2nd November 2025 - Thought from Fr. Colm

Echoing the beautiful French song  ‘The falling leaves drift by the window, the autumn leaves of red and gold’.

The seasons are gently helping the decaying process remind us of the seasonal changes to which the church has historically and wonderfully adapted the liturgical calendar to the cycle of life. With our new windows we can better identify with both. In keeping with this fusion of nature and Spirit, there will be a special Mass for all our deceased relatives and friends on Monday morning, the Feast of All Souls.

This sacredness of remembrance is something we Catholics do very well. It’s that indispensable expression though the Eucharist especially, that brings us back again and again to remember the dead. But rather than languishing in our sadness, we know there is a safe place to bring it. And so we unapologetically celebrate the lives of our loved ones with The Feast of All Souls. It is why the month of November is the month of the Souls.

“When someone you love dies, and you’re not expecting it, you don’t lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time – the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes – when there’s a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she’s gone, forever – there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.”

John Irving

“Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal."
From a headstone in Ireland

Our Christmas Fayre is just around the corner. Great activities planned. 

November also affords us the opportunity for special events such as the Journey in Faith, Lumière, the Parish Christmas Fayre and the Commemoration Mass of Remembrance. All dates are in the bulletin and on the website.

Welcome back to the teaching staff of our three primary and one secondary schools. I hope you have had a good rest.

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