Dear Friends
I am so pleased to see our friends (SNOW BIRDS) who have come back after spending some summer months away. While we have missed them when they were away, we are glad to see them back in the pews to worship with us. May your stay in and around Viera bring you joy and may your worship experience at SJE be richer and may it bring you ever closer to Jesus Christ and all of us.
Last week I was very happy to introduce to the parish an indispensable online site that is rich in Catholic Contents. For the benefit of those who missed it, it is called FORMED.org. This site is sponsored by St. Augustine Institute. It is a technology platform for the delivery of award-winning Catholic content, children’s programming, documentaries, movies, audio talks, e-books and more, attracting over 900,000 users across 5,000 parish communities. I am grateful to the Rodriguez and Antonucci families for sponsoring this program for one year. Since it is considerably an expensive proposition, I would like all of us to get the best out of it. But please remember, this is an attempt to help you know our rich Catholic Faith and thus grow closer to Christ and His Church. The quintessential purpose of this program is that you may come to worship our Lord Jesus in the parish along with your faith-filled friends and reap a reward that has eternal consequences. It absolutely does not in any way take away the necessity to be physically present at the Eucharist.
That leads me to underscore the beautiful theme of our Scripture Readings for the 32nd Sunday Year C. When the Sadducees who don’t believe in the Resurrection posed the hypothetical question to Jesus about the seven men who in turn married one woman dying childless and about the question of whose With Love, Fr. John
wife will she be at the Resurrection? Jesus makes it categorically clear that there is life after death and our God is not God of the dead, but of the living (Luke 20:38). In the age to come there will be no need of marrying as there will be no more death and thus no need of procreation. The First Reading from 2 Maccabees describes the torture and death of 7 brothers and their mother for refusing to eat pork forbidden by the Mosaic Law. The dramatic and graphical scene points to the belief of the Jews not just of the immortality of the soul but of the reunification of the body and soul at the Resurrection. Please read 7th chapter of 2 Maccabees, a Book found only in the Catholic Bibles, to give us a comprehensive idea of our belief in the Resurrection.
Therefore, it makes profound sense for us to pray always for our beloved dead especially during the month of November that they may be deemed worthy to enter the coming New Age. May the souls of the faithful departed through the mercy of God, rest in Peace!
Have a Blessed Week!
With Love, Fr. John