Celebrating the Feast of St Augustine in Titi

The Triduum feast of St Augustine of Hippo was celebrated August 25-27 at the 112 year-old parish of the Chapel of St Augustine in Negeri Sembilan.

The feast culminated on August 27 with Fr Lawrence Ng CDD from Petaling Jaya presiding at the evening Mass. Fr George Harrison, parish administrator and Fr Andrew Kooi, assistant parish priest of the Church of the Visitation concelebrated. The church was packed with local parishioners who are mostly Hakka Catholics and visitors from Seremban and elsewhere.

Fr Ng proclaimed the Gospel (Matthew 16: 13-20) and preached the homily in Mandarin. “Who do you say I am?” was the question Jesus posed to His disciples. Fr Ng said that whatever the people said about Jesus is not important. What matters most is knowing Jesus personally.

We need to go deeper to know who Jesus really is to us. Fr Ng also said that the Church is not just a building, it is the people who are the Church, the Body of Christ. If a church is empty with no people in it, then there is no Church.

Fr Ng mentioned that we all must serve in the Church and not let the same people do everything. He gave an example of the lady who did the chanting of the psalms. People’s attitude is, if someone is good at something, he/she will be doing it all the time.

The chapel of St Augustine was built by Xiao Guan Jie, a devoted Catholic, in 1905. He built the chapel with a belfry which has become a landmark in this rural town of Titi. He was a visionary and an enterprising local Chinese community leader in the late 19th century. He also setup an Old Folks’ Home and a Chinese Primary School, now defunct.

Article reproduced from Herald Malaysia online