Chaplaincy
When your child accepts a place at Saint Paul’s Catholic High School, you and your family become part of a very special community; which has Christ at its centre. The Chaplaincy is here to enrich this community by ensuring the core gospel values of love, compassion, stewardship, respect and service are at the centre of all our relationships and activities.
The Chaplaincy team are always praying for our whole school community, through the tough times and the ordinary of everyday life. We endeavour to lead by example, equipping everyone to bring prayer into our forms, classrooms, assemblies, sports fixtures and beyond, confident that God hears and answers all our prayers.
We see it as vitally important that students get the opportunity to encounter faith and prayer from a different perspective through a retreat experience. For instance, in Year 7 every form has a day retreat exploring the theme ‘belonging to a community’ and Year 8 go away on a residential retreat to Savio House, a nearby youth retreat centre.
Newsletters
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Confirmations
Our parishes are beginning to ask for names of students in the Wythenshawe area who would like to receive the Sacrament of Confirmation.
Due to the pandemic there was no possibility last year to allow for Confirmations to happen but we are more hopeful for confirmations next year. The parish hopes to begin preparations of our young people in readiness for Confirmation in 2022. If you or your child would like to sign up for the Sacrament and the preparation course then please see the attached click CONFIRMATION LETTER
Young people interested in being Confirmed (from Year 7 – 11) are invited to join the Youth Group EXITE, which meets at Sacred Heart.
Saint Paul’s Students Enjoy Mini DASH
Students from Saint Paul’s joined together with multiple high schools within the Shrewsbury Diocese for a Mini-Dash event.
Our day was spent focussed on the ecumenical theme for Creation Time: 2021: A Home For All; Renewing the Oikos of God.
We look at St Francis’ call for us to take care of our common home and to focus on the “cry of the poor”, who live on the streets of our cities and towns.
Our activity for today was to create a shelter for a homeless person to show the difficulties of life on the streets as well as showing that we are compassionate towards our brothers and sisters who are in the unfortunate position of being on the streets. Trying to build a shelter showed us just how hard it is to a build shelter for ourselves and helped us to reflect on the difficulties those living on the streets face on a day to day basis.
We loved our day and look forward to meeting up again with other schools for Mini-Dash in the near future.
The Year of St Joseph
Pope Francis has declared a special Year of St Joseph to mark the 150th anniversary of Bl Pius IX’s proclamation of St Joseph as Patron of the Universal Church.
The Year of St Joseph will run from Tuesday, 8 December 2020, to Wednesday, 8 December 2021.
Stained glass window at Saint Paul’s Catholic High School
Pope Francis has also decreed a plenary indulgence for the Year of St Joseph, available to the faithful under the usual conditions, for various acts of devotion detailed in a report from Vatican News.
In an Apostolic Letter, Patris corde – With a father’s heart – Pope Francis describes the guardian of Our Lord as beloved, tender and loving, obedient, accepting father; one, who is both courageous and industrious, content to live and work “in the shadows” while he protected and provided for our Lord and Our Lady.
“His patient silence was the prelude to concrete expressions of trust,” Pope Francis wrote in the Letter. “Our world today needs fathers,” he said. “It has no use for tyrants who would domineer others as a means of compensating for their own needs,” and “rejects those who confuse authority with authoritarianism, service with servility, discussion with oppression, charity with a welfare mentality, power with destruction.”
Vatican News explains that Pope Francis wrote the letter “against the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic” and seeks to articulate some of the manifold ways in which the global emergency has laid bare to us out interdependence and our common humanity.
“Each of us,” Pope Francis wrote, “can discover in Joseph – the man who goes unnoticed, a daily, discreet and hidden presence – an intercessor, a support and a guide in times of trouble. Saint Joseph reminds us that those who appear hidden or in the shadows can play an incomparable role in the history of salvation.”
“A word of recognition and of gratitude,” Pope Francis wrote, “is due to them all.”
The Letter concludes with a prayer to St Joseph, reproduced here below in its official English translation:
Hail, Guardian of the Redeemer,
Spouse of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
To you God entrusted his only Son;
in you Mary placed her trust;
with you Christ became man.
Blessed Joseph, to us too,
show yourself a father
and guide us in the path of life.
Obtain for us grace, mercy, and courage,
and defend us from every evil. Amen.
Catholic Herald, Rome
