Good Friday in Parramatta

Good Friday I took the ferry from Sydney Harbour for the one hour ride under the bridge, through the inner harbour and up the Parramatta River to the suburb of Parramatta. This is yet another diocese in Sydney. I wanted to be with this community at the newly consecrated St. Patrick’s Cathedral. I had visited this church a few days ago (see the Monday April 2 entry below) and wanted to see how the parish would celebrate the Passion and Death of the Lord on Good Friday. As you may have noticed in Monday’s blog entry, this new Cathedral has a large long center space in which are located the Ambo, the Altar and the Bishop’s chair, the “Cathedra.” The church filled up shortly before 3:00pm when Bishop Kevin Manning processed into the sacred space and began this solemn, sober celebration. There was a large choir supporting the community in sung prayer. I was moved when it came time for the community to sing the response psalm. The whole church sang with gusto! As we sat there the voices of the 375 people across the church from us touched my heart. It was the first time I heard such wonderful participation since I arrived here. An interesting thing happened when it came time for the more than 750 hundred of us to come forward to venerate the cross. The procession moved along well as the choir led the community in sung prayer. At the end of the line of those coming forward, I noticed a group of young males coming forward for the veneration. In any other setting I would have assumed that these guys were tough members of some gang. Their clothing was jeans and tee shirts and each had short cropped hair with a red spiked Mohawk stripe in the middle. As I watched them bend low in reverence before the cross, I asked the Lord to forgive me for my hasty judgments on how things “appear.”


Our need for salvation continues everyday. Today we celebrate its cost.