Clean up day at St Mary’s Cathedral

Sandakan : ‘If you want to cultivate peace. protect creation’ – the theme of Pope’s message on World Day of Peace released on 1st January 2010 which also focused on Integral human development, closely linked to the obligations which flow from man’s relationship with the natural environment (Encyclical Caritas in Veritate)

Some thirty parishioners, mostly from the Bahasa Malaysia Speaking group responded to the message by organizing themselves to clean up the Cathedral and its compound on Sunday 21st March, in preparation for the Holy Week celebration. 

The event started at the Parish Hall with the Proclamation of the Word from Genesis 1 : 11-13 among which the text runs as follows  ‘And the earth brought forth grass, the herb that yields seed according to its kind, and the tree that yields fruit, whose seed in itself according to its kind and so it was.’

We are all invited to have an attitude of respecting and honoring God’s creation. We need to play our roles as faithful stewards of the creation. Thus, we need to make fruitful use of the physical environment that God has given us.

They spend more than three hours cleaning up the Grotto and its surrounding, the waterfall, the baptismal font  as well as the frontage of the Cathedral.