23/08/2026
At this point, two Sundays in a row, our page is starting to look suspiciously like the Diocese of Christchurch. 😆
Last Sunday we shared Bishop Michael’s homily while he was visiting our Diocese. This Sunday, we’ve crossed diocesan lines ourselves, and after hearing Fr Monty’s homily at Mass at the Pro-Cathedral in Christchurch this morning, this one was simply too good not to share.
He began with a line from a theologian writing more than 100 years ago:
“Jesus preached the Kingdom, and what emerged was the Church.”
It raises a fair question — why do we need the Church? Why priests, sacraments, structures and rituals? Why can’t we simply follow Jesus, pray to God ourselves and leave it at that?
Fr Monty brought it back to something beautifully Catholic: people matter, places matter and physical things matter.
God chooses to communicate his life to us through tangible things — through people, water, oil, bread and w**e — and through his Church.
He shared the story of a missionary priest who would travel four or five hours to celebrate Mass with a remote community in Africa. They gathered under a tree, a tree stump became the altar, water and w**e were scarce and when the bishop came for Confirmation, even the chrism had to be carefully rationed.
So much about how they celebrated looked different, but the essentials remained — priest, confession, Eucharist, Confirmation and community.
The Church can adapt to different times, places and cultures, but what Christ gave us remains. The circumstances might change; where we gather, what the altar looks like, how plentiful the w**e or oil might be, but the sacramental signs themselves aren’t things we simply invented. They are part of the tangible, embodied way Christ chose to meet us
“People matter, places matter, physical things matter.”
God meets us through them, and through the Church Christ gave us. When we remain faithful to what Christ gave us, while adapting what can be changed, we remain faithful to Jesus and to the Church he founded. Where what is bound and loosed on earth is bound and loosed in heaven.
