Brisbane’s inaugural Annual Catholic Campaign will be held in parishes next weekend (June 15 and 16). ARCHBISHOP MARK COLERIDGE writes on the significance of the campaign.
THE Annual Catholic Campaign is a fresh answer to an old question: How might we raise the money we need for mission?
The Church isn’t a business: we don’t need money for the sake of money or to pay a bigger dividend to our shareholders.
But we do need money for mission. This has always been the case.
Who bank-rolled Jesus as he moved through Palestine on his mission?
Even more to the point, who bank-rolled St Paul and his team on their complex and costly mission through the Mediterranean world?
We need a St Francis every now and then to tell us that there’s more to life than money and possessions.
But we still need resources for mission.
That’s what the Annual Catholic Campaign is all about.
We need money for ministries within the Church but also for mission to the wider world.
Without the money, there can be no mission.
With all our resources – spiritual, emotional, physical, financial – we reach out to the hungry, to strangers, to the naked and the imprisoned; and in finding our way to them we find our way to Jesus himself, as we learn in Matthew’s great scene of the last judgment (25:31-46).
It’s true of the Church in general that some of the strategies that worked well in the past no longer work as well as they did.
Therefore, we need to think laterally and come up with fresh approaches.
What is true in general is true of fundraising.
The ways in which we raised funds in the past are not working as well as they once did.
That’s why we are trying a fresh approach in the Brisbane archdiocese’s Annual Catholic Campaign.
It gathers a number of separate appeals – for Centacare, for the seminary, for retired clergy, for youth ministry – into a single appeal.
To these we are also adding the MacKillop Foundation which has been established to help children from families who are struggling to find the money to afford the opportunity of a Catholic education.
We say that no child will be denied a Catholic education for financial reasons; and this is an attempt to put our money where our mouth is.
So any contribution to the Annual Catholic Campaign won’t just disappear into a black hole.
It will go to help real people in real need in the areas I have mentioned.
The theme of this year’s campaign is “You make a difference to me”.
At times the Church can seem a vast impersonal bureaucracy; and it’s true that the Archdiocese of Brisbane is a very large operation with more than 100 parishes and more than 130 schools, to say nothing of our other agencies.
But in the midst of all of that, we are dealing with real people, because the life of the Church is, in the end, a matter of relationship.
It is face-to-face and person-to-person.
Each of us can make a real difference in the lives of other people, young and old, who are in need.
We can make a difference to them just as Jesus makes a difference to us.
We say to the Lord, “You make all the difference to me”.
And we can hear from others the words, “You make a difference to me”.
It is in that face-to-face and person-to person relationship that we begin to change the world in the way God wants.
Therefore, I urge you to be bold and generous in giving from your abundance to the Annual Catholic Campaign.
Besides making your own gift to the Annual Catholic Campaign, I am asking you to pray for its success.
Take some time in the coming weeks to pray that Catholic people will be inspired to share their gifts with others.
Pray that, as a result of the Annual Catholic Campaign, the Church will be able to help real people in real need.
I’m also asking you to help us in your individual parish and school communities to encourage others to be part of the campaign.
We need your help to ask others to become part of our Living Faith Society, our monthly regular donor program.
When all of us give on a regular basis, the Church can plan for mission into the future and make the kind of difference we are called to make.
Brisbane archdiocese’s inaugural Annual Catholic Campaign (ACC) will be held in parishes next weekend (June 15 and 16).
Schools will be conducting ACC events and functions at various times.
To make a gift or to find more information on the Annual Catholic Campaign go to www.catholiccampaign.com.au or call the Catholic Foundation on (07) 3324 3200.
