From Down Under to Vatican City: A ‘small but mighty’ Catholic community

For three pilgrims from a small town in Queensland, Australia, meeting Pope Leo after the General Audience helped close the gap between their “geographically isolated” homeland and the heart of the Catholic Church.

Fr. Jack Ho

Thousands of pilgrims fill St. Peter’s Square every Wednesday to attend the Pope’s weekly General Audience. From Tanzania and India to Brazil and Canada, countries from around the globe are always represented.

On May 20, a small group of pilgrims travelled the almost 10,000 miles (15,980 km) from Australia to Vatican City for the opportunity to meet Pope Leo XIV and share their story.

Celebrating an anniversary

Hailing from the small town of Childers, Queensland, Fr. Jack Ho and Joe and Jillian Russo had planned three separate pilgrimages to Rome but soon realized they could turn their individual journeys into a shared celebration.

The trio—all part of the Sacred Heart Catholic Parish—decided to mark the 100th anniversary of the founding of their parish primary school St. Joseph’s Catholic. The school was founded in 1926 by the Sisters of St Joseph and today serves just under 200 students.

While Childers may be small, they saw this pilgrimage as their chance to bring something with them “to the universal Church to connect our little town with the wider Universal Church, and also to be able to bring something, even the Holy Father9;s blessing, back to our little town” as Fr. Jack explained to Vatican News after the Audience.

And that’s just what they did. Not only were they able to attend a General Audience, they were able to greet the Pope. For Fr. Jack, who serves as the parish priest at Sacred Heart, it was an extraordinary experience and something he realized was bigger than himself.

It helps “the people I carry in my prayer on this pilgrimage—our parishioners, our school staff, students, and families—to feel like we are not alone, even though we are geographically isolated, we9;re not alone.”

Catholicism in Australia

For the three pilgrims, their Catholic faith is an essential part of their lives. But they are part of only a small percentage of the Australian population. Only about 20% of the entire population is Catholic, with only 8% attending Mass on an average weekend.

This is a challenge of which Fr. Jack is very much aware. “The church as a whole, I think for us, particularly in our parish, is that we have small numbers. Very small numbers in very small towns,” he stressed. In the town of Childers with little less than 2,000 people, the challenge is real, especially when it comes to bringing young people back to church.

Fr. Jack has responded to this with a twist on the typical approach to engaging young people. He shifted from creating programs for them to join. The parish priest saw a greater response when found out what they were interested in and discovered ways for them to use their gifts and talents in the parish.

Though Sacred Heart Parish’s numbers are small, Fr. Jack highlighted that this does not mean it is mediocre. He shared he often tells his parishioners that even though they are “one of the smallest parishes in the country, does not mean we can9;t be the most brilliant, the most innovative, the most active and the most creative parishes in the church.”

That, he argued, is where their hope lies—that they are “small, but hopefully small and mighty.”

A generational legacy

Investing in the young people of community is something that strikes a chord with Jillian and Joe, who are active in parish life and the school community. Joe is a member of our Parish Leadership Team at Sacred Heart and is an alumnus of the parish school. Moreover, his family has been linked to the school for the past 70 years across three generations.

For the St. Joseph graduate, this papal encounter was a unique experience to represent the parish and school his family has been connected to for the past 70 years across three generations. He shared it was a privilege and meeting he would never have imagined.

From the first Australian saint

The trio made sure not to forget the overarching theme of their pilgrimage to Rome when they met Pope Leo face-to-face. They brought all the faculty, staff, students, and families from Childers with them through the special gifts they presented to the Pope.

Recalling an old tradition, the Australian priest exchanged the Pope’s zucchetto (the white skull cap) for one Fr. Jack had bought the day prior—a simple but grand gesture to bring back to the students in Childers.

The second gift was a simple wooden cross made from the floorboards of the original school established by St. Mary of the Cross MacKillop—the first and currently only Australian saint—in Panola, South Australia. This one of the very first schools she built, and as Fr. Jack noted, having that piece of history is special.

They also presented the Pope with a commemorative centenary school shirt and a small candle, made by the young people in the parish. This, Fr. Jack said, is a reminder that even if their community is small, “when the small light is lit in a dark place, it shines.”

Now the small but mighty Catholic community down in Childers, Australia have not one but two symbols of their connection to the universal Church displayed in St. Joseph’s school, which F.r. Jack stressed will remind them that “we’ve a good future ahead of us.”

Kielce Gussie
Source: vaticannews.va/en