No matter how beautiful the building, the real Church is the people gathered around Christ, Archbishop Timothy Costelloe SDB told the Catholics of Kelmscott at the dedication of their new church on Sunday, September 8.
The new building, dedicated under the parish’s existing title, the Good Shepherd, was full-to-overflowing with the areas’ ethnically and spiritually diverse Catholic population turning out in force for the occasion.
The parish is home to a regular parish congregation, as well as people in the Neocatechumenal Way. and a community that celebrates the Extraordinary Form of the Eucharistic liturgy, known colloquially as the Latin Mass.
People from all three expressions joined together to form a special choir for the event, including students from Good Shepherd Primary School.
The celebration began in the old church – a building that had served the community for some 40 years, with Catholics following the Archbishop and parish priest Fr Andrew Lotton in procession to the locked doors of the new building.
Project manager and longstanding parishioner Neville Voysey was as obviously proud to present the Archbishop with the keys to the building before most of the crowd poured into the building with a sizeable contingent filling the foyer, spilling out into the driveway outside.
In his post-Mass address, Fr Lotton thanked Archbishop Costelloe for his support and all “the workers behind the scenes”, and previous parish priests who had gotten the project of building a new church substantially underway, dating back to initial meetings in 2008.
Fr Francis Sundararajan, the previous parish priest, had wanted to attend the occasion, Fr Lotton told the congregation, but had been held up in Papua New Guinea where he has been missioning in recent years.
“He would have loved to be here this afternoon with us for the opening of this project on which he, and now I, have worked so hard, over these many years,” Fr Lotton said, describing the church as “a prayerful work of God” and thanking everyone who had contributed.
“I’m very happy,” Fr Lotton told The Record after the event. “It’s all a new experience and sometimes you get problems and difficulties and think, “Lord how do we solve this problem” but it’s all come together.”
Fr Lotton said the places-of-origin of the elements inside the church reflected the community’s diversity, with the pews, tabernacle stand and ambo having been built by parishioner Timothy Haydon; the tabernacle and lamp coming from Spain; the Stations of the Cross from Italy; and the corpus of the main crucifix from Ecuador.
Archbishop Costelloe congratulated parishioners, thanking Fr Lotton and assistant priest Fr Marcelo Parra Gonzalez for their leadership.
“It’s a great joy and a great privilege for an archbishop to be able to have an opportunity to dedicate and consecrate a new parish church. It’s especially significant for me,” Archbishop Costelloe said.
“In the 1990s, as parish priest of Victoria Park, I was superior of the religious community of the Salesians who had the care of this parish… So, it’s a little bit special to me to come back.
“I hope it still has something of the spirit of St John Bosco whose relics we have enclosed in the altar this afternoon together with the other two saints [St Teresa of Avila and St Rose Venerini].
“My prayer is that this parish can continue to grow more and more into that community of disciples of Jesus that the Lord is calling us to be.”