After all of the excitement of the Youth Ministry meeting, things were calmer for the Chaplaincy meeting on Sunday 9th and Monday 10th at the Royal Foundation of St Katharine's in London.

Sue McDonald invited chaplains from Salesian schools as well as other chaplains that have Salesian connections. Sunday evening was a relaxed evening with prayer and introductions for the 11 Chaplains.

On Monday, a few of the Chaplains went over to see the Poppy exhibition at the Tower of London before the first session with James Trewby. James had been invited to talk about Social Justice Issues.

 

 

Beginning with prayer, James invited the chaplains to read the newspaper and find something in there that spoke out to them, rip it out and then place it on the table in the middle of the room. After sharing them with one another, they brought the various issues that had been raised to prayer.

After prayer, the Chaplains explored the idea that communities and overseas gap year volunteers are being exploited because of the oversubscription of gap year volunteers. They then looked at how to engage pupils and staff at their schools with the variety of social justice issues.

After the input, the chaplains came together to discuss how they would be able to implement the issues from the morning. The group looked at Families and how to keep them involved after young people leave Primary School. They also looked at and discussed how to change people's mentality of awareness and fundraising.

The groups came back together and spoke about their ideas of how they might be able to implement these ideas in their schools and talked about the resources that they could use and share with each other.

Sue informed the group about the many different activities that the young people from all of the schools could take part in over the next 12 months - Flame at Wembley in March; Youth Easter and the Young Adults Easter retreat at Savio House; Faith in Action at Savio House and Westminster; Phoenix Summer camps and the various Bi-Centenary celebrations.

Sue also alerted the Chaplains to the fact that the Youth Ministry Office are available to give input on Spirituality to Staff on inset days and offered to run workshops at Mission weeks with volunteers.

To end the meeting, Fr Saju led the chaplains in Mass before everyone travelled back home after (which for some was) a very busy weekend.