Our Annual Town Hall will be held on Sunday, November 12th during “Coffee and” at 12:15 PM. Please plan on being there with ideas to make our parish even better.
Thank you to all who made the Harvest Festival a big success last Sunday. A good time was had by all.
We have been doing well with the Annual Bishop’s Appeal. We have reached just over 90% of our goal with 39 pledges. That means about 90 families have not yet made a pledge. Thank you to those who have made a pledge. All pledges have to be in by November 19th. That’s just two more weeks, so please make your pledge now!
We are about to begin our 90th year as a parish. We are looking for more history of the parish as well as ideas on how to celebrate this great anniversary. Why not spend a little time looking at the pictures of the priest and deacons who have served here? Maybe you will be enlightened by the Holy Spirit to contribute a great idea or two for this coming year.
In our first reading today, the Prophet Malachi calls out the priests of his day for breaking faith with the people and “violating the covenant of our fathers.” Those priests were leading God’s people astray. They apparently were not giving glory to God but to themselves and showing partiality in their decisions. Instead of leading the people to God they were looking out for themselves. This is always a problem when power is involved, spiritual or material.
In today’s gospel Jesus says the same thing about the scribes and Pharisees. They were the spiritual leaders of his day. It seems that for most of them religion became their way to power over the people. They loved places of honor and grand titles. They had it all figured out for themselves, but forgot the people. In their own eyes, they were the greatest. But Jesus says: “The greatest among you must be your servant. Whoever exalts himself (herself) will be humbled; but whoever humbles himself (herself) will be exalted.”
In our second reading St. Paul points out what a real religious leader should be like. “We were gentle among you, as a nursing mother cares for her children. With such affection for you, we were determined to share with you not only the Gospel of God, but our very selves as well, so dearly beloved had you become to us.”
This week is a national week of prayer for vocations to the Church. Let us pray for good leadership, for humble and holy men and women to lead the Church. If anyone in the parish is thinking of a vocation to be a religious sister, brother or priest, please see me. I have lots of info on religious vocations.
I ran out of room last week in the Bulletin, so today I will mention Saint Martin de Porres, Religious. He was born in Lima, Peru of a Spanish father and a black slave mother. He became a Dominican lay brother, who humbly ministered to the poor and the sick, especially African slaves. He was devoted to the Holy Eucharist and a close friend of St. Rose of Lima. He is patron of social justice and of peoples of mixed races. He died in 1639. In case you are wondering, the Catholic Church had a rule that a child born of a slave was free, unlike the laws in the U.S., where a child born of a slave was a slave.
In my past work with seminarians in Mexico, I visited Lima, Peru several times because our Spanish speaking novitiate was close by Lima. I also visited his grave many times as well. As one of our Black Saints, his story fits in well with Black Catholic History Month. As has been pointed out several times the bronze statue in the corner is Saint Martin. It is an original art piece done by a student of Mestrovic at Notre Dame many years ago. The student was a Black man named Kelly. St. Martin de Porres, pray for us!
Let us continue to pray for peace in the world. Let us also pray for vocations to the church. Let us pray for the sick of the parish. Let us pray that all will come to respect life. Let us pray for one another and for the canonization of Father Tolton.