About Us:
Waterlooville Parish is situated just north of Portsmouth on England's
South Coast and services the area around Waterlooville including
Widley, Crookhorn, Purbrook, Cowplain, Denmead, Hambledon and Soberton.
Our Parish Priest is Father Kevin Bidgood and our Catholic Community is
strong and vibrant with more than 700 people attending Masses each
week. This website is intended to give both parishioners and enquirers
access to information about the Parish and its activities.
The Parish is supporting for its Parish Charity the
International Refugee Trust and in particular the work of the Sacred
Heart Sisters running the 'Moyo' orphanage in Uganda for refugees from the
Sudanese civil war.
We have for many years used the former Oratory of the Sisters of our Lady
of Charity, (picture top left), as our Parish Church and for this we are
deeply grateful. The Parish is in the process of planning a new church on
the site which, combined with a Parish Centre, will bring all of our various
groups and activities into one focal point of Christian witness. Read
the current position in the New Church
Committee Latest Minutes.
You can read more about us
in our booklet for new parishioners
Father Kevin Writes...
We may have a problem today when we hear the word “love”. In today’s western
society the word is often trivialised or degraded. So when we read, in the
first letter of John, that God is love; and then when our Gospel today
begins by talking of the love the Father has for Jesus – “As the Father has
loved me, so I have loved you” – we may wonder what this all means. The love
within the inner relationships in the depths of the Trinity is, of course,
beyond our understanding; but it’s certainly not a trivial or sentimental
love. In fact it is a love that is total and self-sacrificial.
John’s letter tells us that God the Father’s sacrificial love is shown
through the activity of the Son: “God’s love for us when he sent his Son to
be the sacrifice that takes our sins away”. Accepting crucifixion was
clearly not trivial or sentimental. It was a tough, brutal, self-giving act
of love on the part of Jesus.
Christ calls us to make that standard of love our own. “Remain in my
love,” he says – that same love that is in the heart of the Trinity, that
same love that is demonstrated in the life and death of Jesus. “Love one
another, as I have loved you.” Jesus is calling us to live that love for
others: that love that we saw demonstrated a few short weeks ago on Holy
Thursday, when he washed the feet of his friends and then supremely when he
offered his life for us on the cross.
This is the love in which we are called to remain all our lives. This is
a love that reflects the true meaning of the word: not something that is
trivial or sentimental, not just an emotion that is simply an internal
response to some external stimulus. When we are called to Christian love, we
are called to a total love for God and for others.
To remain in Jesus’ love is not to sit back and enjoy peace of mind that
is untroubled. It is not a self-indulgent sense of the certainty of our own
salvation without reference to anyone else. Rather, Jesus calls us to love
as he did. That means a love that does not concern itself with our own
wants, our own desires, our own emotions; it means a love that is willing to
give of ourselves, a love that does not count the cost, a love that is
extended even to those we would not normally want to love. This is, truly, a
love that is stronger than death. Let us pray for a deeper commitment in our
lives to that true Christian love that does not just inwardly desire but
outwardly gives.
