Welcome to Saint Edmund's, Horndean

 To be read out on Sunday 7^th May at the 830 and 1030 Masses at St Edmund’s Horndean.

This is an important announcement regarding a change to the Sunday Mass time that will take effect from Sunday 4th June.

Due to unforeseen circumstances, Fr James and I will have to cover the Sunday Mass at St. Patrick’s Hayling Island for a number of months, starting from Sunday 4^th June. Unfortunately, due to the shortage of priests, the Diocese does not have any capacity to fill this need, so we need to manage this change within our Pastoral Area.

In St. Edmund’s, in recent months we have talked about the possibility of combining 08:30 and 10:30 masses. We will now make this change on Sunday 4th June. We believe that by bringing all parishioners together at one mass, as happened at the Easter Triduum, we will strengthen, and hopefully grow, our Parish community. This will also enable us to continue to provide Sunday Mass for the parishioners of Hayling and honour our commitment to provide a regular Sunday Mass at all existing Mass centres across the Pastoral Area.

Regarding the time of this single Sunday Mass at St. Edmund’s, we have listened to previous comments from parishioners and the Mass time will be 09:30. This will be the Mass time for the foreseeable future. However, we are involved in the Diocesan 10 Year Review which includes a review of how we will manage all Mass times across the future single Parish and we will not know the outcome of this review till later in the year.

There are no other changes to the current Mass schedule at St Edmunds.

We apologise for any inconvenience this change causes. We are very grateful for the support we have received from parishioners to date and would appreciate your continued support as we extend our Mass coverage over a larger area. We also hope that these actions at St. Edmund’s and at St. Patrick’s demonstrate our desire to maintain and grow each of the parish communities in the Pastoral area, despite the challenges we face in regard to the reduced number of priests.

The change to the Sunday Mass time will be communicated in next week’s Newsletter and on the Website; reminders of the change in Mass time will be included in all Newsletters before Sunday 4^th June.