Putting Christ at the Centre

Affirm and Encourage Value in having a Catholic Ethos To be Inspired and Challenged Three Hopes for Today

Lesson Plan 1.To be Catholic or not to be Catholic that is the Question 2.What Challenges? 3.Christocentric?

What makes a Catholic School Catholic?

1.Positive Anthropology 2.Rationality as an Informer of Faith 3.Tradition 4.Sacramental Consciousness 5.Community

An integrated education of the human person through a clear educational project of which Christ is the foundation and a systematic catechesis of Catholic teaching. The first key reason why Catholic schools are established is to be part of the Church’s mission, to place Christ and the teaching of the Catholic Church at the centre of people lives

A child’s journey into adulthood should also be a journey of faith” “A child’s journey into adulthood should also be a journey of faith”

Through you, as through a clear window on a sunny day, students must come to see the richness and joy of a live lived in accordance with Christ’s teaching. Saint John Paul II

The light of faith should illumine everything so that the students will gradually come to learn about the world, about life and about the importance of the human person. Christ alone is that light.

WhatChallenges?

“On the threshold of the third millennium education faces new challenges. We have a crisis of values which, in highly developed societies in particular, assumes the form of subjectivism, relativism and nihilism”

As a community we must honestly acknowledge that at times Christians themselves conceal rather than reveal the ‘authentic face of God and religion’ by not living according to the Gospel, by failing to hold the true teachings of the Church, and by serious deficiencies in religious, moral or social life Bishop Patrick O’Donoghue

Today Catholic schools are increasingly popular, not only for the good academic results they achieve, but also because many parents sense that a catholic school might help their children to develop the self- discipline, moral resilience and spiritual maturity necessary in surviving the winds of secularism and materialism in our society. Cardinal Basil Hume

To lead a life based on Gospel values we must love as Jesus loved… completely and unconditionally.

Putting Christ at the Centre

The disciple of Christ must not only keep the faith and live it, but also profess it, confidently bear witness to it and spread it. (CCC1816)

“Worship the Lord in the beauty of Holiness” Psalm 96

We can only find intimacy with God in prayer if we approach him through the ‘door’ of humility and discover the vast universe within the soul. Elizabeth Wang

Like an ocean filling a drop of drew So Prayer fills us with the love of God

In the sacramental journey we are refreshed by the living Lord of life

When we meet the Lord in the Sacraments we are never left unchanged… the only thing He asks is our cooperation

“A city built on a hill cannot be hidden” Matthew 5: 14. “Witness to Christ”

"The basic reality in this country is that most Catholics have never been evangelized. This is a very sad thing to say, but we have never engaged our people in a process in which they themselves come to discover the person of Jesus Christ, the power of the gospel and the excitement of discipleship in following the Lord. What has happened is we have been able to give the sacraments, and we have been able to catechize, but without the underpinning of evangelization first. We must witness with our lives and proclaim it with our lips” Joseph M. Pavicic

“God reaches out towards us and in faith we turn to him. He then runs to meet us, because He hears us. He embraces us and as if by an impulse of paternal affection, falls upon our necks, that He may raise up those who are cast down, who loaded with sin and bent to the earth.”

“We should not be miserable saints but people joyful in the Lord”

“The Christian Church is the community in which Jesus Christ, in whom God reveals himself unconditionally and definitively, is proclaimed and celebrated”

Christ is our most precious inheritance. He lives ever with us, not seen, often forgotten, often a sign of contradiction but always with us. He joins us as the unknown pilgrim on our way, with us in our uncertainty, our suffering and our need. Use the power that only love can give, go to everybody. God wherever there are minds to be enlightened, will to be strengthened, energies to be channelled towards good. Wherever there are tears to be dried, doubts to be dispelled, fears to be conquered, BE THERE.

In the beginning was God and God is love.