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Charities

Our Parish Charity

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Our current parish charity is The Rainbow Trust. They provide emotional and practical support to families who have a child with a life threatening or terminal illness.

 

Rainbow Trust pairs each family with an expert Family Support Worker, giving them practical and emotional support.

 

They support the whole family including parents, carers, the unwell child, brothers, sisters and grandparents. Those whom they support include a family in our parish. 

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Former Parish Charities include Bridge for Young People (formerly Young People and Children First), Reaching the Unreached and Alexander Devine Children's Hospice.

Friday Self-Denial

We see and hear of so much tragedy in the world that it is easy to feel overwhelmed by the enormity of these needs.
But we know that we must help somehow because Christ asked us to. As we are told in St. Matthew’s gospel, He said, “In so far as you did this to one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did it to me.”


The idea for a Friday Self-denial Group comes from CAFOD: “As individuals it is physically difficult to share our meals with the hungry. They cannot be at our table. However, if we seek voluntarily to fast one day a week we would, in a small way, be in companionship with all those throughout the world who, without any choice, fast each and every day of their lives.”

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There are two aims – spiritual and practical: to appreciate how fortunate we are materially and to share our blessings with others. There are NO meetings to attend.
Each member, couple or family is issued with a set of envelopes for a year. It is suggested that once a week members practise some small act of self denial:

  • A simple meal 

  • No wine / beer

  • No crisps or sweets for children

and the money saved is put into an envelope for the first collection at the Offertory every Sunday. 

Local Food Banks

St. Mary's and the Abbey support the West Berkshire Food Bank run by the Trussell Trust. For details on how it works, what to give, where foodbank centres can be found, times of opening, please visit their website.

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St. Luke's and St. Bernadette's support ReadiFood which is run by Faith Christian Group in Reading. Full details can be found on their website.

Other Charities

We have a number of Catholic charities we regularly support by Second Collections. These include:

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