On Saturday, 27 August 2022 Edmund Rice Centre for Justice and Community Education (ERCJ) organized a workshop on employment and career development for the newly arrived Afghan refugees. This workshop was delivered in partnership with Openpages.

Twenty Third Sunday of the Year

Jesus has some strong, uncompromising and challenging words about the cost of discipleship and the cost of liberation that goes with it. Some might see as an offence to family-centred sensibilities and family values. Jesus is calling for a seismic shift in consciousness – hitting us in places where we are comfortable and drawing us into conversations that matter. They expose our real loyalties and offer us wider and creative horizons. It may come to detesting the ways of our forebears or society, who gave us full bellies and empty hearts, or despising our own ‘lifestyles’, organized as they are around beautiful things. Jesus asks more of us than the Church has ever done, or will need to.

Twenty Second Sunday of the Year

I imagine that for some people their loneliest times are mealtimes. Ì feel sad when a person, usually elderly, is eating alone at a restaurant, cage or take-away. What’s going on for that person? There are people who have been widowed or divorced. There may be a new student trying to find a place to sit at the cafeteria waiting for someone to say ‘pull up a chair’. Jesus was killed because of who he ate with. He refused to stop eating with the wrong people: the unclean; the outcast; the sinner; the heretic; as well as his foes. Jesus’ words capture the reality of his life: ‘…. when you hold a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind; blessed indeed will you be because of their inability to repay you.’ Jesus calls us to associate with those who are outcast because they are weak, damaged, deemed inferior. Jesus sought out the company of those who were powerless and despised which caused contempt to come upon him.