Dear Friends,
We will long remember 26 September 2021 as a day to thank God for an abundance of blessings in celebration of your dedication to the growth of our parish and support of my installation as your pastor. Thank you for your prayers, kind generosity, and active participation in the life of our parish community. YOU DO US PROUD! Last Sunday’s liturgical celebration was truly inspiring, our various choirs combined for the first time in offering joyful praise to our God and ministry support of the Mass beautifully coordinated, as noted by Bishop Noonan. On behalf of Fr. John Patrick and our wonderful staff, I’d like to thank our ministry leaders and the many volunteers for their extraordinary service. Thanks also to our phenomenal kitchen crew, Parish Life Ministry team, and Misty Huff, and core crew involved with the planning and execution of our celebration in the parish hall. After a very long hiatus, we were able to host approximately 650 parishioners and guests following the Mass, and all were served and seated in a record 14 minutes. Our gracious volunteers, with local Boy Scout troop assistance, worked like a finely-tuned machine to ensure every parishioner enjoyed the event. Thank you! Each year, the Church in the United States celebrates October as Respect Life Month. Today, the 27th Sunday Year B, we celebrate Respect Life Sunday. This is a time we can use to deepen our understanding of why, as Catholics, we “respect life” and what that looks like in our day-to-day lives. In celebrating this Year of St. Joseph, we look to his remarkable witness as a defender of life. He did not hesitate to follow God’s will of faithfully caring for and protecting Jesus and the Blessed Mother. St. Joseph’s example reminds us that we are also to care for, protect, and defend the lives of our brothers and sisters. The Scripture passage from Genesis is not at all about subservience but about belonging –and not just belonging within a marriage but within the entire Body of Christ. Sacramental marriage is a reflection, in miniature, of the human family itself. In the simple challenge of facing daily life at the side of your spouse, so much is revealed about how we interact with other people: how we live with them, how we love them, how we honor them, and how we do not. “This one, at last, is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.” How can we ensure the good of the other? How can we best take care of him or her? Let us keep praying for the grace to embrace the ways in which we belong to the other members of the Body of Christ ... and the ways in which they belong to us. Be Blessed!
With love, Fr. John
Let us continue our reflection on the Eucharist found in the Catechism of the Catholic Church
ARTICLE 3: THE SACRAMENT OF THE EUCHARIST
- THE SACRAMENTAL SACRIFICE THANKSGIVING, MEMORIAL, PRESENCE
The sacrificial memorial of Christ and of his Body, the Church
1372 St. Augustine admirably summed up this doctrine that moves us to ever more complete participation in our Redeemer's sacrifice which we celebrate in the Eucharist: This wholly redeemed city, the assembly, and society of the saints, is offered to God as a universal sacrifice by the high priest who in the form of a slave went so far as to offer himself for us in his Passion, to make us the Body of so great a head. . . . Such is the sacrifice of Christians: "we who are many are one Body in Christ" The Church continues to reproduce this sacrifice in the sacrament of the altar so well-known to believers wherein it is evident to them that in what she offers she herself is offered (St. Augustine, De civ Dei, 10,6:PL 41,283; cf. Rom 12:5).
The presence of Christ by the power of his word and the Holy Spirit
1373 "Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised from the dead, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us," is present in many ways to his Church (Rom 8:34; cf. LG 48): in his word, in his Church's prayer, "where two or three are gathered in my name (Mt 18:20),” in the poor, the sick, and the imprisoned (Cf. Mt 25:31-46), in the sacraments of which he is the author, in the sacrifice of the Mass, and in the person of the minister. But "he is present . . . most especially in the Eucharistic species (SC 7).”
1374 The mode of Christ's presence under the Eucharistic species is unique. It raises the Eucharist above all the sacraments as "the perfection of the spiritual life and the end to which all the sacraments tend(St. Thomas Aquinas, STh III,73,3c.)." In the most blessed sacrament of the Eucharist "the body and blood, together with the soul and divinity, of our Lord Jesus Christ and, therefore, the whole Christ is truly, really, and substantially contained (Council of Trent (1551): DS 1651)." "This presence is called 'real' -by which is not intended to exclude the other types of presence as if they could not be 'real' too, but because it is presence in the fullest sense: that is to say, it is a substantial presence by which Christ, God, and man, makes himself wholly and entirely present (Paul VI, MF 39)