SACRED HEART PARISH
Waterlooville

PASTORAL MESSAGE
FROM
THE BISHOPS OF ENGLAND AND WALES

In this Advent season, the Holy Father calls us to "the preparation of that new springtime of Christian life which will be revealed by the Great Jubilee"(TMA 18) of the Millennium.

This is the "acceptable time" to start our work of preparation. In diocese and parish, in religious community and family, wherever two or three are gathered in the Lord’s name, we need to reflect and pray so that we can be renewed by the light and truth of the Gospel. It is time, once again, and with new courage, "to give an account of the hope that is in us" to a world short on hope but full of longing and expectation.

We need to be open to the action of the Holy Spirit so as to be able to proclaim – with Christ – that we have been anointed "to bring the Good News to the afflicted, liberty to captives, sight to the blind and freedom to the oppressed." (Luke 4:18-19) It is our task to "proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour" to the world which is ours to-day.

In the Old Testament, everyone was exhorted to return to their ancestral property – to their homes – for the Jubilee. In the New Testament, we witness Christ being faithful to that tradition and returning to Nazareth – to his home – to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour, the first Christian Jubilee.

We too need to return to our ancestral home – to the sacramental roots of our faith and to the rediscovery of the riches and power of the Lord’s renewing love – for our celebration of Jubilee.

We return to the Incarnation, to the Good News of the Gospel and to the freedom of the children of God that springs from the Gospel. We rediscover our need for reconciliation with God and with each other, for repentance for our sinfulness and our sins. We are led to deeper fellowship in the communion of the Church through the Eucharist and to a greater solidarity in that wider community which is the human family.

This journey of faith with Christ is a deepening process of conversion and renewal. It involves prayer and sacrifice. It needs repentance and reconciliation. It demands a time of preparation and a generous and courageous spirit. It is a life – journey that "costs not less than everything and "Tertio Millennio Adveniente" gives us the map.

In what he has written, the Holy Father encourages us to commit ourselves even more generously to renewal for the Lord’s work. He challenges us to become "salt for the earth and light for the world." (Matt 5:13-14)

Only in the context of this renewal can we begin to build on the significant contribution made by our document "The Common Good" to any sort of debate about ‘the state of the nation.’

In this coming year in particular, we are invited to place the needs of the poor at the centre of all we do by rededicating ourselves to all the practical commitments we have undertaken on their behalf. We are being challenged to make a New Covenant with the Poor, imitating God’s covenant with His people.

Me need the courage which comes from renewal if we are "to raise our voice on behalf of the poor of all the world....and give thought to reducing substantially, if not cancelling outright, the international debt which threatens the future of many nations." (TMA 51)

We must remember too that the Millennium is a Christian celebration which we share with all our fellow Christians. As we do so, we "should invoke the Holy Spirit with ever greater insistence, imploring the grace of Christian Unity." (TMA 34)

We need to come to the celebrations of the Great Jubilee, "if not completely united, at least much closer to overcoming the divisions of the Second millennium." We need to seek more and more urgently the fulfilment of "the great petition of Christ before His Passion:

‘Father....that they also may all be one in us.’" (TMA 34)

The Good News of the Gospel springs from this ‘Year of the Lord’s favour’ as a Word which is fresh and persuasive, encouraging and optimistic, full of the Lord’s love and mercy – a Word, proclaimed and lived by us.

Jesus said "I have come to cast fire on the earth and how I wish it were blazing already." Renewed and cleansed by the fire of the Holy Spirit, we are all called to make the prayer of Jesus a reality in the Great Jubilee of the Millennium of His birth.