Free
Catholic Life Publication of the Diocese of Sale
August 2017
ISSUE 200
Diaconate ordinations TWO of our seminarians will be ordained as deacons at St Mary’s Cathedral, Sale, on September 2. They are Avinash George and Hiep Van Nguyen who are studying for the priesthood at Corpus Christi Seminary, Carlton. Bishop of Sale Pat O’Regan will ordain them at an 11am Mass. For both men it is an exciting milestone on their long journey to the priesthood, which Godwilling will take place next year. Avinash, 32 last week, was born in Kerala India, and initially entered a Franciscan seminary there before coming
to Australia in 2011. He began at Corpus Christi as a candidate for Sale Diocese in 2012 and did his pastoral placement at St Agatha’s parish, Cranbourne. Avinash will be wellsupported at his ordination by his parents, his uncle Fr Mathew Joseph who served in this diocese for several years, and an aunt and uncle from his mother’s side of the family, who are all travelling from India. Also there will be some relatives now living in Australia including an uncle Sunny Joseph and his family and several cousins, including fellow seminarian Stanley Devasia. Hiep, 39, was born in Vietnam
shortly after the reunification of the country at the end of the Vietnam War. He became a secondary school teacher for seven years before discerning that he was being called to become a priest. He started studies in Vietnam, then came to Australia in June 2010 with a view to entering a seminary here. He began learning the English language and was accepted as a candidate for Sale Diocese, beginning at Corpus Christi in February 2011. Hiep did his pastoral placement at Our Lady Help of Christians Parish at Narre Warren. At the ordination he will have support from two priest friends
Avinash George
Hiep Van Nguyen
who are from the same parish in Vietnam where he grew up.
They are Fr Le Van Truong and Fr Pham Troing Phuong.
200th issue this month for Catholic Life WELCOME to the 200th issue of Catholic Life! The newspaper first published in November 1997 and was one of the first free religious newspapers in Australia. The paper came into being following a thorough investigation of the options available to the Diocese of Sale to provide information to the people. A previous paid diocesan newspaper Sale Catholic Life had been closed down by Bishop Jeremiah Coffey some two years earlier because its circulation had fallen to extremely low levels. Bishop Coffey accepted the concept of extending the reach of a diocesan publication by distributing copies to families of children at Catholic schools within the diocese. He employed former Gippsland Times editor Colin Coomber to produce and distribute the newspaper. Mr Coomber used to write all the articles, take the photographs, sell advertisements, do all the production and then deliver around 15,000 copies to every school and parish in the diocese. After a couple of months it became evident that assistance was needed to distribute the
Trinity FAMILIES
papers and so two people were engaged to help. Printing methods in the early days were extremely basic as computerisation was still in its infancy. Each item and its heading had to be separately printed at the Gippsland Times in Sale, have a wax layer placed on the back and then had to be pasted down. The black and white photographs were individually rephotographed through a screen to produce the dots necessary for clear definition. The completed paste-up of each page then had to be taken to the Latrobe Valley Express in Morwell where a full-scale negative was made before the printing plate was produced. After a couple of years, each page could be produced electronically using the Quark Xpress program and the page files had to be taken to the Express. Files were too large to be put onto the maximum 1.4Mb floppy discs available at the time and so special Zip disks were used. By the early 2000s, Catholic Life began to transfer files by the internet but the dial-up system was very slow. It took more than an hour to transmit
the files and if the line dropped out during transmission the process had to be started all over again. Often it proved quicker to revert to the Zip disc process and drive the
files between Sale and Morwell. Finally, with ADSL internet access and the change to Adobe InDesign program the transfer speed improved rapidly and today 16 full color pages can be uploaded in a matter of two or three minutes. T h e Latrobe Va l l e y Express continues to print the
newspaper which had grown to more than 16,000 copies an issue and inserts which used to be hand inserted by a team of workers can now be inserted mechanically. The distribution method has also improved with John Isles Transport in Warragul being responsible for ensuring the papers get to the schools and parishes. The first color pages in Catholic Life occurred in our fifth issue on May 1988 to announce the launch of the CDF Pre-Paid Funeral Fund. Apart from spot color on some advertisements, it took until September 2001 for four color to reappear on the front page of an issue heralding the launch of Bishop Coffey’s pastoral plan, Journeying Together. It heralded the start of a new era and in March 2002 we began producing front, back and centre pages in color, extending to eight pages in 2008 and finally all pages from February 2010.
• Pages from the past. 200 issues in 20 years, see Page 8 The first of our 200 issues.
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