Today, Saturday 27 June, is the feast of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour (Help). This feast is celebrated throughout the Catholic world, and the date is linked to the giving of the original icon into the care of the Redemptorists at the church of St Alfonso in Rome by Pope 150 years ago . The Redemptorists have declared this year 2015-2016 as a year of celebration for the sesquicentenary (there’s an unusual word!) of our guardianship and promotion of the icon and devotion to Our Lady under the title Perpetual Succour. We are working towards 27 June next year (2016) for a grand celebration, along with the rest of the Redemptorist world.

There are literally millions of copies of this icon: the copy entrusted to the Redemptorist community here at St Alphonse is No. 68 — one of the earliest in existence. Copy No. 1 is in the Pope’s private chapel; copy No. 2 is with the Redemptorist community in Liverpool, UK.

There is a (brief) but good commentary on the icon here, and of course the ever-useful Wikipedia provides a good overview here.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of this icon and its associated devotions everywhere. During the coming year, we hope to help restore the shrine of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour here at St Alphonse; we intend to promote devotion to Our Lady under this title; and we plan to make available prayer cards and other devotional items to help us all rediscover the important part the Mother of God can play in our life of faith and devotion.

Fr Ed

Our Lady of Perpetual Succour: Pray for us.

I have just received a kind offer of 4 tickets for tonight’s Cathy Krier & Friends concert at Philharmonie. The tickets are free, and can be collected if you wish to use them. The concert looks interesting — unfortunately I’m not free to go myself. If you would like some/all of the tickets, please get in touch asap (call or text me on 691 217 713 — email is out of action).

Fr Ed

Again, apologies if you’ve been trying to contact me by email. Apparently my account has been hacked once more (from Ireland, Britain and The Netherlands this time). As previously I have been promised a new reset-password, but based on previous experience it will probably be Monday or Tuesday before I’m fully up and running again. These hacks are not individually targeted but are attacks on PT’s servers. I’d be grateful if you’d let me know about any email outages you may have had this year if your service provider is Poste as I would like reassurance I’m not the only one in our community suffering in this way. If you let me know by email, it will be a while before I can acknowledge!

Thanks for your patience,

Fr Ed

This Tuesday, 23 April (Luxembourg’s National Day, of course) we are organising a Sports Day for the First Holy Communion children, young adults and parents, starting at 14:30 in the Bambesch Playground. All are welcome — See the flyer for the event below.

Sports day – 23 june 2015 

Come and enjoy!

Fr Ed

Headline: Children are welcome in our church!
They can make noise, run around, distract others, make a mess, distract their parents, and even distract the priest… but we’ve all been there, we all were those children, and thanks to the patience, perseverance (and occasionally sheer bloody-mindedness!) of our parents, we came to church, and are still hanging around to this day.

This link (thank you to Cheryl Kouba) to an online blog follows this theme http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jamie-bruesehoff/parents-kids-church_b_3909085.html

So if you are the parent/guardian/grandparent of a child or of children, and you bring them to Mass, and you worry about the reactions of people around you if your children are distracting — know that the children are always, always welcome, and thank you so much for bringing them.

Fr Ed