Firstly, may I thank all those people who kindly sent me presents and cards at Christmas, and also thanks to those who generously gave money in the form of your Christmas offerings. I’m always touched by people’s generosity and thoughtfulness, not just at Christmas, but also throughout the year.
I hope you had a good Christmas and managed to see members of your family, hopefully face-to-face, but if not then maybe online in some sort of virtual meeting. Whilst virtual meetings are never as good as the real thing, they are a lot better than a standard phone call. If you, like me, are old enough to remember Christmases when many people didn’t have telephones and they were expensive to use; then it was often the case of either seeing people face to face or not hearing from them at all.
We had 416 people present in the church at our Christmas Masses and 372 online visitors. I usually work on an average of 1.5 people per view, but at Christmas there are more families watching, so I used a factor of 2 this gives us a figure of 744 online and a total of 1160. The vast majority were from the UK but we also had another 17 countries watching.
Finally, I hope you had a safe New Year and let’s pray that 2022 sees the whole world moving forward in a post pandemic way. When you feel safe about coming to church you will notice some of the improvements in the building and, with a bit of luck, more to follow in 2022.
Mgr Bernard
