26th October 2025 - Thought from Fr. Colm

The Parish Council met on Wednesday. It was a very productive meeting with shared ideas on the Parish moving forward building on our strengths. The many groups, the changing face(s) of those attending our Masses. The new challenges of church usage. The outreach to the wider community. Loneliness and isolation experienced by those living alone.

The schools links with parish via welcoming, music and Youth activities. Building on the university’s expansion and increasing numbers of university students attending our Masses. Much lively discussion to reflect…and act upon.   

St. Leonard’s Mass of welcome at St. Joseph’s was a lovely celebration tinged with sadness, as next years will no longer be in the parish but in the newly built, state of the art school.

Congratulations to Beth Otty on receiving the award from Durham Constabulary as the most outstanding investigator of the year. Beth, along with husband and fellow PC  are past pupils of St. Leonard’s. Beth and twin sister Alex, who recently received her doctorate in Educational Psychology, were both Mass servers at St. Joseph’s while attending St Joseph’s School, and both served my very first Mass in the Parish all those years ago. Well done girls. Your late Mum, Andrea would be very proud .

Despite unfair parking restrictions recently imposed in Durham City Centre on Sunday mornings, our attendances continue to improve at our 9.00am Mass. Young families continue to attend and what a witness that is. It’s no joke getting a brood of very young energetic children out so early on a Sunday morning for 9, or indeed 10.30am. Well done.

19th October 2025 - Thought from Fr. Colm

For my own part, I have never ceased to rejoice that God has appointed me to such an office. People talk of the sacrifice I have made in spending so much of my life in Africa. Is that a sacrifice which brings its own blest reward in healthful activity, the consciousness of doing good, peace of mind, and a bright hope of a glorious destiny hereafter? Away with the word sacrifice. Say rather it is a privilege. Anxiety, sickness, suffering, or danger, now and then, with a foregoing of the common conveniences and charities of this life, may make us pause, and cause the spirit to waver, and the soul to sink; but let this only be for a moment. All these are nothing when compared with the glory which shall be revealed in and for us. I never made a sacrifice.

David Livingstone

There are three kinds of violence. The first, mother of all the others, is institutional violence. It legalises and perpetuates domination, oppression, and exploitation. It crushes and eliminates millions of people in its silent and well-oiled cogs.

The second is revolutionary violence, which is born of the will to abolish the first.

The third is repressive violence, which stifles the second, by making itself the helper and accomplice of the first violence- the one that causes all the others.

There is no worse hypocrisy than only calling the second 'violence', while pretending to forget the first one, that gives it life, and the third, that kills it.

Helder Camara , Spiral of Violence

12th October 2025 - Thought from Fr. Colm

We continue our Partnership journey next Thursday evening in St. Leonard’s (see the note in the bulletin). The Finchale Partnership includes Durham City and the outlying parishes. Do join us.

I hope you like the windows. They are timely, as we reflect more on the glory of God’s creation. I’m expecting that our energy bills will be reduced.

“Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life.”

Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way (In Search of Lost Time, #1

Thanks to our Parish SVP conference for a lovely lunch on Tuesday. The spirit was great. Fish and chips, with mushy peas for the purists, and for those brave souls with a taste for all things sweet and with a total disregard for the waistline, there was the triple layered multicoloured ice cream consumed with unapologetic delight by the few, as the majority looked on with envy.

It was all great fun and enjoyed by all .