The cancellation of public Masses during stage 3 restrictions has had a significant impact on Mary. “Going to Mass has been such a big part of my life for such a long time, that I started to feel like a heathen” she says. “The Eucharist is obviously the most important part of the Mass and I am missing that, but I’m very pleased to at least I feel I am participating in some way” said Mary.

For Mary, the need to view Mass online was the impetus to connect to the NBN and purchase a laptop computer. She did this with the help of a Good Samaritan neighbour and fellow Eaglehawk parishioner, who organised everything for her.

It was a chance meeting. Mary called out to her neighbour as he walked past one morning and asked if he knew when public Masses would resume as she just didn’t “feel right”. On seeing how upset Mary was, her neighbour stopped for a chat and engineered a plan for Mary to “get connected”.

A parishioner of St Liborius in Eaglehawk for thirty-one years, it’s fair to say Mary, a former nurse, has lived a lot of life and seen a lot of change. Born and raised in Bendigo and educated at St Mary’s College, she received First Holy Communion in 1945, the year World War II ended. Yet in her 83-years, Mary has never known a time when there weren’t public Masses. “Even in the war, even during the Polio pandemic of the 1950s we always went to Mass” she says.

Although Mary says she is “behind the times”, she’s made remarkable progress connecting to the internet and learning how to use a computer and web-browser in less than a week, thanks to her trusty neighbour. Like many seniors, Mary is now looking forward to enjoying the benefits of being connected to the virtual world.

Hearing Mary’s story, it’s hard not to wonder how many more Marys are amongst us, and how we, as a community, can reach out.

Before Mass on 17 March this year, Pope Francis, who is the same age as Mary and has a twitter following of over 40 million people, asked us to pray for the elderly. “I would like today that we pray for the elderly who are suffering at this moment in a very particular way from an interior solitude that is very great, but also with a lot of fear. Let us pray to the Lord, so that he might be near our grandparents and all the elderly, that he might give strength to them who have given us wisdom, life, our story. And that we might be near to them with our prayer."

In a separate statement, Pope Francis called for us to be more thoughtful and more kind towards our senior citizens. “The pandemic has hit the elderly particularly hard and it has disconnected the already weak links between generations … respecting social distancing rules does not mean accepting a destiny of loneliness and abandonment” he said.

As COVID-19 restrictions continue, Australian seniors have been ‘getting online' at an ever increasing rate, but what about those who feel they don’t have the capacity to connect online, or need more ‘real’ and less ‘virtual’ elements in their life?

In this edition of the Sandpiper e-News, Daniel Giles makes some suggestions on ways to foster intergenerational relationships and benefit from the gifts of our elderly without going high-tech.

We have heard stories of priests delivering parish bulletins to their parishioners’ mailboxes, children chatting with their grandparents on facetime and zoom and the Chancery posts printed versions of the e-Newsletters to people who cannot access it online….

What other ways can we foster connectedness and deeper relationships with some of our most isolated and vulnerable? We’d love to hear from you.