God's love and mercy through Confession

Confession and Reconciliation in our Parish

The Sacrament of Reconciliation

We welcome you to our Parish. If you would like to go to Confession then you can find the general times below in our Parish churches. However use our Daily Services Calendar to get an actual view of the Services for that day.

Confession is heard at the front of the Church in the sacristy either privately or face to face.
Confession is also available on request if at all possible.
If you want to find out more about the Sacrament of Reconciliation then please feel free to visit out webpage on Reconciliation

View our Daily Services calendar for upcoming dates >

Confession at St Swithuns

(Check calendar for actual dates)
Mondays at 9.30am to 9.55am
Tuesdays at 9.30am to 9.55am and 6:30pm to 6:55pm
Wednesdays at 9.30am to 9.55am
Thursdays at 9.30am to 9.55am
Fridays at 9.30am to 9.55am and 6:30pm to 6:55pm
Saturdays at 9.30am to 9.55am
Sundays at 8.00am to 8.25am and 5:30pm to 5:55pm

Confession at Our Lady of Lourdes

(Check calendar for actual dates)
Saturdays at 5:30pm to 5:55pm

Beacon

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DAILY MEDITATION:Good News ReflectionTuesday of the 28th Week of Ordinary TimeOctober 16, 2018Today’s Prayer:May Your Holy Spirit open my spiritual eyes to see what is really important for my life and the life of my neighbors. Amen.Today's Readings:Galatians 5:1-6Psalm 119:41,43-45,47-48Luke 11:37-41True obedienceTrue obedience to the laws of God is true faith -- not because obedience wins us God's approval and gets us into heaven, but because faith is the presence of Christ within us and he is the fulfillment of the Law.Today's first reading reminds us that faith expresses itself through love. Since God is love and every law of his is based on love, obedience without love is legalism, i.e., lawfulness without faith. And this, St. Paul says, is an attempt to justify ourselves; it's a fall from grace. Why? Because it separates us from Christ who already justified us through his death on the cross.In the Gospel reading, Jesus defines the core problem of legalistic obedience: It fails to change us on the inside. The Pharisee's attitude was quite condescending toward Jesus, which reveals that his obedience to the rules and regulations of religious life had not moved his heart with love. He was more concerned about rituals than about people.Moral laws, Church rules, and ritual norms are good and necessary. They are all based on the Law of Love. Their purpose is to bring us into a stronger, closer relationship with the Author of Love and with the whole Church that embodies this Love. Disobedience is either rebellion against love or ignorance of the loving reasons for obedience, and someone somewhere somehow gets hurt.However, when we love obedience more than we love people, the law itself becomes our god. To imitate Christ, we must care enough about others to put aside legalism whenever it interferes with their salvation or their basic needs. The Church calls for this in Canon Law!Please note: Moral laws are unchangeable, because it's always unloving to disobey them. But rules and norms and policies do change as the problems that they address change. If we're afraid that changes and adaptations are disobedience, we have to examine them through the lens of moral law, and if the change is based on love and we still don't approve, we are only understanding them legalistically, not faithfully.Legalism makes us desperate. Try as we might, we cannot earn our way into heaven through obedience, because we will never be perfect enough. In trying to make ourselves right with God, we become more rigid, we distrust changes in the Church, and we're unable to see where and how the Church does allow for adaptations.Faith means obeying even before we understand why we should obey, always asking the Holy Spirit to give us understanding. To fulfill the law faithfully, we must keep our eyes on Jesus, for he showed us by his example how to be truly obedient.#dailymeditations www.stswithuns.org.uk/event/dr-16102018 ... See MoreSee Less

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DAILY MEDITATION:Good News ReflectionMonday of the 28th Week of Ordinary TimeMemorial of Saint Teresa of Jesus, Virgin and Doctor of the ChurchOctober 15, 2018Today’s Prayer:Your resurrection, Lord, is the only sign I need to know that my whole life is in the hands of my Father. Amen.Today's Readings:Galatians 4:22-24,26-27,31--5:1Psalm 113:1b-7Luke 11:29-32What sign you are looking for?What kind of sign do you need God to provide so that you can feel assured that your prayers are being answered?Reflecting on today's first reading, let's remember why Abraham had two sons. God had promised him one son, born by his wife, Sarah. But Sarah laughed at that idea, because the signs of her aged body told her that she was long past fertility. Then as time went by without a miraculous pregnancy, both Sarah and Abraham took this as a sign that God wanted the baby to be born through human means, i.e., through a surrogate mother, Sarah's handmaid, Hagar.This decision caused rivalry and animosity between Abraham's two sets of descendants. Four thousand years later, the Middle East is still suffering the repercussions of this decision. (Hagar bore Ishmael, who married an Egyptian woman, according to the Bible. According to the Arabs, he also married a daughter of Sheik Mudad, who bore Adnan, the ancestor of Mohammed, the founder of Islam.) Muslims and Jews have been fighting each other throughout history. What if Abraham and Sarah had continued to wait for God to fulfill his promise, instead of taking matters into their own hands?In the Gospel reading, Jesus says, "This is an evil age. It seeks a sign." Why are signs evil? Because we invent our own signs. We seek signs that are not from God.What help from God are you still awaiting? What resolution to a problem, what new job, what reconciled relationship? Jesus says that he is the sign that we are given. And he is enough! He is the one who is "greater than Jonah".The sign of Jonah was his emergence from the belly of the giant fish after three days. Jonah's mission after getting spewed onto the beach (and presumably after cleaning himself up a bit) was to call the Ninevites to repentance. Jesus emerged from the belly of the earth at the end of his three-day ordeal. His resurrection calls the whole world to repentance.Here is the sign we are given, and it's the only sign that really matters: Since God the Father raised Jesus from the dead, of course he will also give us the new life that we need. Of course he will provide the right resolution to our problems, the job that's right for us, or the reconciled relationships. We fail to notice this sign, however, because God's timing is not usually the same as our preferred timing. While we wait, we take hope from any sign that pops up in our view. We make ourselves miserable and frustrated by trusting in what we see instead of keeping our eyes on Jesus.The storms in our lives could be as huge as a hurricane, but if we look for Jesus instead of signs that the storm is abating, we find him in the eye of the storm. The moment we pull away from him, we hit the hurricane's eye wall and it blows us off our feet. Keep your eyes on Jesus!And while you're waiting for relief from the storm, take a break as often as you need to. Go on a vacation or retreat, attend an uplifting prayer service, talk to friends who are filled with the Holy Spirit's upbeat inspiration, go to daily Mass and let that place be an oasis for you.#dailymeditations www.stswithuns.org.uk/event/dr-15102018 ... See MoreSee Less

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THE HOLY EUCHARIST TODAY:AT 8.30AM in St Swithun's churchAT 10.15AM in St Swithun's church (Family Mass)AT 1.00PM in St Swithun's church (Mass in Polish)(an the rest day and whole night a duty in QA Hospital)below we can see the photos from last Sunday's Family Mass - homily for the children and spontaneous renewing the Sacramental Marriage vows by Rosemary & Brian ... See MoreSee Less

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DAILY MEDITATION:Hitting the Spiritual Wall 14 October 2018Twenty-Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time Mark 10:17-30As Jesus was setting out on a journey, a man ran up, knelt down before him, and asked him, "Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?" Jesus answered him, "Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. You know the commandments: 'You shall not kill; you shall not commit adultery; you shall not steal; you shall not bear false witness; you shall not defraud; honor your father and your mother.'" He replied and said to him, "Teacher, all of these I have observed from my youth." Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said to him, "You are lacking in one thing. Go, sell what you have, and give to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me." At that statement his face fell, and he went away sad, for he had many possessions. Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, "How hard it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!" The disciples were amazed at his words. So Jesu s again said to them in reply, "Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for one who is rich to enter the kingdom of God." They were exceedingly astonished and said among themselves, "Then who can be saved?" Jesus looked at them and said, "For human beings it is impossible, but not for God. All things are possible for God." Peter began to say to him, "We have given up everything and followed you." Jesus said, "Amen, I say to you, there is no one who has given up house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands for my sake and for the sake of the gospel who will not receive a hundred times more now in this present age: houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and eternal life in the age to come."Introductory Prayer: I come to you Jesus, my friend, and my teacher so that by listening to you I will discover you more, learn from you more and fully accept the demanding conditions of following you. I love you Lord, and I trust myself entirely to you.Petition: Help me, Lord, to accept generously the sacrifices that you ask of me today.1. A Sincere Question: Jesus meets a man who wants to do whatever is necessary to obtain eternal life. How do we know this? When Jesus lists off the commandments for him as examples of what he must do to gain eternal life, he replies that he has observed all of them since his youth. Mark goes on to tell us that, “Jesus looking at him, loved him.” If the man weren’t telling the truth, Jesus would have said so, perhaps jogging his conscience and helping him to see where he still needed to improve in his following of the commandments. Jesus does this with us every day if we are sincere and ask ourselves daily if we are truly doing God’s will. He has no qualms in telling us where we are failing and helping us to do better.2. A Sincere Life: Apparently this man is telling the truth. He has always made an earnest effort and has been successful in following all that his Jewish faith asks -- at least insofar as he understands God’s Law. Perhaps we wish we could also respond with a clear conscience, “I have kept all these.” Yet as human beings, we are weak. We can fall at any time. What God expects to see from us is not a life without sin, but that we seek repentance and a quick return to obedience when we do fall. A person who makes light of his sins against God, even in just little things, is destroying his conscience. In contrast, by taking responsibility for our sins, repenting and quickly getting up from our falls, we show our commitment to respect the moral demand of God’s commandments, and we prepare the ground to receive the grace of moral perfection that we cannot achieve by ourselves.3. But He Can’t Step Up: The man is doing everything that his Jewish faith requires and still he wants to do more for God. He has never refused God anything. Jesus sees he is ready for the next step. He calls him to be an apostle. He calls him to give up everything else in his life and follow him. You would think that since he has never denied God anything, he would be able to say “yes” to this. But he cannot. It is too much. Although he doesn’t realize it, there are things he possesses that he loves more than God. Sometimes we progress in our spiritual life, giving everything that God asks for, until the day he asks for something we aren’t prepared to give. Our spiritual life stalls -- sometimes for years -- until we are willing to give what Jesus asks for. Christ calls all people to perfection, to place God above all things. He promises that if we give up our own selves to follow him, he will fill our lives with himself.Conversation with Christ: Dear Jesus, I have tried to follow you faithfully. You know that sometimes it has been a struggle. Help me to leave my comfort zone. Help me to give up the other loves that come before you. Help me to be as generous today as you hope I will be.Resolution: What is the moment in which I usually fail God on a Sunday? I will make sure to be faithful at that moment today.#dailymeditations www.stswithuns.org.uk/event/dr-14102018 ... See MoreSee Less

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stswithuns.org.uk/newsletter-NL_14102018 Join us for Mass today at St Swithun's RC Church Southsea. Mass Times are 8:30am, 10:15am (family mass) and 1pm (mass in Polish). Have a peaceful and blessed day from all at St Swithuns ... See MoreSee Less

Newsletter: 14th October 2018 - 28th Sunday of Ordinary Time Year B 2018 St Swithun's RC Church Southsea

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Confession and Reconciliation in our Parish

Confession at St Swithuns

Confession at Our Lady of Lourdes

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