ONE-COUNTY DIOCESE IS MAKING RAPID PROGRESS

Many priests now saying 3 Sunday Masses
S0 rapid and widespread has been the progress of Catholic development in the Brentwood diocese
-in spite of building and financial restrictions that many priests have now received permission to say three Masses every Sunday to keep pace with their pastoral duties, Bishop Beck reports in his Trinity Sunday pastoral letter.
Swift development has been called for and helped on by the thousands of people who have come to the new housing estates and towns in this one-county (Essex) diocese, and the Bishop has a special word of praise for the Catholic families living there.
But also, in its first year, the Brentwood Travelling Mission is finding scores of scattered Catholics-some of them away from the Mass and the Sacraments for years on end-and is now providing Mass regularly in 16 isolated parts of the diocese.
Progress
Five of these have developed so quickly that the Bishop is having to seek buildings to serve as permanent Mass centres.
The bombed church at Canning Town has been rebuilt and reopened, the diocese's first permanent church since the war has been opened at Newbury Park and another at Wickford, as well as a chapel at Thaxted.
Tunis Hall, Hadleigh. has been bought and converted into a Mass centre, and another has been opened at Doddinghurst. New church halls arc on the way at Collier Row, Harold Hill, Aveley and Hainaultall new estates. Properties are to be acquired as Mass centres at Saffron Walden, Harold Hill and Harwich.
Even so, Bishop Beck suggests that "the most notable material development in the diocese has been concerned with presbyteries."
Here a new development is the renting of houses for priests on L.C.C. estates. Rented houses are already occupied at Hainault, Harold Hill and Aveley, and similar arrangements are being made on the Melbourne Estate at Chelmsford.
Altogether, about a dozen presbyteries have been acquired in the year or are on the way to being built.
"We are confident that there is a great future for the Church in these new areas," says Bishop Beck. "and are grateful to the pioneer Catholics in the housing estates who are setting such a good example."
Irish help
Irish Bishops and religious superiors are lending a considerable number of their priests to the diocese and more are coming. But the Bishop points out that eventually the diocese must depend on its own priestly vocations, and he asks all to encourage them.
Meanwhile-with his thoughts on the immense amount of work tc he done-the Bishop asks the laity "most earnestly to pray for your priests and to ask Almighty God to protect them and keep them in good health."