St Ninian's & St Clement's, Catholic Churches Together
Mary, our Mother,
As we prepare to celebrate the birth of your Son Jesus,
we reflect on the difficulties you faced.
We seek your intercession.
May our hearts and minds be opened to the many expectant mothers who face great uncertainty giving birth and the mums and dads struggling to feed and keep their children safe.
Help us to love and support our sisters and brothers in need.
Amen
We met this time with a pumpkin theme! Bernadette is demonstrating the reuse of pumpkin shells to turn into hanging bird feeders! Let’s hope the birds love them! The kids are getting stuck into planting daffodil bulbs for next spring. Thanks to the Garden Gang for building this area dedicated to flowers for the bees.
We have also been collecting seed pods from the wigwam. These started out as the ones we grew from seed last year! It’s been great to watch their grow and flowering cycle and we hope these little wool pots will soon be germinating next years plants. It was a fun afternoon 🎃
Who doesn’t love getting dirty?! 🤩
We are thrilled to announce that we have been awarded the Eco Congregation Scotland Gold Award for our “outstanding practice in caring for creation shown in your spiritual life, practical action and global awareness.”
We are now one of only 11 congregations in Scotland to be awarded Gold and the first Catholic parish to achieve this honour.
We are incredibly grateful to everyone involved and look forward to continuing our eco journey together responding to Pope Francis who says, “I urgently appeal, then, for a new dialogue about how we are shaping the future of our planet. We need a conversation which includes everyone, since the environmental challenge we are undergoing and its human roots, concerns and affects us all..” (Laudato Si’ *14)
It was eyes down at St Mary’s, Lochee this week as we held our bingo fundraiser event. Many thanks to all those who came along to support this and to those who donated prizes, baked cakes and helped on the evening. We raised £620!
For the month of September the children are thinking about their favourite things in creation and in what ways they will make a difference to help save our beautiful Mother Earth. We are saying the Children’s Creation Prayer and special eco bidding prayers to help us think more closely about the world’s problems.
Today we had a lovely visit from the ladies at Hogs Croft hedgehog sanctuary. We really enjoyed it! We had lots of great questions to ask such as “how fast can hedgehogs run” (and wow it’s fast!) and “what do they eat” and “how many babies do they have” ! We have learned a lot and we are doing very well with our little area to encourage a hedgehog to come and live in the church orchard 🙂
As we enter September, the Season of Creation, we, at St Ninian’s are considering ways of ‘hoping and acting’ with creation. The times we live in show that we are not relating to the Earth as a gift from our Creator, but rather as a resource to be used. “Creation is groaning” because of our selfishness and our unsustainable actions that harm her. So this month, we’ll focus on having a more sustainable approach to clothing……
We are planning to to set up a ‘Clothes Share’ through a Whatsapp group, help parishioners learn how to sell their items on Vinted, and a parishioner will alter and repair clothes to improve their appearance and longevity.
