Happy Advent! Our four-week journey to the Christmas Season begins this weekend. We are fortunate this year to get four full weeks of Advent as Christmas falls on a Saturday. Thank you all for your contributions to the giving trees and for the success of the annual RAINE Foundation Thanksgiving celebration. It is good to see all of these annual events continue to thrive during these challenging days. The Advent Season comes with a few important events that we should put on our calendars. Next Friday night, December 3rd we have our annual Christmas Tree Lighting event here in the parking lot at 6:00 p.m. This is always a fun evening – a good family event and one that happens quickly enough as the children don’t get too antsy! There is a “special guest” arriving in style to make the evening even more exciting. That same guest will appear again to spend some time visiting with the children at the Knights of Columbus Breakfast on Sunday, December 12th. Read more.
Happy Thanksgiving! The beginning of the holiday season is always festive and exciting, and I look forward to this time of the year. I hope that, unlike last year, you will all be able to celebrate the holiday with the family and friends who would typically grace your table. I will be in Pennsylvania with my Mother and whomever else she has managed to invite this year, for the holiday, and a few other days this week. For many reasons I guess, this is really my favorite holiday of the year. Read more.
We have been observing Vocation Awareness Week, recognizing our need to continue to encourage and invite men to consider a priestly vocation. The “Called by Name” cards are available at the doors of the church. Please consider carefully putting forth names of those who you feel might be open to responding to the Lord’s call. At this moment we have all of eleven seminarians for our diocese. With ninety-eight parishes and only 121 active priests, this is a non-sustainable situation. Hopefully, with the grace of the Holy Spirit, and the blessed efforts of the vocations team, we will be able to turn that around. I also ask that you continue to pray for our seminarians. It is not easy for men to discern a priestly vocation these days as there is often little support even from family and friends. Read more.
As November is the month of the Poor Souls I thought this an opportune time to talk about an issue that is increasingly presenting itself to us in the parish here, and in other parishes throughout the country. Many times we are getting requests for a Funeral Service Outside of Mass to be celebrated in a funeral home. While this is understandable in certain circumstances, as a general rule a Catholic has both the right and the obligation for a Funeral Mass to be celebrated in their parish church. Read more.