Weekly Letter from the Pastor

Dear Fellow Parishioners of St. Benedict:

Today at the Co-Cathedral of St. Robert Bellarmine, Bishop O’Connell will celebrate a Mass for couples who are observing significant anniversaries of marriage this year. While I am always happy to attend, as we have a few couples each year who are celebrating an anniversary, this year we are blessed to have sixteen couples attending. Not only is that a statistic itself worth celebrating, it is also very impressive that these couples – and the many other hundreds from around the diocese, choose to gather with our bishop for this Mass. The celebration will be repeated at the Cathedral in Trenton on October 20th.

Thursday, October 10th we will gather again with the Bishop, at the Co-Cathedral to celebrate the annual Catholic School’s Mass. Twenty members of the school community will attend this Mass representing the entire school. We have much we need to do keep our school on mission and to address the ever-changing needs of our students, and the advancement of our curriculum.

We are offering opportunities to establish scholarships for our students, and to secure the school for the next generation to come. You will be hearing more about our initiatives soon.

Today we observe Respect Life Sunday. Through the initiative of Deacon Rich we had a team of parishioners praying at the Planned Parenthood location in Shrewsbury this past week, as they will do throughout the month. There are many threats – direct and indirect – to the dignity of human life in our nation and throughout the world. With a primary focus on abortion, respect life issues are certainly very broad. We are reminded of the threats to life in so many other venues. Cutbacks in food voucher programs, assistance for expectant and new mothers, ever-increasing medical care and prescription costs, racism, ageism, war, terrorism, assisted suicide legislation – all of these and countless more – need our focused attention, social action, perhaps political activism, and certainly our prayerful responses.

Of course, with respecting life we see the ever-important adjective “respect.” Often the language used in these discussions about life, especially regarding abortion, is anything but respectful. We cannot allow our dialogue to be anything but respectful.Once we acknowledge that each and every person is created in the image and likeness of God, we should then be challenged to treat that person with the dignity and respect that creation demands. Predicated on love for one another, let us allow this respect life Sunday to remind us to respect all people. Human dignity seems to beabsent from our national dialogue, our treatment of migrants and refugees, and even in our interactions with our neighbors and even our family members. Let us pray for that conversion of mind and heart that will draw us all to a deeper appreciation of one another.

Let us remember to pray for one another,
Fr. Garry