Draft minutes of meeting of St Pancras parish council, January 26, 2021,
Meeting held online via Zoom.
Present Fr Joseph Welch (parish priest), Stephen Griggs (chairman), Stephen Donaghy (secretary), |Mim MacMahon (safeguarding officer), Judy Fell (sacristan) and Sue Devlin (SD)
Apologies: Kathleen Vidal, David Mitchell (administrator)
Meeting opened with a prayer
Minutes of previous meeting on January 28, 2020 had been circulated and were approved.
Matters arising: Bernie Wood, Lisa Maria De Pasquale and Jo Shevlin who had resigned from the committee were to be thanked for their service.
Weekday Mass times
Fr had introduced daily weekday Masses at 1030am on his arrival three weeks previously, apart from Tuesday when Mass was at 8am. Saturday morning Mass at 10 and Sunday Massses were left unchanged.
Having Mass at 1030 allowed elderly parishioners travelling in from outlying areas to use bus passes that took effect at 9.30. However, having Mass then meant Fr was unable to carry out pastoral work until after lunch. He was looking at experimenting with varying times, introducing earlier and evening Masses from the start of Lent.
2 Statue of St Pancras. Fr would like to have an altar to church’s patronal saint but at present we do not even have a statue. He had invited the Bishop to celebrate a high Mass on the feast of St Pancras, May 12, this year, Covid restrictions permitting, and had begun exploring the possibility of having a statue of St Pancras carved; a parishioner had offered to contribute to the cost. Fr had spoken about possibility of obtaining a copy of the Nettuno statue of Our Lady of Ipswich which would cost several thousand pounds and a good-quality statue of St Pancras would be a similar price.
3 Car parking Any enforcement action would have to be policed to ensure car park may be closed to non-parishioners. An undertaker had recently sent a member of staff to the car park two hours before funeral to ensure that it had spaces for cortege. A barrier with key pad had been costed at £4,500. A bollard post would be a few hundred pounds.