I was first assigned to the Cathedral church in Nottingham as an assistant priest, and then to the four-parish cluster in south Leicester, before being assigned by the Bishop to Saint Joseph’s as parish administrator in March, 2020. Before my arrival in the parish, the first great nationwide lock-down had already fallen into place. Nevertheless, I restarted the daily Masses immediately (albeit offered privately, behind closed doors at the church). The church has been opened again since September 2020, subjected to restrictions and there are two parish Masses on Sunday morning and a divine liturgy according to the Syro-Malabar rite on Sunday afternoons. From July 2021, there has been a fourth Mass added as a vigil of the Sunday on Saturday evenings at 18.00.
I began an offsite blog on my arrival in March 2020, to make regular entries from the church and presbytery, in case parishioners were curious about what was going on at the parish property during lockdown. Please click the link below to access that blog, which is now semi-active, since I’ve begun posting directly to this website.
As stated on the blog, my weekly prayer intentions are the following. In the absence of requested intentions for the daily Masses, these function as default intentions for Mass on the respective weekdays:
- Sundays: our Parishioners in general
- Mondays: the Holy Father and the Bishop
- Tuesdays: our deceased Parishioners (++)
- Wednesdays: the sick and the dying
- Thursdays: vocations to the priesthood and Religious life
- Fridays: persecuted Christians (currently central Africa, China and Pakistan)
- Saturdays: medical staff, especially considering the current health situation
As this is a private page on the parish website, I’m also adding a short list of books I’m navigating through at the moment.
- Apologetics and Catholic doctrine, M. J. Sheehan (a comprehensive catechesis)
- Classical music, J. Stanley (a comprehensive survey of the genre)
- Divina Commedia, Dante Alighieri (a classic of Italian literature)
- Dominic Barberi, Fr. G. Skinner (a biography of the saintly priest)
- How to paint landscapes quickly and beautifully in watercolour and gouache, N. Fowkes (its all in the title, really.)
- Jerusalem, a biography, S. S. Montefiore (a colossal history of the holy City)
- Jesuits of the Goa province, Fr. G. Naik (an historical overview of the Jesuits in Goa)
- Marking the Hours: English people and their prayers, E. Duffy (on the daily prayer of the English in late medieval England)
- Pope Leo XIII: his life and work, J. de Narfon (a biography of the pope)
- Reading Greek, by the Joint Association of classical teachers (a primer of classical Greek)
- Secrets of the Middle Ages, J. Harpur (short essays on the medieval period)
- Summa contra Gentiles, S. Thomas Aquinas (a shorter treatise on the Catholic Faith)
- Tactical chess endings, by J. Nunn (a survey of game endings by the English GM)
- Temple theology: an introduction, M. Barker (the old Hebrew religion, dating from before the rise of pharisaeism and the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple)
- The book of a hundred hands, G. B. Bridgman (essays on the illustration of the human hand)
- The complete Jewish study Bible, Barry Rubin (ed., a Jewish commentary on sacred Scripture)
- The complete visions of Anne Catherine Emmerich (an autobiographical classic of devotion)
- The dinosaur hunters, D. Cadbury (the story of the eccentrics who founded the sciences of geology and paleaontology in England and Europe)
- The memoirs of Louis Bouyer, L. Bouyer (an autobiography of one of the most impressive 20th-century liturgical scholars)
- The path to Rome, by H. Belloc (an autobiography of his conversion)
- The Reformation and the English people, by J. J. Scarisbrick (various essays on the destruction of the medieval English Church)
- The soul of football: one man’s story of football, family and faith, M. Chester (an interesting-looking book, more about fatherhood than football perhaps)
- Through the lands of the Bible, H. V. Morton (a 20th-century travelogue of Syria, Babylonia and Egypt)
- Vita communis, Fr. J. Bertram (a history of the priestly college)
Also, since this is a private page on the parish website, let me introduce my latest object of devotion: a tiny little black cat with a white collar, called Laetitia (or Letty). The name, of course, means Joy.