By Bishop Christopher Saunders
Easter is our spiritual springtime of glorious celebration. Hopefully, this is as evident in our lives as it is in our liturgies which are beautiful, prayerful connections with the living God and the paschal mystery that is at the core of our faith.
Easter is extraordinarily busy, liturgically speaking, beginning on Palm Sunday through Holy Week and extending for a season of grateful remembrance until Pentecost, on 15 May. It is a delightful kind of busy-ness that offers us another opportunity to be uplifted in our worshipful commitment to God and our way of life in Christ. For that, we are truly thankful.
This Year of Jubilee has special significance for the people of the Diocese of Broome. It is our 50th Anniversary as a Diocese that was proclaimed on 17 June 1966. The Apostolic Vicariate of the Kimberley was specifically established as a mission territory in 1887; the proclamation of the Diocese 79 years later signalled that the temporary nature of the Church up here had been replaced by a permanent ecclesiastical jurisdiction, the Diocese of Broome. In some sense, our Church in the far north of Western Australia had come of age.
And so, the Jubilee is being celebrated in every parish of the Diocese and in remote communities within those parishes. Memorable beginnings were made on 8 December last year when we began the Year of Mercy, as called by the Holy Father, together with our Year of Golden Jubilee for our Particular Church of the Kimberley region. Both celebrations here in the Kimberley are being run as one festivity which will continue until the Feast of Christ the King, on 20 November 2016.
Indeed, as Easter is our spiritual springtime, I am hoping that, throughout the months ahead, we will see a blossoming of grace in each parish and in each tiny settlement. During the celebratory occasions that are planned throughout the Diocese, we will first of all give thanks for God’s greatness and rejoice in His gift of His merciful love and forgiveness, that we may grow to be the people He has called us to be.
Priests in the Diocese have been asked to emphasise our Holy Father’s words on the Mercy of God during this Jubilee time. In their instruction, they are to further Mercy as a Divine quality which we are blessed to share as the People of God by means of our actions and our words of forgiveness towards each other.
This Jubilee Year of Mercy pronounced by the Holy Father has been called so that we all might “receive blessing and pardon from God and remission of sins”. And, to this end, we will urgently explain that the forgiveness of sins is a sure pathway to restored right relationships between God and His people. The renouncing of sin is also clearly a doorway to justice and right relationships between human beings. It is vital in this Jubilee Year that we address the decline of the use of the Sacrament of Reconciliation among the faithful and encourage a renewal in faith in the power of this sacrament.
We pray that the Grace of Easter which is now bestowed on us may energise us as Church to reach out to those struggling in their relationships and those who are barely coping with the complexities of life. It is for the faithful, for those in ministry and most certainly, too, for those who are not, to be an avenue for God’s love, to be beacons of hope for us all to receive the power of the Spirit, of God’s infinite, loving mercy.
I take this opportunity to wish you and your families God’s choicest blessings this Easter season. May the grace of the Easter Sacrament inspire us to serve our Lord and God faithfully.