By Chris Palfrey Take a class of eager children, a teacher, four parent helpers, an education assistant and lots of beads – then set to work. On Thursday July 5, Year 4B students from St Joseph’s College in Albany made their own Rosary Beads. There were beads of many colours; crosses and junctions were white. After choosing their beads we set to work. Adult helpers did the knott...

Seniors are special to the life of Floreat Parish, Parish Priest, Fr Wayne Davis told 80 seniors at a special day to honour and celebrate their contribution to parish life. As people who passed on their faith to, and prayers for, the next generation, they were living witnesses of faith in the parish and therefore should be honoured and celebrated, Fr Davis said; they were the living face...

Our Lady of Lourdes, Rockingham welcomed the Sisters of Our Lady of the Missions on Sunday, July 29. The Sisters were involved in Star of the Sea School from its opening in 1973 and prior to that at the original parish school situated at the Turtle Factory at Point Peron from 1948. Sisters have also ministered at the the Parish over many, although they withdrew from parish ministry at...

It all began in a car park following a Catholic Youth Ministry event; two years later Catherine Gallo Martinez and Gaetan Raspanti celebrated their engagement at St Lawrence Parish hall after Eucharistic Adoration with family and friends at St Lawrence and Mary Immaculate church in Balcatta. “I was lost, limping and it was dark” Miss Gallo Martinez said, about the night she first meet Mr...

For possibly the first time in Perth in years, if not decades, the forgotten practice of the ‘rite of betrothal’ was brought to life at the engagement mass for James Chua and Lisa Aarts, featured on the front cover of this edition of The Record. Father Joseph McShane FI celebrated the mass, and the rite of betrothal began with the priest bidding the couple to join their right hands while...

When Chris De Sousa made the decision to discern a Religious vocation with the Somascans, most people were more than a little confused. “‘What are you doing? Are you serious?”, that’s what most people said,” Mr De Sousa, 28, told The Record. He had been practising law for five years, steadily working his way up from office dogsbody, just after graduating, to the level of Associate. ...

Each time when I ponder over how the Lord has led me in life to embrace my vocation as a Norbertine Canon, I feel drawn back to Jeremiah 29: 11 – 14. These verses were given to me when I was at a retreat discerning my life’s direction a few years ago. Praying over them now often leave me pondering and wondering at how true the Lord has been to His promises by leading and shaping me to...

The Venezuelan native is a long way away from his home city of Barinas, close to the Andes, and many years have elapsed since fear of a very concrete kind gripped him as a younger man. Victor Lujano was 19 when he stepped forward at a gathering of the Neocatechumenal Way to say he felt called to ordained ministry but for five years afterwards, he was plagued by a mysterious neurological ...

To say St Charles’ Seminarian Mariusz Grzech made a decision to become a priest, would be to get things the wrong way around, he told The Record earlier this week. The 35-year-old former accountant is now in his third year at St Charles Seminary at Guildford. Like a lot of men at the seminary, to all outward appearances, his life before entering was a highly successful one. He had ...

In this homily from Sunday, July 29, Archbishop Costelloe lays out his hopes for Perth’s seminarians. When I became a bishop one of the gifts I was given was a book entitled “Directory for the Pastoral Ministry of Bishops.” Along with what I learnt when I went to what some people irreverently call “Baby Bishops School” in Rome soon after my consecration in Melbourne, this book has bec...