Parish and School News

Solemn Blessing of St Kevin’s, Hampton Park

Monday 20 August 2012

By Fr Nicholas Pearce

ON Saturday 28 July, Archbishop Denis Hart visited for the Solemn Blessing of our new church, St Kevin’s. This brings to conclusion over 21 years of waiting, planning and saving for the people of Hampton Park, and twelve months of building, restoring and furnishing.

We were incredibly lucky to place in our new church some beautiful pieces of art, some new and others restored. To this end we are incredible grateful for the advice of a number of priests who had been through this process before.

Pope Paul VI once said, when addressing a group of artists: “We need you; we need your collaboration in order to carry out our ministry, which consists, as you know, in preaching and rendering accessible and comprehensible to the minds and hearts of our people the things of the spirit, the invisible, the ineffable, the things of God himself. And in this activity … you are masters. It is your task, your mission, and your art consists in grasping treasures from the heavenly realm of the spirit and clothing them in words, colours, forms – making them accessible.”

Two special mentions must made, firstly, to Paul Hallett and his team who worked to piece together our new altar, font, and statues and make them work, once them came out of the box. The altar now sits at the heart of the Sanctuary, and for the people of Hampton Park it is now a place to gather and be nourished by the Body of our Lord.

Secondly, we were lucky enough to come across a second-hand lectern, and through painstaking and dedicated work, Dwayne at Heritage Silver has breathed new life into it (along with a number of other pieces), and it now stands proudly as a worthy place from which the word of God is proclaimed and expounded.

These men are true craftsmen, who through their dedication and skill continue in a fine tradition of artists who have gone before, helping us in our mission of proclaiming the beauty of God to a world that is sometimes a little ugly.

Photos by Casamento Photography