News

Booking for Christmas Masses

The Covid restrictions on number of people in Church will have a significant impact on our Masses over Christmas, and we risk having to turn people away at the more popular Masses. The only fair way of managing the situation is to ask everyone only to attend one Mass over the period of Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and the following Sunday, and to allocate the space at each Mass through a booking system. Only people who have booked will be able to attend, as this will take up all available capacity.

The booking system will be available online, or through telephoning the office. The link and further details will be published here shortly.

Advent Group

Through the weeks of advent we are running an advent group meeting each week at 10am on Thursdays online. Each week we will be looking ahead to the coming Sunday and studying and discussing the Sunday readings as advent preparation. If you are available do join. The link to zoom for the meeting will be posted here each Wednesday ready for Thursday

If you’re unfamiliar with zoom, it should just be a matter of clicking the link we send. See our help pages.

Remembrance Book

As we cannot access the remembrance books in the churches this November, we have set up an online remembrance book here. On this page you can view our remembrance book with all the names submitted throughout November.

Fitzherbert Community Hub

Many of you will have enjoyed visiting the community cafe run by the Real Junk Food Project at St John the Baptist before lockdown. It was really popular with parishioners and members of the wider local community alike but because of the condition of the parish hall and kitchen we were only able to open one lunchtime a week, despite such high demand. You will also be aware of the Food Hub, coordinated by Brighton Table Tennis Club, that has been operating out of St John the Baptist. Covid-19 has exposed the extent of food poverty in the area that we serve and the food bank is now providing food for 300 people a week and ready cooked meals to 45 refugee/asylum seeker families, some of whom have no recourse to public finance or cooking facilities.

Building on these two initiatives we are now working in partnership with our three co-located grassroots charities, Voices in Exile, Brighton Table Tennis Club and Real Junk Food Project to raise funding to redevelop the parish hall at St John the Baptist, creating a flexible, multi-purpose, socially inclusive Community Hub with a commercial standard teaching kitchen, dining area, food bank, full disability access (including a lift to the upper rooms) and additional meeting spaces. Central to our plans is the provision of a daily “pay as you feel” (customers pay what they feel the food is worth or what they can afford) community café using food otherwise destined for landfill. This is an exciting opportunity for us as a Parish as not only will we have access to a lovely new parish hall and cafe but we will be able to live out our faith through social outreach and community building.

Please have a look at the short films in the following link which considers local need and how this project will help:

Our New Resource Page

In particular look out for our resources pages, providing links to good things to watch, listen to, or read. Also the Prayers of the Faithful are now published weekly on the newsletter page. We would encourage all parishioners to submit potential prayers by email to the office, so that increasingly these do become the prayers of all the faithful.