Letter from the Pastor

                Six days a week – Monday through Saturday – we live our lives in a highly competitive world.  Nations compete for power.  Politicians compete for votes.  Business competes for customers.  Workers compete for victories.  All of us, it seems, are competing with someone for something that both of us want but only one of us can have.  That is how we live six days a week.  Then on Sunday we come to church at Annunciation-Our Lady of Fatima for worship and encounter a totally different emphasis.  In Church we pray that God’s […]

I read a story recently about a woman who got on a crowded subway in New York City.  When a man got up and offered her a seat, the surprise was so great that she fainted.  When the woman recovered she said, “thank you”, and the man fainted. I suspect that this story isn’t true.  Well at least, I am reasonably sure it isn’t.  But one wonders how much of it is really exaggerated!!  It seems that in our society common courtesy and simple gratitude seem to be so rare that we are pleasantly surprised by them. We need to […]

There is a sense in which every area of life places upon us a category of   demands, a minimum set of duties which we are required to meet.  An employee is expected to show up for work at a particular time, remain on the job a certain number of hours, and do certain things while he is there.  To meet these demands is his duty.  He’s expected to perform at least at this level. The same thing is true of family life.  To be a father or a mother, a husband or a wife demands that certain minimal duties be […]

In recent times a great deal of news centers on the Middle East.  As we all know in the year 70 AD, the Roman legions, under the leadership of Titus, put down a Jewish rebellion, over ran the city of Jerusalem, and scattered its inhabitants to the four winds.  At that point, for all practical purposes there was no longer a nation of Israel.  The Jews had no homeland.  This dispersion    continued for one thousand, eight hundred, seventy-eight years. In 1948, the modern nation of Israel was established with Tel Aviv as its  capital.  Now, for almost 75 years, […]

As election day 2023 draws near and in light of all that has happened within our nation over the past few years, many people are finally asking themselves:  Is it proper for a Christian to vote precisely as a Christian?  That is, to make political choices based primarily on Christian values and principles? I would answer yes.  Emphatically Yes!! We, Catholics, have let the secular society in which we live give us a kind of inferiority complex. We, too often, speak and act as if the biblical understanding of man and woman and human society were in some way inferior, […]