Feast of the Holy Family 2019
Sixtieth Anniversary of the Holy Family Parish, Port Glasgow
 
 
Dear brothers and sisters, it is a joy for me to be with you today in this Christmas Season and on the Feast of the Holy Family.  It is a delight to celebrate this Holy Mass with you on the occasion of the Sixtieth Anniversary of this wonderful parish. 
 
In the fine commemoration booklet for this anniversary, Fr. Chima has laid out the history of the parish from its foundation until today, some of you who will remember these things vividly and with deep affection. 
 
You may remember those heady, hope-filled days in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War when Fr Sweeney and his curate, Fr.  Rice, were charged with creating in the Carnegie area of the Port a daughter parish from the mother parish of Saint John’s in the town centre.  Without a church the parish gathered every Sunday at the HMS  Monck naval base which, during the war had prepared the forces for amphibious invasions of Africa and Europe.   Being decommissioned in 1946, it proved an ideal temporary home for the new parish community engaged in building up the town in the new era of peace and prosperity.    
 
Fifteen years later, this spectacularly modern parish church was opened by Bishop Black on 20 December 1959 on the cusp of the Second Vatical Council and the swinging ‘sixties.   It has been shepherded and served faithfully since then by faithful pastors who are rightly named in the anniversary booklet.
 
The sixty years of the parish have accompanied the history of Port Glasgow over the same period. The post war years marked the twilight of the glory days of the Port Glasgow shipbuilding industry, which eventually lost out to cheaper competition from the Far East.  Shipbuilding days were replaced by the new electronics industry and the likes of IBM, which also came and went with global market forces.   The sixties saw springing up the Industrial Estate into its heyday in the seventies, creating jobs, friendships and memories in clothing companies like Playtex and Wovenair, electronics businesses like AMP, Fescol and Sangamo, and camping and leisure suppliers like Blacks, Vango and The North Face.  Then there was the Kellburn Business Park on "the plots", with White House Products and Amphenol.  The most recent years have brought another wave of regeneration in the waterfront development and Newark Castle, and the Retail Park with the Tesco, the B&Q, Marks & Spencer, Next, Aldi and so on.
 
At the same time our Church saw its Second Vatican Council bring about radical changes in the lives of Catholics, from Masses celebrated not in Latin with the priest facing East but in the English language and with the father facing the people that better allowed the people’s participation.  Our Church rediscovered the vocation of our lay faithful to be full participants in the life and mission of our parishes and to be salt, leaven and light in our world.  Our young people learned their faith at home and in our schools not so much by catechism but by discovering their own personal relationship with Jesus and their unique vocation in life from the Father.  And they were encouraged not to reject the world but to love it as God’s Creation and serve it by bringing it to the Lord.
 
That said, the promise of the Vatican Council has not always brought to fruition the big promise of evangelisation of our culture and the conversion of our people that we hoped.  Perhaps in our enthusiasm to ring in the change of the new we were too quick to ring out all that was good about the old faith of our fathers and, a little too naively, threw out the baby with the bathwater.  Certainly, the great breathing of the Holy Spirit on our Church in modern times has not yet seen the harvest expected and is still to be better understood and embraced. 
 
The effect of big changes in our world and Church has left its mark on the parish of the Holy Family in Port Glasgow.  For you it has meant sixty years of ebb and flow, like the river that runs past the town and through our veins.  Years of new enterprises and promises of prosperity have been interwoven with sudden downturns and all the family anxieties that come with redundancy and unemployment.  Years of great renewal in our Church have, at the same time, failed to stem relentless decline in the numbers of priests and practicing Catholics, or of lapsation and scandals where we had hopes for heroic faith and holiness.
 
So, the parish of Holy Family came to birth as the great World War came to its end, has lived through a different kind of struggle about the kind of Church and society the Lord wants for these times of peace.  In all of this the parish of the Holy Family has played its part and, while many changes have come and gone, the parish is still here and, please God, will be here to see its one hundred year’s centenary.
 
Today we contemplate the Holy Family of Nazareth:  Saint Joseph, Our Lady and the Baby Jesus.  The Gospel records their own voyage, from the arrival into their town of wise men bringing gifts to big changes brought about by policies from the rulers of their time, the Roman Emperor’s census and King Herod’s slaughter of the innocents, which made their own times precarious. Yet, Herod and Augustus eventually moved on while the Holy Family survived and flourished, protected by God in all of the ups and downs of their times. In a funny way, things turned out exactly as God had planned and for the best because they stayed true to Him and to their family bonds.   
 
Today, we the children of the founding fathers of our parish honour our forebears in faith best by proving loyal to our parish in these weaker times, sure that the Lord will answer our prayers for our families and give our parish long life into the future.  We can be sure that we are, no less than our fathers in the faith, God’s chosen race and saints, and that He loves and cares for us as much as He did for them.
 
With humility and with compassion, kindness, gentleness and patience may we bear with each another in these days, and may peace, gratitude and love be the strength that renews our parish community to flourish in the decades ahead, all the while singing hymns and inspired songs to God.