The Cairns Catholic Education Community will celebrate Queensland Catholic Education Week (CEW) during July 26 – August 1. However, our celebrations this year may look very different than in other years which has seen events such as large scale masses and other liturgical celebrations, parent and grandparent days and award presentations held.
This year’s celebrations may evoke an image of community from Acts 2: 42-47 where small groups gathered in a family-like atmosphere, encouraging one another, laughing together, enjoying each other’s presence, and offering love and support in personal and meaningful ways drawing on the teachings of Jesus.
This year we’re seeing festivities move from those large scale events to smaller more intimate simple celebrations: In Week 3 at St Clare’s, we are preparing for a Year 4 to 6 Liturgy on Wednesday, 29th July and a Prep to Year 3 Liturgy on Thursday, 30th July. Unfortunately, due to the limited number of people able to enter the church due to COVID restrictions, only staff and students will attend the liturgies.
Early Christian communities were models of what our schools in the Diocese of Cairns strive to live out each day as they commit to supporting the dignity of each person, practising Christian hospitality, and proclaiming its values through word and action.
This Catholic Education Week within our school communities across the Cairns Diocese, we will celebrate our identity, our achievements, and strive to strengthen relationships between students, staff, families and parish, especially relationships with our First Nation brothers and sisters, the traditional owners of the land on which our schools stand.
May we use this week and the weeks that follow to not only celebrate what is done in our schools, how it is done and who is doing it, but to explore and commit to ways of how each of us can contribute to achieving reconciliation in Australia and in our own school community.
