Malacca Johore Diocese News Update #220

Apr 25, 2025

Welcome dear friends,

Wishing you a blessed Easter and may the peace of the Risen Lord be with you.

The journey to the Church of St Theresa Masai is usually a 15-minute drive. But the heavy downpour and the flash floods on the Masai Lama Road and the Pasir Gudang Highway, the road cutoffs worsened the traffic flow…. I had to make U-turns, detours, squeeze into emergency lanes and crawl along. When I was getting edgy, a hymn by the Weston Priory Monks, Anything happens, calmed me and I made it on time for the Chrism Mass. We want things to be linear and certain. We react to the uncertain, the unpredictable and chaos. We forget very quickly that Anything happens. It was a spirit-filled Chrism Mass.

Something’s Happening Near You:

1. The pilgrim cross or the Salib Malaysia was assembled at the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart Johor Bahru on April 11 and it leaves for St Louis Kluang on its second leg.

2. The diocese is preparing for the Training of Trainers Programme on Synodality, the changes that are expected, the conversions needed, the spirituality required to sustain this new Pentecost. Ignorance is not bliss.

3. The PSO MJD will be conducting a Safeguarding of Minors Workshop on July 5 (9.00am - 1.00pm) at Majodi Centre for Tamil-speaking parents, youth leaders and catechists.

4. The Catholic Bishops Malaysia called for a nationwide appeal for Myanmar- Thailand Earthquake Humanitarian Response. In all churches, the second collection on Divine Mercy Sunday (April 26-27) and additional donations are welcome till May 31.

Easter Time: Love Poured Out, Not Love Stored Up.

1. In this beautiful hymn, Philippians 2:5- 11, Paul recognises that Jesus had only one “operational mode.” Everything he did, he did by self-emptying. He emptied himself and descended into human form. And he emptied himself still further (“even unto death on the cross”) and fell through the bottom to return to the realms of dominion and glory. In whatever life circumstance, Jesus always responded with the same motion of self-emptying — or to put it another way, with the same motion of descent: going lower, taking the lower place, not the higher.

2. It is a path he himself walked to the very end. In the garden of Gethsemane, with his betrayers and accusers massing at the gates, he struggled and anguished but remained true to his course.

3. Do not hoard, do not cling — not even to life itself. Let it go, let it be — “Not my will but yours be done, O Lord. Into your hands I commend my spirit.” 4. Thus he came and thus he went, giving himself fully into life and death, losing himself, squandering himself, “gambling away every gift God bestows.” It was not love stored up but love utterly poured out that opened the gates to the Kingdom of Heaven. --Fr Richard Rohr

A Thought for the Week: The Radio DJ.
A very poor woman with a small family called-in to a radio station asking for help from God. A non-believer man who was also listening to this radio programme decided to make fun of the woman. He got her address, called his secretary and ordered her to buy a large amount of foodstuffs and take them to the woman. However, he sent it with the following instruction: “When the woman asks who sent the food, tell her that it’s from the devil.” When the secretary arrived at the woman's house, the woman was so happy and grateful for the help that had been received. She started putting the food inside her small house. The secretary then asked her, “Don’t you want to know who sent the food?” The woman replied, “No, I don’t even care because when GOD orders, even the devil obeys!” Lesson from the poor woman: For the believer, God hears. The unbeliever mocks. But God uses all means and any means to accomplish His plans.

QnQ! Q asks? Does God abandon us as HE abandoned Jesus on the cross? From a Cistercian monk in Spain: ‘Sometimes God withdraws a particular blessing from someone so that the person can comprehend Him as something other than a being of whom one asks favours and makes requests. He knows how far He can test a soul, and never goes beyond that point. At such moments, we must never say: “God has abandoned me”. He will never do that, even though we may sometimes abandon Him. If the Lord sets us a great test, he always gives us sufficient grace to pass that test.’

The Holy Spirit @ work: “The resurrection of Christ changed the midnight of bereavement into a sunrise of reunion; it changed the midnight of disappointment into a sunrise of joy; it changed the midnight of fear to a sunrise of peace.” Billy Graham

Something To Tickle You: When a nation’s young men are conservative, its funeral bell is already rung. Henry Ward Beecher

Bishop Bernard Paul