St Vincent's Parish, Portland & Wallerawang

16/06/2026

TUESDAY OF THE ELEVENTH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME
St Patrick’s Lithgow

On the 13th of May, 1981, in St. Peter’s Square, a young Turkish gunman named Ali Ağca raised a pistol and fired. Pope John Paul II fell, bleeding, into the arms of his secretary. Four bullets. Two lodged near his spine. The world held its breath.

He survived. And the world expected a statement of condemnation, a diplomatic protest, perhaps a solemn prayer for justice. What came instead silenced everyone.

Two years later, on the 27th of December, 1983, John Paul II walked into Rebibbia Prison in Rome. He sat down beside the man who had tried to kill him. He took Ağca’s hands into his own. He leaned in close and spoke gently — words so personal that the Pope himself chose never to reveal them publicly. When they parted, Ağca — a hardened assassin — was weeping.

John Paul II later said simply: “I spoke to him as a brother.” Not as a victim. Not as a Pope. As a brother.

The world did not know what to do with that image. Because this is precisely what Jesus is asking of us: “Love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you.”

Not diplomatic courtesy. Love. The Greek word is agapē — not the love you feel, but the love you choose. The love that descends into a prison cell. The love that takes the hands of the man who wanted you dead and says — you are still my brother.

And here is the breathtaking logic beneath it all: God sends rain on the just and the unjust. The sun rises over the saint and the sinner alike. This is God being extravagant. Divine love does not wait for worthiness. It precedes it. It arrives uninvited. It kneels beside the very worst of us and refuses to let hatred be the final word.

When Jesus says “Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect,” He is not setting an impossible bar to break our spirits. The word — perfect — in the biblical world means complete, whole, fully formed. We are not called to flawless behaviour. We are called to relational wholeness — a heart spacious enough to hold even those who have tried to destroy it.

Pope John Paul II did not walk into that prison because he had stopped feeling the wound. He understood that unforgiveness would imprison him far more securely than any cell could imprison Ağca. And so he chose freedom — the only kind that costs everything and gives back more.
Hatred poisons our own hearts. Love your enemies: Christ is asking us not to allow evil to make us become monsters ourselves. Forgiveness frees the heart.
Why pray for those who persecute us? It is because prayer changes us. Our hearts gradually become less bitter and more compassionate. That is agapē. That is being perfect. That is the life Christ is inviting us into.

In the wisdom of Saint John Paul II: “Freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought — and love is always what we ought.”
In the words of Saint Augustine: “He who is filled with love is filled with God himself.” Amen

15/06/2026

Together in Mission

Parishes exist for mission. Our Assembly will help us move from asking “What could be done?” to “What can I do?” and “How can we act together?” All are invited to help renew the life and mission of our parish.

Secure your place by registering to attend.

https://bathurst.catholic.org.au/parish-assembly-register-to-attend/

14/06/2026

13/06/2026

SATURDAY OF THE TENTH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME
Sacred Heart Wallerawang

There is a moment — when someone loves you not because of who you are, but in spite of it.

Not after your apology. Not after your improvement. Not after you cleaned yourself up and presented your best self at the door.

Before. In the mess. In the wound. In the wandering.

That is the world changing truth Saint Paul drops into history like a stone into still water — and the ripples have never stopped:

“What proves that God loves us is that Christ died for us while we were still sinners.”

Not candidates. Not the reformed. Not the almost-ready.
Sinners. Present tense. Unfinished. Unworthy.

The Roman world understood transactions. You earned favor. You built alliances. Love was a ledger. Even the gods demanded tribute before blessing.

And then — this.

A God who moves first. A love that does not wait for the invitation to be deserved. The Incarnation itself is God crossing the room toward us before we even knew we were lost.

The Church has held this truth for two thousand years not as a theological footnote but as its beating heart: that grace is not a reward — it is a rescue. That mercy is not dispensed to the qualified — it is abundantly bestowed on the unqualified. This is what the Catechism means when it calls God’s love unearned — freely given, shockingly given, boundlessly given.

The saints knew this personally — not abstractly.

Saint Augustine did not encounter God after becoming virtuous. He met God in the wreckage — restless, broken, brilliant, and lost — and heard those words across the ruins of his own heart: “You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in Thee.”

Saint Francis of Assisi was kissing lepers before he understood theology. He simply believed that God had kissed him first, while he was still shallow and vain and afraid.

Thérèse of the Child Jesus — small, sick, ordinary — understood that holiness was not a ladder she climbed toward God, but a pair of arms that lifted her.

This is the pattern. God does not wait for us at the summit of our achievements. At times, He meets us in the valleys of our weakness, where we finally discover that His love was never something we had to earn.

And so, what does this demand of us?

Every person we are tempted to write off, give up on, or leave behind — God has not written off.

The Crucifixion is God’s permanent public declaration: No one is too far gone.

In the wisdom of Saint John Paul II:

“We are not the sum of our weaknesses and failures. We are the sum of the Father’s love for us — and that sum was written in blood, on a cross, while we were still running away.” Amen

13/06/2026

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DZa9RsKxw6j/?igsh=dWo5cGVvYjdicXo3

13/06/2026

*Today’s Saint*

June 13 — St. Anthony of Padua, Priest and Doctor - Memorial

13/06/2026

*Today’s Feast*

Immaculate Heart of Mary – Memorial

13/06/2026

https://youtu.be/CZlNRI8sH_o?si=tc309REL_5xaRJ7g

🙏Lord of Truth, dwell within my heart and make it pure and holy. Fill me with Your presence so that my words and deeds may always reflect Your light and truth. Help me to be a beacon of honesty and integrity, bringing glory to Your name in all that I say and do. Conform my will to Yours, and guide me to live in accord with Your divine plan. Jesus, I trust in You.

Jesus said to his disciples: “You have heard that it was said to yo...

12/06/2026

SOLEMNITY OF THE MOST SACRED HEART OF JESUS
St Patrick’s Lithgow

There is a wound in the side of the world.
Not the kind that bleeds and heals. Not the kind that scars and disappears. This is a wound that seems to widen with every passing year—in our newsfeeds, in our homes, in the silence that greets us at three in the morning. It is the wound of a humanity that, as the late Pope Francis observed, has in many ways “lost its heart.”
And yet, here we are.
Gathered around a Heart.
Saint John writes with the simplicity of one who has rested his head against the breast of Christ and learned the rhythm of eternity: “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them” (1 Jn 4:16).
God is love.
Perhaps no sentence has ever carried such weight. No philosophy dared imagine it. No religion expected it. The mystery at the centre of the universe is not power, nor fate, nor necessity, but love.
Yet for John, love is never an abstraction. Love always bears a face. Love always carries a wound.
“We love because he first loved us” (1 Jn 4:19).
The initiative is always His.
That truth opens before us in today's Gospel. Jesus, looking beyond the calculations of the learned and the self-assurance of the powerful, lifts His eyes to the Father and rejoices: “You have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and revealed them to little children” (Mt 11:25).
The Sacred Heart is not discovered through mastery. It is received through wonder.
Not by those who know everything, but by those willing to be loved.
And then comes one of the most tender invitations ever spoken:
“Come to me, all you who labour and are burdened, and I will give you rest” (Mt 11:28).
Not, "Come to my ideas."
Not, "Come to my system."
Not even, "Come to my institution."
Come to me.
The late Pope Francis began He Loved Us with a truth drawn directly from the Gospel itself:
“His open heart has gone before us and waits for us, unconditionally, asking only to offer us his love and friendship. For ‘he loved us first.’”
Before we searched for God, we were sought.
Before we spoke His name, He carried ours.
Before we loved, we were loved.
The late Pope Francis warned that ours is a culture of restless consumption, a world rushing from one distraction to the next, bombarded by noise and novelty, often losing contact with its deepest centre. We have become experts at connection and strangers to communion; surrounded by information and starving for meaning.
The answer to that wound is not another technique, strategy, or program.
It is a Person.
A Person whose heart was pierced open so that humanity could finally see what had always been there.
This is the mystery we celebrate today.
Not a feast of sentimentality.
Not a devotion among many others.
But the revelation of what is most true about God.
At the centre of all things is the Heart of Jesus: gentle and humble, wounded and glorified, burning with a love stronger than sin, stronger than suffering, stronger even than death.
Saint John Eudes, one of the great apostles of devotion to the Sacred Heart, contemplated that mystery with profound tenderness. In prayer, he heard Christ speak to the depths of the human soul:
“I did not come to impress you with my divinity. I came to find you in your humanity. I am not the God of the distant sky. I am the God of the tired afternoon, the broken promise, the recurring failure, and the stubborn hope. My Heart was not pierced to become a symbol. It was pierced so that you might finally believe that there is nothing in you I do not love, and nowhere you could go where I have not already gone before you, waiting.”
And nowhere is that love made more tangible than in the Eucharist.
The Heart opened on Calvary continues to give itself here.
Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity.
The same love that flowed from His pierced side is poured out upon the altar and placed into our hands. In Holy Communion we do not simply remember that love; we receive it. We become participants in it. The Heart that loved us first begins to beat within our own.
And so, on this Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart, perhaps the Gospel can be gathered into a single sentence:
He has loved us.
Before our successes and failures.
Before our faithfulness and our wandering.
Before our first breath and beyond our final one.
He has loved us.
That is the beginning of the Christian life.
That is its centre.
That is its end.
Everything else is commentary.
Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, make our hearts like unto Yours.
Amen.