Meeting up with the Mission

THERE is an Irish Mission on in Birmingham but you don't have to go to the Cathedral to find it. You can meet up with it anywhere from one of the local dance halls to way out on the site of the new Birmingham motor road.
There are the 8.000 members of :he Holy Family Confraternity to be reckoned with, too. Many of !hem always fill the Cathedral each ‘N'ednesday evening, they will have a gay social for an hour or so afterwards, and the next day they make it their business to pass on to others—al home and at work —the things they heard from the pulpit the previous evening. They hear what the Missioner says. and half the city hears what they say.
This confraternity was started seven years ago by Canon Hodgson and the Irish Jesuit Missioners Since then there has been a mission every year but one.
Now the Missioners, Fr. Shell from Dublin, and Fr. Kilbride from Cork are back again. They are preaching nightly this week, sometimes from one pulpit. sometunes using two for a discussion.
The people are equipped with a textbook called-" Handy Answers" and they also get two leaflets to help them approach careless Catholics and non-Catholics.
And the missioner supports the apostolic people. He visits five or six dance halls where Catholics congregate. The managers welcome him and invite him to speak from the band platform. . .
During the day he visits the principal construction works where Catholics are employed, like the McAlpine motor-road. where he talks to Catholics among the falling bricks and dust of the demolition squads.
The schools are not forgotten. Two talks .a day arc given for a week and there are opportunities for personal interviews.
The missioners are returning to Dublin next week but will he back in England in September for a three-months' campaign.
700 villages
Bishop Parker opened the new chapel of St. Christopher at Fox Den, Burnham, Bucks, on Sunday. Many priests, nuns and parishioners of surrounding parishes were present and attended Benediction given on the lawn during which the Bishop preached. The opening was preceded by the annual meeting of the Friends of the Travelling Mission which in the Northampton diocese annually visits some 700 villages in seven counties,
Second prize
Gordon Sewell, leader writer of the Southern Daily Echo, won the second prize of f100 in the British Section of the Atlantic Community Awards' Journalism Competition. He was presented with the prize by Sir David Kelly last week.