+JMJ Dear Parishioners, Hoping to provide for all of you whose New Year’s resolutions included adding a regular source of Catholic formation beyond the Mass into your life (if you don’t have that built in yet), here are some recommendations. First of all, I think it could
Read more →Archive for the Pastor’s Corner Category
+JMJ Dear Parishioners, Because of Christmas and New Year’s holidays, the bulletin company requires us to turn in our bulletins much earlier than usual. For this reason, I am writing my bulletin letter for this weekend only a couple days after having met with high school youth
Read more →+JMJ Dear Parishioners, Why all the fuss about God becoming “incarnate” at Christmas time? Well, the excitement is all because God for the first time in all of history becomes tangible in a way He had never been before. “Incarnate” means “in-the-flesh”. God comes to us in-the-flesh,
Read more →+JMJ Dear Parishioners, On December 10 we had another pastoral Council meeting. Below are highlights: -We discussed impressions of both the wine tasting event at Payne and the bazaar at Paulding. Both events seemed pretty successful financially. But even more importantly, they both seemed to be very
Read more →+JMJ Dear Parishioners, Many months ago, when Bishop Thomas of Toledo announced a restructuring of the Pastoral Center offices of the Diocese, I wrote a bulletin letter explaining how this action was part of the three-fold munera (duties) of teaching, sanctifying and governing. The restructuring fell under
Read more →+JMJ Dear Parishioners, On November 19th we had another finance council meeting. We began by looking at the balance sheet, the profit-and-loss statement, and the payables statement. The balance sheet showed $279,752 in usable savings, although about $25,407 of this money was given specifically for the moisture
Read more →+JMJ Dear Parishioners, Now that we have experienced the sealing off of our Extraordinary Jubilee Year of Mercy Holy Door and are anticipating opening it is a pilgrimage site on December 13, I thought I would give you some more teaching on the “theology” of a holy
Read more →+JMJ Dear Parishioners, Seeing the retreat team’s invitation for parishioners to join the planning, it occurs to me that now would be a good time to give an update on the annual parish Lenten retreat, which occurs on Saturday, March 5. I was invited by the retreat
Read more →+JMJ Dear Parishioners, With this letter I would like to repeat at greater length the announcement I made about the Holy Door in last week’s homily. On Divine Mercy Sunday this past April, Francis promulgated a bull (a certain type of papal document) announcing that he was
Read more →+JMJ Dear Parishioners, After many months of looking for a purchaser, we finally sold the pipe organ in the loft of Antwerp’s campus to another church. As was predicted by an organ expert when we first started this journey, nobody wanted the organ as is for playing
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