Pieta

At Youth Cafe this evening we focused on the Pieta. This is the Michelangelo Pieta in St Peter's, Rome. Our St John's Pieta is quite beautiful and we are currently thinking of a worthy and permanant place for it. The Youth Cafe spent some time thinking about the sorrowful mysteries of the most holy rosary.  Last time we met we concentrated on the glorious mysteries; we used our fingers to pray the rosary. The rosary is an easy prayer (we can pray it with our fingers) but it is also a prayer which reflects all the complexities of life.
Jack Regan, lay chaplain at St Wilfrid's School, joined us and led the ice breakers. Great! Meat free pizza was the food.
At the Pieta we reflected that the Church's encouragement to abstain from meat is primarily devotional. We abstain from flesh and reflect on the Incarnation. Christ took our flesh (became Incarnate), He shared our humanity and our inevitable death. In a spirit of prayer, as we come to the Lord who shared our humanity that we might share His divinity, we find the grace to express our Friday abstinence in charity.