Weekly Letter from the Pastor

Dear Fellow Parishioners of St. Benedict:

Come, Holy Spirit fill the hearts of the faithful ...A most blessed Pentecost to everyone. Today is the proverbial “birthday of the church” and, although like any other 2000 year old, we’ve had some aches and pains, we are alive and well and proclaiming the Gospel of Jesus Christ to all peoples and lands! Let us continue to support and pray for one another.

The following weekend is the Solemnity of Corpus Christi – the Most Holy Body and Blood of Jesus Christ. This year we will hold a Eucharistic Procession after the 12:30 Mass. This very old tradition in the life of the church takes us on a Eucharistic pilgrimage. I will address this more later. We have invited our new communicants to participate in the procession that day. This is also the fourth anniversary of the opening of the Our Lady of Victory Adoration Chapel. This is a beautiful, if not unheralded ministry in our parish.

Friday night we celebrated our graduation and this coming Friday (June 14) is the last day of school for the 2018-2019 school year at SBS! Unbelievable that another school year has come and gone. Thank you to Mr. Donahue and the faculty of SBS for an awesome school year. You might have heard that we had a minor incident in the school a week ago. One of the projectors sparked when being turned on and started a fire. Fortunately it happened before there were students in the classroom. I want to thank Mrs. Guido, the classroom teacher, for her quick thinking and response to the situation. Mr. Donahue and the faculty were on it and handled the crisis with great aplomb. A word of thanks also to the Holmdel police and fire departments who kept everyone calm and handled everything with great proficiency. All of those different drills students are required to go through worked well. We also need to thank St. John Vianney HS for welcoming our students as an evacuation point.

Congratulations and best wishes to all members of the Class of 2019!

We are also announcing that Mrs. Christine Keeling, presently the Supervisor of Faculty at SBS is being promoted to Vice-Principal effective July 1. She is a wonderful asset to our school, and I am happy that Mr. Donahue has made this appointment. Congratulations Mrs. Keeling. 

Next weekend Principal Donahue and Lori Ulrich, director of marketing, and myself are heading to the University of Notre Dame for a conference on developing and promoting Catholic Schools. The particular emphasis of the conference is on Latin American families. Given the growth in the Latino families in our area, it is important for us to discover ways to offer Catholic education opportunities to their children. They come from Catholic countries and value their faith and the desire to hand it on to their children.

As with previous generations of Catholic immigrants from Europe, the Catholic school is a springboard for acculturation and to higher education. I believe strongly in this role for the Catholic school, and trust that we can find ways to enable St. Benedict’s School to better serve the Latino community. If anyone is interested in sponsoring through a scholarship initiative a student to attend our school, please make contact with me. There are many advantages and ways that we can make this happen.

“Thank you” to everyone who expressed an interest in becoming involved in any of the many ministries at the Ministry Fair last weekend. We will be in touch soon about training, etc.

Blessings to everyone,
Father Garry