Monaco Boys Choir comes to Aberdeen

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Aberdeen RC Diocese and St Mary’s Cathedral in Aberdeen are delighted to announce that on Friday 19th July, they are to host the Monaco boys choir – one of the world’s leading youth choirs who are celebrated internationally for their repertoire of classical and traditional works. The choir was established by Prince Albert I of Monaco in 1904 and is comprised of 30 boys between 9 and 18 years of age (images attached). Under the patronage of Prince Albert II, and with the generous support of the government of Monaco, the choir performs top quality charity concerts all around the world.
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Homily for the 250th Anniversary of the Episcopal Ordination of George Hay

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“What do you understand by the Trinity? I understand that there is but one living and true God, and that in God there are three distinct persons, called the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.

“But how can we conceive or comprehend this? It is impossible for us to comprehend it. In the simplicity of our heart we believe it is so; because God himself has revealed it.” Continue reading

Pluscarden Abbey Awarded RTIF Grant

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Pluscarden Abbey has been awarded a grant of £80,500 from the Rural Tourism Infrastructure Fund. The object of the award at Pluscarden is the provision of a new parking area outside the immediate curtilage of the Abbey. Day visitors will thereby be encouraged to leave their vehicles outside the gates and walk up the entrance drive, thus helping to preserve the tranquillity of the grounds beside the Abbey and also enhance their own experience of the beauty of the setting.

Northern Catholic History Notes

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Alasdair Roberts and Ann Dean’s History Notes chronicle Catholic life in the North of Scotland. From the fascinating story of Patrick Gordon of Auchleuchries, close friend of Tsar Peter the Great, who rose in rank from trooper to full general, to the intriguing tale of Malcolm Hay, the code breaking laird, who headed up the War Office’s Cryptology Department in the First World War. Continue reading

Homily for the Ascension

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We are keeping a beautiful feast.

“As he blessed them, he withdrew from them and was carried up to heaven”. So the Gospel describes what we are celebrating. “He withdrew from them”: he brought to an end the 40 days of post-Resurrection appearances to his disciples. He “was carried up into heaven”: returning to the Father from whom he came, taken in his humanity, definitively, irreversibly into God’s heavenly domain and into the fullness of who he is. He leapt, says an Anglo-Saxon poet. And in that “leap”, “the host of angels / … was made glad with rapture / with joy…[and] / the play of the prince became an eternal delight” (Cynewulf, Christ II). The disciples, too, “went back to Jerusalem full of joy”, rejoicing in the joy of the one they loved. Continue reading

Family Life Centre, Aberdeen

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St. Mary’s Family life centre is a Diocesan Office for Family Life Issues and is to be used by the Holy Family Sisters of the Needy and their collaborators in line with their apostolate of caring for the poor and needy, to attend to occurring family issues like: crisis pregnancy, abortion mindedness, post abortion crisis, marriage crisis, barrenness, intimate partner domestic violence, girls and women in difficult situations. Continue reading