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Parish History 1999 and Beyond The Parish Today In spite of all these arrangements, accommodation was still stretched. Some relief came after the second Vatican Council, when the practice of Saturday evening Mass as “the first Mass of Sunday” was restored. Today three Masses are celebrated each weekend and on Feast days with additionally one on many weekdays. The active congregation numbers about seven hundred and fifty, although upwards of one thousand attend on major Feasts, and many groups are active within and outside the congregation. Working with other churches has a high priority as does work within the wider community. The church does not see itself as an exclusive club but as people spreading and witnessing to their Faith in their daily lives. Geographically, the parish is large. Spread over an area of 100 square miles and serving an estimated three thousand Catholics in Leighton Buzzard and twenty two outlying villages, it is a heavy task for a single parish priest, even with the support of around sixty lay ministers and catechists, and many other helpers. The Future When our parish was founded, Catholics were an insignificant proportion of the local population; only one in every two hundred. Now we are nearer one in ten. But at that time many more people in the town would have claimed to be Christian and a larger proportion then than now would have been knowledgeable of scripture and of Christian beliefs. It is a sad fact that, if we include the congregations of all the churches in the town, only slightly more than one person in ten regularly attends a church. Much needs to be done in the field of mission. In the ebb and flow of these things, the situation is worse than one hundred years ago but no worse than two hundred or three hundred years ago. It is estimated that in 1750, as today, only one in ten in this land attended church . Christians are, one suspects, in any age, no more than the yeast in the bread or the salt in the stew; small in proportion to the whole, but significant in the effect on the larger body of ingredients. That is one task that lies ahead.
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