Changes to Sunday Masses

A year ago, with limited numbers permitted at Mass I introduced the 4pm Saturday Vigil, I didn’t imagine at the time we would keep 5 Sunday Masses for a year. Over the summer I have been contemplating the number of Masses we need as the capacities of the churches increased and the 4.00pm Vigil Mass has become popular. Each Church can comfortably accommodate 150 people with some degree of social distancing and with 380 to 450 people attending church each weekend evenly split between both churches; we currently have too many Masses.

Looking at the numbers attending each Mass and after a few conversations, I have decided to keep a Vigil Mass and a Sunday morning Mass in each Church. As the Sunday 5.00pm Mass is the quietest of our Sunday Masses and there is a wide provision of Sunday evening Masses locally, the Sunday evening Mass will stop after Sunday 3rd October. I appreciate this will be an inconvenience to those who have attended the Sunday evening Mass and I hope one of our four mass times will suit most people.