In the Footsteps of St. Louis Marie de Montfort
"Footsteps Online"
Christmas 1995 (Volume 1, Issue 1)
A New Look
Welcome to "FOOTSTEPS", the new newsletter for the Montfort Associates. We hope you will like it. The change has been initiated because of the retirement of Fr. Wilfrid Jukka from the responsibility for the Associates. Fr. Wilf has worked for 7 or 8 years now at this task, keeping you up-to-date with all our news, and helping you to understand better the spirituality of St. Louis Marie de Montfort. He has done sterling work, for which we thank him sincerely, as we are sure you will want to do too. But Fr. Wilf is not getting any younger, and it was felt that he should no longer be asked to carry this burden, especially as we hope to be starting some new initiatives to help you in the next few months and years. So our Provincial Council has appointed Father Robert Ellwood to take over the direction of the Associates. He will be helped in this by our Provincial Bursar, Fr. Paul Allerton, who will be looking after the editorship of the new newsletter, which we hope to put out, as Fr. Wilf did, 3 or 4 times a year.
Christmas is nearly upon us, the shops and the streets are already glittering with all kinds of tempting things, and the Church's liturgy is preparing us for the celebration of Christ's birth. Different people look forward to Christmas with different feelings: for some it is excitement; for others, it has to be said, it is with less comfortable feelings. Christmas can be a time of loneliness for those who have no family or no home, a time of weariness for those who have to bear the burden of making sure everyone else is happy (mothers of families can easily feel this way), or a time of sadness for those who have recently lost relatives or friends. Yet, what we are celebrating, as Christians, is the greatest event in the history of mankind: the coming into our world of our Creator and Saviour, to share with us all the burdens, but also all the joys, of our human lives, and to hold out for us the promise of everlasting happiness. And so Christmas is essentially for us a time of hope.
In this issue of FOOTSTEPS, we would like to dwell on this theme of hope. It was a virtue dear to St. Louis Marie, as shown in his own life. And the Montfort Missionaries continue to try to give hope to our contemporaries by the work that they do. We pray that the articles in this issue will help you to go forward with renewed hope this Christmastide.
