NEWSLETTER INSERTS FOR ASCENSION SUNDAY

‘We need faces and voices to speak for people again. We need to cherish the gift of communication as the deepest truth of humanity, to which all technological innovation should also be oriented’.

Pope Leo XIV, Message for World Communications Day, 17^th May 2026

‘Our faces and voices are unique, distinctive features of every person; they reveal a person’s own unrepeatable identity and are the defining elements of every encounter with others….Faces and voices are sacred. God, who created us in his image and likeness, gave them to us when he called us to life through the Word he addressed to us. This Word resounded down the centuries through the voices of the prophets, and then became flesh in the fullness of time. We too have heard and seen this Word (cf. 1 Jn 1:1-3) — in which God communicates his very self to us — because it has been made known to us in the voice and face of Jesus, the Son of God’.

Pope Leo XIV, Message for World Communications Day, 17th May 2026

‘Today our Lord Jesus Christ ascended into heaven; let our hearts ascend with him", and noting that through grace, "we also ascend, because we are in Him’.

St Augustine

‘The Solemnity of the Ascension invites us to be in profound communion with the dead and Risen Jesus, invisibly present in the life of each one of us.’

Pope Benedict XVI

‘Had Christ remained on earth, sight would have taken the place of faith’.

Blessed Fulton Sheen

‘Today we celebrate the feast of the Lord’s Ascension into heaven. The meaning of this mystery of faith is easily misunderstood. It is not about the departure of God from the stage of the world. God did not draw close to us with the birth of his Son and then withdraw from us again with the ascension. It’s not a case of ‘now you see him, now you don’t’. With the coming of Christ, God has visited his people and has come to stay. That is why he promises at the end of the Gospel – ‘Know I am with you always, yes to the end of time’.

Fr Billy Swan