Weekly Letter from the Pastor

Dear Fellow Parishioners of St. Benedict:

As autumn digs in – at least we hope soon the weather will become season appropriate – the faith formation programs in our parish ramp up in earnest. Much planning and attention has gone into the preparation of these programs, and we hope that you will be able to take advantage of some of these opportunities to grow ever deeper in faith.

This coming week we are offering the Blessed Mother in Art and Music, which should prove to be both informative and formative in its process. As we learn more about the artistic renderings of the Blessed Mother we are able to grow more deeply in our proper devotion to Mary in our spiritual lives.

Father Martin O’Reilly will be here (Wednesday, October 16th) to do a presentation entitled Why be Catholic? Father has offered this presentation in various parishes and he is always well-received. He is definitely engaging and entertaining.

I am especially excited about the Rediscover the Eucharist day on Saturday, October 19th. We had planned this event even before the recent Pew Survey showing that only 31% of American Catholics have a proper understanding of the Eucharist. That alone makes this day even more powerful and necessary. We have various speakers and presentations throughout the day. Everyone will have the opportunity to learn more about the Mass, the Eucharist, and our devotion to the Blessed Sacrament. Please put it on your calendars.

As follow-up events Father Christopher Dayton (Wednesday, October 23rd) will present Why Go to Mass and Father JM and I (Wednesday, October 30th) will discuss Why Pray.

On-going faith and family formation are so integral in our lives as disciples, adults-living-in-the world, and certainly as parents.

Sadly, some prefer not only to avoid such growth through apathy, but are even openly objectionable to the programs that we offer. While we can push our way through apathy, the latter is both divisive and certainly not the work of the Spirit. This is particularly painful when such resistance involves our children. Some of the children in our parish live in very difficult and dysfunctional situations. We do our best, given the parameters that we have, to work with everyone involved. It is very challenging when, even good families, find the work of faith formation more burdensome than enriching.

Both as your pastor and as a career educator, my first priority is in working with you and for you in the total formation of your families as the domestic church. We all know that these are not easy times to be parents. Dealing with over one-thousand children here in our parish community, plus the many high school students who are members of the youth group, we are increasingly aware of the struggles of being a child, a tweener, an adolescent, and even a young adult. Issues around bullying, cyber and social media issues, the opioid crisis, vaping, drugs, the mental health crisis, and sexual identity must be maddening to anyone parenting these days.

More often than not, the parish and school staffs, and especially Father JM and myself, have to deal with the fall-out of these issues. We get called or invited in when things have gone wrong in a significant way. We want to help you to be pro-active in these issues, so that we don’t have to be reactive later on.

Let us work together – pray together – and grow together in the faith that has been gifted to us!

Fr. Garry