like a leopard, that comes up from the sea to the aid of the Dragon, indicate various masonic lodges, which act everywhere in a subtle and dangerous way. Woman Clothed with the Sun explains:
The grace of redemption, won by Jesus for us through his Sacrifice carried out on Calvary, is communicated by means of the seven sacraments. With grace there becomes implanted in the soul the seeds of supernatural life which are virtues. Among these, the most important are the three theological and the four cardinal virtues: faith, hope, charity; prudence, fortitude, justice and temperance. In the divine sun of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, these virtues germinate, grow, become more and more developed and thus lead the soul along the luminous way of love and of sanctity.
To the seven theological and cardinal virtues, which are the fruits of living in the grace of God, Freemasonry counters with the diffusion of the seven capital vices, which are the fruit of living habitually in the state of sin. To faith it opposes pride; to hope, lust; to charity, avarice; to prudence, anger; to fortitude, sloth; to justice, envy; to temperance, gluttony.
Whoever becomes a victim of the seven capital vices is gradually led to take away the worship that is due to God alone, in order to give it to false divinities, who are the very personification of all these vices. And in this consists the greatest and most horrible blasphemy. This is why on every head of the Beast there is written a blasphemous name. Each masonic lodge has the task of making a different divinity adored.
The first head bears the blasphemous name of pride, which opposes itself to the virtue of faith and leads one to offer worship to the god of human reason and haughtiness, of technology and progress.
The second head bears the blasphemous name of lust, which opposes itself to the virtue of hope and brings one to offer worship to the god of sexuality and of impurity.
The third head bears the blasphemous name of avarice, which opposes itself to the virtue of charity and spreads everywhere the worship of the god of money.
The fourth head bears the blasphemous name of anger, which opposes itself to the virtue of prudence and leads one to offer worship to the god of discord and division.
The fifth head bears the blasphemous name of sloth, which opposes itself to the virtue of fortitude and disseminates the worship of the idol of fear, of public opinion and of exploitation.
The sixth head bears the blasphemous name of envy, which opposes itself to the virtue of justice and leads one to offer worship to the idol of violence and of war.
The seventh head bears the blasphemous name of gluttony, which opposes itself to the virtue of temperance and leads one to offer worship to the so highly extolled idol of hedonism, of materialism and of pleasure.
The task of the masonic lodges is that of working today, with great astuteness, to bring humanity everywhere to disdain the holy Law of God, to work in open opposition to the Ten Commandments, and to take away the worship due to God alone in order to offer it to certain false idols which become extolled and adored by an ever increasing number of people: reason, flesh, money, discord, domination, violence, pleasure. Thus souls are precipitated into the dark slavery of evil, of vice and of sin and, at the moment of death and of the judgement of God, into the pool of eternal fire which is hell.
That Masonry is the church of Satan on the earth.
My son how many times I told you and I reminded you that Lucifer and his staff based their activity and their way of being to mimic God.
I, Jesus, true God and true Man, have founded my hierarchic Church... and hierarchic is the church of Satan on the earth, the Masonry; I, Jesus, had disseminated spiritual fortresses in all my Church.... the Masonry, the church of the devil, has disseminated throughout the world its lodges with heads and followers with the only purpose to oppose and combat my Church. Now being the Demons like that just because rebel to God, all their activity is inspired and pivoted on the rebellion and therefore on the contrary of what is being accomplished in my Church.
The Masonry wanted, sustained and guided by the obscure powers of the evil, is reaching its maximum level of its work of demolition of my Church operating both inside and outside it; inside it has a lot of followers at the height and at the basis, outside as always masked of hypocrisy but hitting and injecting with its poisonous sting all those it comes into contact with, today then, foreseeing at hand the great fight minutely prepared from so long time with deceitful art it doesn't hesitate to disclose what has always kept jealously hidden, concealed.
They charge with madness those who have remained and remain faithful to the faith and to the fidelity to God and to the Church, that, even if nearly entirely prisoner of these gloomy infernal and earthly forces, will resist and will not be destroyed, on the contrary, from the sufferings of the present hour it will get out more beautiful and brighter as it has never been.