CATHOLIC SCHOOLS WEEK 2017

Catholic Schools; working with Pope Francis to care for our common home.

Launch of week for the  Archdiocese of Armagh  ( Mainly Northern Schools)  will be at St John The Baptist Church Drumcree, Portadown on Tuesday 31st January.  Gather for 11.00 am start.   This will be a para-liturgy exploring Pope Francis and his message about caring for the Earth and all its wonderful resources.  Teachers and students from all our schools are most welcome to attend.

On Thursday February  2nd. Seinn will host the Annual Gathering for CSW in the Redeemer Church, Ard Easmuin, Dundalk mainly for Co Louth Schools. This will be at 12.30 during lunch break. Seinn will engage the students through music and singing, images and prayer and again we hope as many schools in Co Louth and South Armagh will travel to take part.

To mark Catholic Schools Week, Dromore Diocese will celebrate a special Mass in St Peter’s Parish Church in Lurgan on Wednesday 1st February 2017 at 10.30am.  The celebrant will be Bishop John McAreavey and there will be representation from all the primary and post primary schools in the diocese.

Organising teams have been meeting to prepare the liturgies and suitable resources for our own celebrations.

National Resources for 2017:

a2poster_ok

csw2017_ppflier_web

csw_juniorcycle-2017_

csw_senior-cycle-2017_

csw17_pp_bom_

SHUSAKU ENDO’S SILENCE An exciting new film arrives.

Shusaku Endo’s Silence

Martin Scorcese’s 2016 film, based on Shusaku Endo’s celebrated novel Silence, raises a wide range of faith-related questions. The story follows Fr. Sebastian Rodrigues, a seventeenth-century Jesuit priest from Portugal who sneaks into Japan in a time when Christians were brutally persecuted there.

.

Seventeenth-century Japan: Two Portuguese Jesuit priests travel to a country hostile to their religion, where feudal lords force the faithful to publicly renounce their beliefs. Eventually captured and forced to watch their Japanese Christian brothers lay down their lives for their faith, the priests bear witness to unimaginable cruelties that test their own beliefs. Shusaku Endois one of the most celebrated and well-known Japanese fiction writers of the twentieth century, and Silence is widely considered to be his great masterpiece.