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Princethorpe, November 2005

To: Professed and Lay members of the MSC family in the Provinces of Europe.

News from the new European Community

Dear Brothers and Sisters of the MSC family,

On the 28^th of September 2005 Mark Van Beeumen and Ton Zwart left their respective countries of Belgium and the Netherlands and joined Carl Tranter in "Gardener’s Cottage" on the campus of Princethorpe College, the Catholic secondary school founded by the MSCs in England in 1966. It is here that the new European Community is being initially established. It is called ‘new’ to distinguish it from the already existing International M.S.C. Community in Eastern Europe (Nitra, Slovakia). This new community is meant specifically to connect with the secular and multicultural world of a Western European city through a ministry of presence.

Princethorpe, located in gently-sloping countryside, does not come anywhere near to an inner-city environment! But, offered by the Irish Province as a temporary residence for the new community, it serves the purpose of a staging area, giving us the necessary time to adequately prepare ourselves for moving out next year to one of the major cities of England.

Preparation is indeed our present task. It requires first of all that the three of us form one community by living together and getting to know one another. We aspire to be an MSC community characterised by a prayerful relationship with the Lord who calls us for His mission and by warm mutual relations among one another.

Part of forming community consists also in connecting with the wider MSC community we belong to, that of the Irish Province. We were happy to attend two Assemblies in October; the one for the MSCs working in England and the other for the MSCs in Ireland. It was very pleasant to meet and get to know so many of them.

We ourselves have also been able to welcome a few confreres. We regularly see Alan Whelan M.S.C. and Teddy O’Brien MSC, who live nearby, but also Joe McGee MSC, Parish Priest of the MSC parish in Tamworth, Staffordshire, has dropped in a few times and we had the pleasure of welcoming Diarmuid O'Murchú MSC and our first foreign visitor, Mathieu Paradijs MSC of Belgium.

Apart from housekeeping and all that it entails most of our time is given to study and reflection. We are following a reading and shared reflection programme about evangelisation today, about missiology in the western, secularised world, dialogue with other religions and about our own MSC spirituality. The purpose of all this is to arrive at one heart and one mind as we try to discern what city to choose for our intended inner-city ministry and what this ministry of presence would look like. We also want to see for ourselves what sorts of activities others who are engaged in this type of ministry have been doing and how we can learn from them and find ways to cooperate. We have planned a three-week seminar in Tilburg, in the Netherlands, during February next year to deepen our understanding and appreciation of our congregational history, charism and spirituality of the Heart, the basis of our being and doing. We hope that this will give a particular MSC focus to our discernment, and challenge the way we seek to incarnate our spirituality in Western European, post-modern society. By March of next year we expect to be ready to decide on the precise city and neighbourhood to live and work in so that the necessary arrangements can then be made.

Our own website is still a dream. But we need a broadband internet connection for that. So far our application has run into technical difficulties which only British Telecom can solve. Clearly we are not a priority for them! As soon as we have a site up and running we will let you know.

We are very much aware that we have to prove ourselves and the project as a true MSC response to the fast-changing nature of Western Europe, but we are equally convinced that being true MSCs will suffice to make some difference in this world.

This is our wish for ourselves and for all MSCs as we approach the celebration of the 151^st anniversary of our society and at the same time prepare for the feast of the birth of Christ. He was the first to engage in a Ministry of Presence. We trust that He will continue to do so.

Ton Zwart MSC

Mark Van Beeumen MSC

Carl Tranter MSC