May 2005

 

I am very happy to offer researchers whatever help we can provide through our diocesan archives. I have been struck by the growth in genealogy in recent years and I think that it is telling us something about the needs of modern men and women. We live in a rather atomised society, yet God made us to be connected, to belong to something bigger than ourselves. We find ourselves precisely through our relationships with others. God created us, in other words, to live in community.

 

The Catholic Genealogy website is a very helpful response to this deeply felt need. It offers people a way of rediscovering their Catholic identity as this has been transmitted through the generations. Our family is our fundamental community. Faith is always an intensely personal decision, but all of us who have had the blessing of growing up in a Catholic family know that we received our faith through our parents’ love. As we trace the generations backwards, so we see the hand of God intervening time and again in the lives of our forebears, and we recognise that the Risen Lord is as present now to us as He was and remains to them.

 

I know that Catholics from all over the world have settled in this diocese. We have been enriched by repeated waves of immigrants searching for a better life for themselves and their children. In time, no doubt, we will receive enquiries from Eastern Europe, from the West Indies, from Africa, from Ireland, from the Philippines; indeed, from countries in every continent. What a splendid tool the internet is, that it allows us in this way to express in the local Church our communion with one another and the universality of Christ’s Church!

 

With every blessing,

 

 

 

The Right Reverend Arthur Roche

Bishop of Leeds

Leeds Diocesan Archivist Website: refinnigan@hinsley-hall.co.uk .