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News 5 Impressive Our Lady of the Southern Cross Church ready to open
new Springfield spiritual home
By Mark Bowling
BRISBANE’S newest church will be blessed and dedicated next Friday – the completion of a “spiritual dream” for parish priest Fr Mauro Conte and patient parishioners of Our Lady
of the Southern Cross, Spring eld
Lakes.
For seven years Spring eld’s place of worship
has been a hall at St Augustine’s College, with packed Sunday congregations reaching 450-500 people.
Together parishioners have prayed, planned and fundraised for a new spiritual home.
The new Our Lady of the Southern Cross Church will seat 520 – but much more than that, the new church is an artistic showpiece, rich in design and full of religious symbols.
At night the illuminated crosses above the new church will shine like beacons high over Spring- eld Lakes.
“It was an effort to make this church prayerful and spiritual and also artistic,” Fr Conte said.
He travelled to Italy to order the key materi- als, and also to convince renowned Jesuit artist Fr Marko Rupnik to produce unique mosaic works and to paint panels of glass depicting nine scenes from the life of Mary.
Fr Rupnik is the creative man behind the Jubilee of Mercy logo and he is known for his bold, colourful icons featured in churches and sacred spaces around the world.
The mosaics are still to be installed, but will in- clude a mural wall behind the sanctuary depicting the Wedding of Cana, where Jesus performed his rst miracle by turning water into wine.
Fr Conte is enthused and convinced the new church will be an inspirational place of worship.
“I think a church should be very artistic. And why don’t we use the space we have inside, like in old times, to catechise people. The kids will love that,” he said.
“I think it is important we go back to the origi- nal thought that the church is a church. It is not a hall.
“Certainly there will be people who come to the church just for the art.”
Unlike many contemporary churches, Our Lady of the Southern Cross contains no see-through windows to the surroundings.
However, the painted glass panels of Mary allow light to enter and are one of the artistic showpieces.
The chairs, lectern and baptismal font are cut from Jerusalem stone and the pews are made of beechwood from Germany’s Black Forest.
Rosso francia – red marble from France – cov- ers the sanctuary oor and Sardinian white marble covers most of the remaining oor-space.
The new church project has been on the drawing board since the Spring eld Catholic community was established in 2011.
It is a multicultural parish, which now boasts 20 nationalities, drawing on the rapidly growing population of Greater Spring eld, a collection of ve suburbs.
One of the main church fundraising efforts has involved Spring eld church volunteers regularly travelling to Milton to operate a popular sausage sizzle outside Suncorp Stadium.
The project has also received donations from across the Brisbane archdiocese. “There are so many generous people out there. You just need to ask and they will give,” Fr Conte said.
Brisbane Archbishop Mark Coleridge will celebrate the blessing and dedication of Our Lady of the Southern Cross, 44 Opperman Drive on Friday, September 1, starting at 6pm.
The project cost $6 million.
Dream realised: Fr Mauro Conte inside the new Our Lady of the Southern Cross Church,
Labour of love: Joe Coco.
FOR Brisbane tiler Joe Coco, the last 12 months have been a labour of love laying the oors of the new Our Lady of the Southern Cross Church.
As he completed last minute paving outside, he re ected on the biggest single job of his career – carefully working with huge blocks of imported marble that cover the entire church oor space.
“For me to have the opportunity to do this – it is an honour,” Mr Coco said.
“It’s something I have always wanted to do quite frankly.”
Joe’s father from Sicily, was also a tiler and brought his son into the trade.
However, in Brisbane working with marble is usually con ned to a wall or oor, “but nothing so grand as an entire church,” Mr Coco said.
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“We’ve been dealing with three metre slabs of marble.
“I mean this is an enormous project – over a thousand square metres of beautiful stone.”
Mr Coco said he expected that people would come to Spring eld to visit the new church.
“Once the mosaics are completed, I think they will come ocking. De nitely,” he said.
Mr Coco points out some of the key features of the church’s marble oor including a “but- ter y effect” in which identical slabs of marble sit side by side down the main aisle, creating a pleasing, symmetrical look to the nished oor.
“From the door to the altar, it is a continuous pattern. I don’t think you will see that anywhere
in Australia,” he said.
– Mark Bowling
Springfield Lakes.
Photos: Mark Bowling
Jenny
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‘Marbleous’ job on new church
The Catholic Leader, August 27, 2017
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