BAPTISM
Please collect the form from the Parish Administrator – Shirley Bailey.
CERTIFICATE OF CATHOLIC PRACTICE – SCHOOLS ADMISSIONS
Certificates of Catholic Practice can be downloaded from this link here. Once you have completed it and the accompanying request form, downloaded from this link here, They should be posted into the Hemel West parish office letterbox at 186 St Johns Road. If everything is fine with your application it will be signed and available for collection from the Parish Office, within 5 days, excluding weekends. The Parish Office is behind the Parish Centre. Just follow the signs outside the Presbytery to the Parish Office. You’ll see the opening times below.
VERY IMPORTANT: There is one simple criterion for the issue of a CCP and it relates to Catholic practice. Catholic practice equates to weekly attendance at Sunday Mass. This is a fair and good test and means there is a level playing field for every applicant. Therefore certificates will only be issued to practising Catholics, that is, families who are known to parish clergy and regularly attended weekly Sunday Mass in the period before the suspension of the Sunday obligation for at least three years. Occasional absence for sickness or other emergencies, such as extreme bad weather etc are understandable and acceptable, however prolonged absence that has not been notified to our parish priest in advance of a request, by a phone call to him, means that it is unlikely that he will issue a CCP. Attendance at non-Catholic churches on Sunday does not count towards ‘practising.’
Please ensure that you make your application to to our parish priest is in good time to meet school deadlines (at least two weeks prior to the school deadline) as he cannot be responsible for late applications.
Please do not include any covering notes, emails, baptismal certificates or birth certificates etc with your request as they will be returned unread.
If you are relatively new to the parish and despite making your self known to our parish priest, then you will need to apply to the parish priest of your previous parish. The same criterion will apply, as the policy comes from the bishops of England and Wales and applies in all parish churches in those countries.
All the best with getting your child into one of our excellent Catholic Hemel Hempstead schools!