Records of the parish of Holy Trinity date back as far as the 1830s. There was a Roman Catholic presence in the area long before that.

Street names like Friary Road, not to mention The Friary itself (now private residencies) are ample evidence of monastic ministry during the middle ages.

The current building was consecrated in 1979 and is situated adjacent to Holy Trinity Catholic Primary School along with the Community & Partnership Centre which was opened in 2005. This is a replacement for the church in Parliament Street which still holds fond memories for older parishioners.

For anybody wanting to learn more about the history of the Catholic Church in Newark, a two-part PDF document has been produced by parishioner Francis Towndrow which can be downloaded by clicking the following links: Part 1 and Part 2

Current news items...

In June 1952, six ladies from Holy Trinity Parish, Newark set up the local branch of The Catholic Women's League. On Thursday 19th April following 12 noon Mass, Monica Burton and Hildegaard Fisher of the early meetings enjoyed the meal provided by the present group in the company of guests from Stamford, Sleaford and Lincoln.

The diocesan President Odette Millar and the spiritual director Fr Michael Lynch assisted the local President Freda Richmond for the cutting of the cake. A history of the CWL Newark has been assembled and can be viewed here along with a selection of photographs from the lunch.

Did you know that the translation of the Mass that we previously used has changed? The texts we had before had been in use since 1970 and in September we began to use a new translation. For further information click here.

We are pleased to have been chosen as one of 17 projects nationally. The Diocese, Parish and RE: generate have been working together over the last 6 months to explore the potential of community animating and organising models, and to introduce the RE: congregate programme to the area. Our vision is to increase our impact with harder to reach communities within Newark and to tackle the roots of issues facing our neighbourhood. The Holy Trinity Partnership has physical assets and human resources that can and should be made available to those who are facing particular disadvantage – and we are keen to look at creative ways of engaging, motivating and mobilising people in developmental, transformational and organised action to tackle root causes, address immediate needs and build local sustainability and resilience.

Fr Michael O’Donoghue will lead the project of behalf of the Holy Trinity Partnership. The Holy Trinity Partnership will commission Re:generate to bring their unique community engagement and organising process, skills and expertise to the locality.

RE:generate will work directly with the Partnership team and provide an experienced team of trained animator/organiser(s) and senior managers/training staff, to deliver the Listening-Matters process and training for transformation programme. The RE:generate team will train and mentor parishioners and members of the local community to co-deliver the Root Solution-Listening Matters engagement process in the parish and surrounding neighbourhoods.

The relationship will benefit the Holy Trinity Partnership by:

• boosting and extending volunteer skills
• extending and deepening a strong base of experience, volunteering and activism within the parish community into the wider, diverse and secular communities across the neighbourhood
• unearthing undeveloped and hidden talents – and engaging new volunteers
• Developing new skills, insights, leadership and effective process to fulfil the partnership mission and aims of empowering people who experience disadvantage.

RE:generate will benefit from the opportunity to pilot their RE:congregate model with a strongly rooted, socially committed faith based organisation located in an area of significant disadvantage – enabling demonstration/comparison of their community animating and organising models in relation to the Big Society.

The Holy Trinity Partnership and RE:generate will both benefit from the opportunity to work with NESTA and to learn from other organisations on a national programme. We will:

• Be open to working in new ways throughout the lifetime of the project
• Participate in rigorous evaluation and share learning publicly
• Work openly with NESTA and any partner organisations to develop the skills and capacity to deliver the project
• Act as an impartial distributor of funds and to put in place a process to do this fairly and impartially in the local neighbourhood

The Neighbourhood Challenge is being run by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) with support from the Big Lottery Fund (BIG). It will work with community organisations and community organisers to demonstrate how people, when equipped with the right skills and small amounts of money, can devise new and imaginative ways to get people involved in tackling local issues together.

Please click here for link to the Community Challenge blogs.

END

Fr Michael O’Donoghue

All parishioners and friends are welcome to The Concelebrated Mass of Thanksgiving with Bishop Malcolm McMahon OP, Deanery and Diocesan Priests to mark Fr Michael's 40 years of priesthood on sunday June 13th at 6.30pm followed by refreshments and entertainment in the Community Partnership Centre.

The Parish Mission came to a marvellous end on Friday 26th with a party for the parish by the parish. Thank you to Fr Kieran Brady and Bro Derek Ryan for leading us in Faith.

In order that the Parish can evaluate the success of the Mission, we would appreiciate a few minutes of your time to complete a short questionnaire which we have prepared. This is available to be completed as an online form by clicking here. Alternatively, you may prefer to download a PDF which you can print out and complete by hand before delivering to the Parish office by clicking here. Thank you for your time.

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